I had the pleasure of speaking with Elizabeth, a reference librarian who keeps blogs herself! Check out www.bookcurl.blogspot.com, which has great book recommendations. She’s been a librarian for twenty-three years and loves it because it’s a job that never gets stale.
Right now she’s reading King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema, by Anupama Chopra. It’s not as deep as she expected.
Something exciting right now--they're raising money to build a new main library and hope to break ground in 2011. The library has raised a lot of money privately—they would like to raise $25 million and hope to reach $20 million by the end of the year, from gifts from individuals, families and corporations, not just for the new main library but for new branches all over the county. One of their branches, in Clendenin, is now housed in a mobile home which they’ve outgrown.
The community is very committed. The city provided the land for the library. They hope to break ground in 2011, but don’t want to hold the bond levy during the presidential election.
Her favorite book of all time—Dragonbone Chair, by Tad Williams. It’s wonderful, she said, if you like long, epic science fantasy. She wrote to the author and he wrote her a fabulous letter back. It has a good plot but what she was really drawn to was the characters--they are characters that evolve, not with superficial changes, but real changes.
Regional authors—her favorite children’s book set in West Virgina is No Star Nights, by Anna Smucker, which is set in a steel town where, because of the steel industry, there is always smoke in the sky, but when the steel plant closes down, you can see the stars, but then everything else in town, due to the shut down of the plant, is gone.
Her favorite adult book set in Virginia is The Unquiet Earth, by Denise Giardina, set in the coal mining heart of the state. It takes you from the 1930s to the present and shows the relationship between the land, the people who work the mines, and the people who control their lives.
1 comment:
You write very well.
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