The Twelve Dates of Christmas by Jenny Bayliss | print / digital
I don’t know about everyone else, but I always watch the sameChristmas movies every year; Home Alone, The Santa Clause, Krampus (we all have our favorites!). But this year, with so much time spent at home, I’m finding new holiday favorites to throw into my yearly rotation. Even better, the following titles are available on Hoopla so you don’t even have to leave your couch to find some Christmas cheer!
Research for this article contributed by Scott King-Owen, Ph.D, Teacher, Bexley City Schools.
One month before the First World War ended a second wave of the deadly Spanish Influenza pandemic, initially spread in military encampments by troop movement, found its way into the civilian population of central Ohio. Like Covid-19, a century later, the absence of medicine for treatment or a vaccine for prevention necessitated avoiding crowds, through isolation or quarantine, to control spread of the respiratory virus.
Hanukkah is right around the corner, so what better time to dive into our collection and find books that will help us celebrate this special time of the year.
If you’re looking for books to sharpen your hosting skills or to learn more about Hanukkah, look no further than these titles:
As 2020 comes to a close, I asked staff to reflect on their favorites books, movies, and albums from this year. Some staff found it easy to narrow it down, while others couldn’t choose just one! Here are the BPL staff favorite books of 2020:
Christian’s Pick – The Lucky Star by William T. Vollmann | print
David’s Pick – COVID-19: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie | print
Hannah’s Pick – Wilderness Chef: The Ultimate Guide to Cooking Outdoors by Ray Mears | print
Juliana’s Favorite Memoir – This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire by Nick Flynn | print
Juliana’s Favorite Fiction Read – Writers & Lovers by Lily King | print / digital
Leann’s Science Fiction Pick – A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green | print / digital
Leann’s Favorite Thriller – The Guest List by Lucy Foley | print / digital
Nichole’s Pick – Being Lolita by Alisson Wood | print
Sue’s Pick – Deacon King Kong by James McBride | print / digital
Our favorite films from 2020 include:
Christian’s Pick – Feels Good Man *currently unavailable through the CLC
Juliana’s Pick – The Devil All the Time *currently only available on Netflix
Nichole’s Pick – The King of Staten Island | DVD / Blu-Ray
And finally, our BPL staff favorite albums from 2020 include:
Christian’s Pick – Heaven to a Tortured Mind by Yves Tumor | CD
Hannah’s Pick – Old Flowers by Courtney Marie Andrews | CD
This November marks the 30th anniversary of Native American Heritage Month, as declared by President George H. W. Bush in 1990.
The month is a time to celebrate rich and diverse cultures, traditions, and histories and to acknowledge the important contributions of Native people. Heritage Month is also an opportune time to educate the general public about tribes, to raise a general awareness about the unique challenges Native people have faced both historically and in the present, and the ways in which tribal citizens have worked to conquer these challenges.
The feeling of a ghostly presence, knickknacks moved out of place, someone or something tapping one’s shoulder, but is Jeffrey Mansion, the Jacobethan Revival home on North Parkview Avenue, haunted?
Tales of its haunting have been attributed to unidentified individuals and their mysterious and unreported deaths. Perhaps it’s the spirit of a young woman, said to have been murdered there, that haunts the third floor, or that of a man, one supposedly hung himself in the towerwhileanother from the staircase.
Donated to the City of Bexley in 1941, the original owner, former Mayor of Columbus Robert Hutchins Jeffrey, had the stone and brick residence built in 1905. He had long since moved out when he died in 1961 at Grant Hospital. His wifeAlice Kilbourne Jeffreydied inside the home in 1922, but only after an illness lasting several months.
During the seventies, children experienced sightings of a witch, her white hair outlined by light in a second floor window. Then, opening the window, in a “scratchy, shaky, haunting voice,” the woman scared the children off. But, that was just Violet Ketner, who with her husband John, were live-in caretakers for nearly two decades. “I’m not really afraid,” she told a reporter from the Dispatch. “I’ve never seen anything.”
For more ghostly tales and scary stories from around Columbus and Ohio explore these titles:
With just less than a month to go, the second meeting of the BPL Virtual Book Club is just around the corner! The upcoming meeting will be held on Wednesday, November 4 at 7PM, and we’ll discuss the book Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. It’s an award-winning book, well received by critics and readers alike, and is sure to generate an engaging discussion. Register to join us! I’m still in the midst of reading the book, but I’m enjoying it so far. It seems like a book I could usually finish in just a day or two, but I’ve been trying to take my time with it. Not only to better prepare for the discussion, but I also have a feeling it is a book I’ll be sad to see end.
If you’re like me and don’t want to race through the book just yet, you might be looking for another book to absorb yourself with in the meantime. These books share a variety of themes with Shamsie’s: identity, belonging (especially as experienced by an “outsider”), and the nuances of strained/difficult relationships. They follow well-developed, complex and sympathetic (though often flawed) characters. They’re books that evoke a strong sense of place and that attempt to humanize and explore sometimes difficult political stories; i.e., my favorite kinds of books. Indeed, several of these make my list of all time favorite reads!
A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza / print | digital
Happy October, Readers! When October rolls around, I love to wrap up in heart warming stories about witches like Practical Magic or The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and bone chilling thrillers like Ruth Ware’s The Death of Mrs. Westaway. In this week’s blog post, I’ll highlight five new books that are perfect for the spooky month of October. Enjoy!
Embody Your Magick: A Guided Journal for the Modern Witch by Gabriela Herstik
Witchcraft is, once again, gaining popularity in mainstream culture as a way for all people to find empowerment. Often, modern witchcraft is framed as a way to focus on self-care and self-improvement. In her latest release, self-proclaimed witch and devotee of the Goddess of Love, Gabriela Herstik has created a series of inspirational and creative prompts that will help readers embrace their inner witch. This is a book for anyone interested in what it means to be a modern witch. The book includes journal prompts, meditations, rituals, and more, all in an effort to help readers better connect to the universe and their inner light.
Naomi Novik is known for her fairytale-esque stories like Uprooted and Spinning Silver, which center on powerful women who, after embracing their own power, thrive in the face of adversity. A Deadly Education promises to deliver on Novik’s legacy of complicated, nuanced, powerful women. The book is about a magic, and deadly, school and at its center is an unwilling dark sorceress who is destined to rewrite the rules of magic. Fans of The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman, Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and any of the popular TV shows about magic schools like Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina or Freeform’s Motherland: Fort Salem will surely find something to delight in with A Deadly Education.
No punches are pulled in Alyssa Cole’s first foray into thrillers and the results are completely engrossing. The lily-white psychological thriller genre welcomes this book as both intense and jaw dropping in turns of jumps and thrills, but also as a clever and insightful commentary on the very real disruption of swiftly gentrifying neighborhoods. Cole uses the genre to deftly illustrate what being displaced through gentrification feels like and how a system of oppression is truly a monster to those within its grasp. When No One is Watching translates the tone and setting of Hitchcock’s Rear Window into Jordan Peele’s Get Out and leaves us with an unapologetic, terrific thriller. And don’t worry, for those fans of Cole’s romance work, she doesn’t leave you high and dry.
The title doesn’t bury the lede: Mexican Gothic is just that, a gothic supernatural horror set in the hills of Mexico. I hesitate to call the book horror, as it isn’t gory and the vibe is tense and suspenseful more than shocking, but it does have some pretty intense elements and supernatural scenes. The protagonist, a young, smart, glamorous debutante named Noemí travels to the distant countryside after receiving a frantic and cryptic letter from her newly-wed cousin. When she arrives at High Place, a dilapidated old mansion in the hills of a rural town, she finds stories of violence and madness and meets her cousin’s alluring but menacing English husband. The question soon becomes: will Noemí be able to leave High Place? Mexican Gothic is for fans of Daphne Du Maurier’s works like Rebecca or My Cousin Rachel as well as those who loved Get Out or Lovecraft Country.
There’s a library, it’s in Hell, and it’s full of books that their authors never finished. Sometimes, characters in those books become restless and escape and the librarian, with the help of a demon and a muse, must track them down. At least, that’s how things work in the first installment of the Hell’s Library’s books, The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith. Saying she is, “Certainly not an ink witch in a hoodie,” Hackwith is a queer writer of fantasy and science fiction and writes sci-fi romance as Ada Harper. In the second installment of Hell’s Library books, released this year, after a war between Heaven and Hell, mysterious and nefarious ink has started to pour out of some of the volumes in Hell’s library and the librarian, demon, muse, and this time also an angel, must investigate. Fans of the TV show or Marvel comic Lucifer, the books and subsequent TV show A Discovery of Witches, and the books The Bear and the Nightingale, and Uprooted will likely enjoy this series.
Banned Books Week was launched in the 1980s, a time of increased challenges, organized protests, and the Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982) Supreme Court case, which ruled that school officials can’t ban books in libraries simply because of their content.
While books have been and continue to be banned, part of the Banned Books Week celebration is the fact that, in a majority of cases, the books have remained available. This happens only thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, students, and community members who stand up and speak out for the freedom to read.
Every year, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom compiles a list of the top 10 challenged books to bring to light censorship that still plagues libraries and schools.
Of the 566 books that were targeted, here are the most challenged, along with the reasons cited for censoring the book:
Reasons: for LGBTQIA+ content and a transgender character; for sexual references; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint and “traditional family structure”
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin | print / digital
Reasons: LGBTQIA+ content, for “its effect on any young people who would read it,” and for concerns that it was sexually explicit and biased
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss, illustrated by EG Keller | print / digital
Reasons: LGBTQIA+ content and political viewpoints, for concerns that it is “designed to pollute the morals of its readers,” and for not including a content warning
Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, illustrated by Fiona Smyth | print / digital
Reasons: LGBTQIA+ content; for discussing gender identity and sex education; and for concerns that the title and illustrations were “inappropriate”
Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, illustrated by Stevie Lewis | print
Reasons: featuring a gay marriage and LGBTQIA+ content; for being “a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate young children” with the potential to cause confusion, curiosity, and gender dysphoria; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint
I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas | print
Reasons: LGBTQIA+ content, for a transgender character, and for confronting a topic that is “sensitive, controversial, and politically charged”
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood | print / digital
Reasons: profanity and for “vulgarity and sexual overtones”
Drama written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier | print / digital
Reasons: LGBTQIA+ content and for concerns that it goes against “family values/morals”
Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling | print / digital
Reasons: referring to magic and witchcraft, for containing actual curses and spells, and for characters that use “nefarious means” to attain goals
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson illustrated by Henry Cole | print / digital
Election Day 2020 is now a mere 43 days away. Somehow this seems like both a lifetime away and, well, tomorrow. Regardless of how you plan to vote this November, Bexley Public Library is here to help! To encourage everyone in the community to exercise one of their most fundamental rights, we are hosting two drive-in voter registration events with The League of Women Voters on Tuesday, (TOMORROW!) September 22 from 3-5PM and Thursday, October 1 from 5-7PM. Both events will be held in the BPL parking lot and will also feature musical guests and food trucks. Join us as we celebrate – maybe not the election itself, but at least our ability to have a say in its outcome! And be sure to visit http://bexleylibrary.org/vote or give us a call at 614-231-2793 to get more information on deadlines, procedures, accessing voting materials, etc.
In the spirit of the election season, I’ve composed a list of some of my favorite “political” (I’m using that term in a fairly broad sense) books. And while this list is attached to a post about preparing for the upcoming election, I’ve chosen books that, I think, are largely non-partisan, and don’t focus much on presidential elections or candidates. Rather, they’re books that have helped me better understand and refine my own political worldview, while also helping me better understand those views I may not agree with. Importantly, several of these books put the struggles and concerns of real people at their centers: in my mind, what politics should always be about. Such stories help us build empathy for, and an understanding of people who aren’t always politically aligned with us already. Happy reading!
The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti | print
Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis | print / digital
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Hedges and Sacco | print
With Liberty and Justice for Some by Glenn Greenwald | print
Strangers in their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild | print / digital
