Librarying

May 2023

The Ivoryton Library is hiring!

The Library recently sent out a survey and after a better front entrance (in the works!), the second biggest request was Sunday hours. We am looking for the perfect person:

• Library experience is a plus but library enthusiasm is a must.
• Someone who reads and likes to talk about books. And movies.
• Basic computer skills to assist patrons with computer questions.
• Someone comfortable with working alone in the library after training.

3 hours, Sunday afternoons.

Interested? Drop off a brief resume with cover letter at the library.

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

Harper Lee

New Book Spotlight

The year is 2023, and things are bad—bad, but still not as bad as they could be. Hestia Harris is forty-two, abandoned by her husband (he left to fight for the Union cause), and estranged from her parents (they’re leaving for the Confederacy). Yes, the United States has collapsed into a second civil war and again it’s Unionists against Confederates, children against parents, friends against friends.

Hestia has left journalism (too much war reporting) for a job at a Baltimore retirement village on the Inner Harbor (lots of security). She’s single and adrift, save for her coworkers and Mildred, an eighty-four-year-old, thrice-happily-married resident who gleefully supports Hestia’s half-hearted but hopeful attempts to find love again in a time of chaos and disunion. She reckons with the big questions all while wrestling with that simmering, roiling, occasionally boiling feeling that things are decidedly not okay, but we have to keep going, one foot in front of the other, because maybe, just maybe, we can still find the kinds of relationships that sustain a person through anything.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. They were greeted as heroes.

But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected old money Stockton family, followed her heart, trading her job and her inheritance for motherhood but giving up far too much in the process; Sasha, a middle-class New England girl, has married into the Brooklyn Heights family, and finds herself cast as the arriviste outsider; and Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t have, and must decide what kind of person she wants to be. 

Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one-percenters, Pineapple Street is a smart, escapist novel that sparkles with wit. Full of recognizable, loveable—if fallible—characters, it’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots, and the insanity of first love—all wrapped in a story that is a sheer delight.

Upcoming

We recently did some cleaning around here and found some slate tiles we removed when we had a new roof put on years ago. Roughly rectangular shape, 9"x18". We believe these were original to the building, built in 1889. Most have nail holes, ready for hanging!

Paint whatever you want . We supply the paints and brushes and a few stencils, you bring your ideas. Space is limited.

Clink here to register.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his needs, is good for him.

Maya Angelou

2023 Nutmeg Book Award Nominees announced!

Elementary --- Intermediate --- Middle School --- High School

Book Clubs

May 16

3:30 pm

Special Guest:

Jenny Tripp

Author and memoirist

May 16

7:00pm

Sitting Pretty:

The View From My Ordinary, Resilient Disabled Body

by Rebekah Taussig

May 19

4:00pm

The Maid

by Nita Prose

Book List of the Month:

15 Books Chris Pine Thinks Everyone Should Read

(NSFW, he drops f-bombs repeatedly)

“We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.”

Jules Verne