Dr. Shaw Memorial Library

Library Column June 2015

Our “Be a Hero!” summer reading program is shaping up. All story/activity periods will take place at the library at 4pm on Monday afternoons starting June 29 and going through July. While we love super hero characters – especially those featured in children’s books (Traction Man by Mini Grey!), our Monday afternoon activities will revolve more around the “every day heroes” of a community. This is what our schedule looks like:

June 29, Maine author Nancy Prince, who wrote Libby’s Loons (the main character is a bit of a hero, trying to protect loons!). Nancy’s programs are geared towards both kids and adults, so please join us.

July 6, Fire Fighter hero from Mt. Vernon! One of our heroes will come visit with us.

July 13, Mrs. Hatt, our magnificent 4th grade teacher hero, with story time and craft.
July 20, One of our Mt. Vernon Rescue heroes (complete with ambulance!)

July 27, and lastly, our fine local music hero, singer Dan Simons, who will do music and song with our young patrons. His performance was very popular last year. You’ll love it.

We’ll send flyers home with MVES students this month so you can keep track of the schedule for the children’s programs.

Our housing discussion (Home is where the heart is) will be at the library on Sunday, June 7, @ 3pm. Sandy Wright, Rebecca Dorr, and Greg Plimpton (who builds accessory housing in Southern Maine) will be on hand to talk about their experiences with trying to help people figure out housing issues faced by both young folks just starting out, and seniors, who live in small rural communities. We want to hear your frustrations and worries about housing, as well as share ideas you may have about making home a safe, affordable, and comforting place within a thriving, caring community. Rebecca and Mary Anne will bring some refreshments.

The annual used book sale will be at the Mt. Vernon Community Center as usual on Saturday, July 18, starting at 9am. We have so many books to sell! Join us to browse the tables, buy lots of books for summer reading, and enjoy impromptu visits with various community members. We’ll have paperback & hard cover fiction and nonfiction, children’s books, as well as some movies and audiobooks.

And finally, our annual Community Poetry Reading is scheduled for Thursday evening, August 6, at 7pm in the Mt. Vernon Community Center. Mark your calendars – a beautiful evening, with community members reading or reciting beloved classics or contemporary and “homegrown” verse. It is always an amazing mix of beautiful literature and the warm and familiar voices of our dear friends and neighbors. There will be cookies.

“The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.” Kurt Vonnegut

We will host a program on Sunday, April 12 at 3pm on making Health Care Advance Directives, presented by Jackie Fournier, who is a palliative care nurse practitioner at Central Maine Medical Center. Join us here at the library to learn what you might need to know about sharing directions for your medical care with family, friends, and health workers, in the event that you cannot let your wishes be known. We also have a DVD of “Consider the Conversation: a Documentary on a Taboo Subject” on loan from Jackie. Please feel free to come in and borrow it. We also have Atul Gawande’s quiet and informative book entitled Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.

As many of you know, we pay a subscription to the Maine State Library Downloadable Books project for our patrons. Use of this resource by our adult patrons has increased greatly this past year, and we want you to know that the project includes many juvenile and young adult titles which might appeal to the younger generation. Please let your kids know these are available for loan to download onto their Ipads, Kindles, Nooks, or other tablets and computers. To access the collection, go to the MSL website at http://www.state.me.us/msl/ and click on “Download Library for e-books and audiobooks” under Popular Services at the top of the page. To sign up, our patrons use their four digit library number that is handwritten on their library card, rather than the barcode that is attached to the card.

Cool website of the month: a nice one for searching and then downloading free images. Try Pixabay at http://www.pixabay.com and search for the image you might need for a flyer or card.

There are some beautiful physical books being published lately. They are a great pleasure to hold and study. It is a nice reminder that e-publishing and traditional hard copies are both important for building knowledge and life experience and memories. We have mentioned Christie’s novel, Gutenberg’s Apprentice, in a previous column — such a beautiful book to hold as well as read. There are some children’s picture books being published in large format, beautifully illustrated, also. We have Jenny Bloom’s Animalium, which is chockfull of information, with classic illustrations on nicely textured paper. Steve Jenkins’ The Animal Book is also wonderful, as are the Eyewitness series of books. This winter we acquired the gorgeous new Historical Atlas of Maine, put together by UMaine – lucky for us, because the first printing sold out quickly.