A Happy New Year at the library

Published 12:00 pm Sunday, December 29, 2019

Happy New Year! We are hoping to make 2020 a ReadTASTIC year and are more than ready to help you reach your reading (and other) goals this year.

The library will be closed on Martin Luther King Day, Jan. 20.

Our long standing public story time continues on Thursday mornings at 10 a.m. Join Ms. Trina, a huge assortment of puppets, stuffed animals, and craft supplies galore to read some of the best of our children’s picture book collection. Children need to be accompanied by an adult and the programming is developed with children between the ages of 18 months and 4 years old in mind.

Programming for Young Adults happens on Tuesday and Thursday evenings from 5-7 p.m. For details on what is being offered on a particular day check the Google calendar or sign up for our e-newsletter, delivered fresh to your email address every Monday afternoon.

Consider subscribing to our e-newsletter, liking us on Facebook or checking the Google calendar attached to our webpage (tiftonlibrary.org).  You can always call the library at 229-386-7148 for more information as well.

What’s new to read?

 Lists are all over the place this time of year. Best of 2019 this, that and everything else. One of our favorite list making people is Nancy Pearl, sometimes known as America’s librarian. In a list she presented on NPR, she makes a special note of “Out of Darkness, Shining Light” by Petina Gappah. This is what she said.

“If you said to a person on the street, ‘What do you know about David Livingstone?’ They would say, ‘Oh, Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’ — and that’s all they know. But David Livingstone, as I learned from this novel, was this very complex individual who was an early British abolitionist — yet had slaves — who devoted his life to finding the source of the Nile. What Petina Gappah has done in this novel is write about what happened after his death. It has two different narrators: One is Livingstone’s cook, a young enslaved woman, Halima, who was bought to be the traveling wife of the leader of the expedition. And the other person who narrates the story is a freed slave who is keeping a journal of the expedition. Gappah did a lot of research for this book — a lot of reading, a lot of primary research studying Livingstone’s journals.”

People who love a good cozy mystery will be pleased to know that Marty Wingate has started a new series. The First Edition Library Mysteries starts with “The Bodies in the Library” and introduces us to Hayley Burke, the new curator of Lady Georgiana Fowling’s First Edition Library. It’s Hayley’s dream job and she has Big Plans for making the library a going enterprise. But, change is hard and murder changes everything.

Interested in something different? Try J. Ryan Stradal’s new novel “The Lager Queen of Minnesota.” Two daughters, one farm. One daughter takes all, leaving the other to struggle. If you are interested in beer, farming, family dynamics and strong women characters, this one is worth your time.

Cassie Hanwell was trained as a firefighter in Texas and was very good at her job. Other peoples’ emergencies and tragedies were her bread and butter. However, when her seriously ill mother begs her to move to Boston, Cassie suddenly has her very own crisis. She finds work in Boston easily enough, but the underfunded, poorly equipped boys’ club she finds herself working with is NOT what she was expecting. There is the rookie, though. He is quite interesting. “Things You Save in a Fire” is by Katherine Center.

Based on a true story, Clare Clark’s “In the Full Light of the Sun” follows the fortunes of three Berliners caught up in an art scandal—involving newly discovered van Goghs—that rocks Germany amidst the Nazis’ rise to power.

To continue in the same period of history, we have recently added a copy of “A Guest of the Reich: the Story of American Heiress Gertrude Legendre’s Dramatic Captivity and Escape from Nazi Germany.” Although this reads like fiction, it is not. Gerty Legendre was from a very wealthy industrial family based in South Carolina who joined the OSS (the agency that preceded the CIA) after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and was privy to some of the most sensitive secrets at the time. She was captured by the Germans and subjected to extensive questioning by the Gestapo until finally escaping to Switzerland. If you like your history exciting, this is one you should investigate.

It’s January. It can be cold, dark and dreary. You also are thinking you want to eat better. And (or) you got an Instant Pot for Christmas. We’ve got you. Melissa Hartwig has authored “Whole30 Slow Cooker with Instant Pot Recipes.” A few of these recipes are for slow cookers, with no instructions on how to do them for the Instant Pot, but many can be made in either appliance. Whole30 is a diet plan that is heavy on lean proteins, vegetables and unprocessed foods. Even if you are not interested in the program, the recipes are interesting. And who can argue with a dinner made with real food on the table in less than an hour?

Did you know?

 Maybe one of your New Year’s Resolutions is to start your own business, or maybe see what would be involved in marketing a new idea or service, or even to look at the world in a different way. Maybe you don’t know where to start?

Even before you start thinking about putting together a business plan (which we can help you do) and looking for funding, consider this. The Georgia Public Library Service has recently added Entrepreneurial Mindset Training to GALILEO! There are approximately 10 hours of video content as well as activities that will help you recognize opportunities that other people might overlook, explore strategies for finding ways to fund your brilliant ideas and tap into a way of thinking that will help you achieve your goals.

Because you are using GALILEO, this class is free to library card holders and is available 24/7 from any computer or mobile device with a connection to the internet. We would be glad to help you find this resource (and any of the other thousands of things available through the library) any time.

Do you have a child in your life with an electronic device that you have been told can be used as a reader for ebooks? Looking for high quality, inexpensive (read: free) books to download to the device? Look no farther than eReads Kids, a digital library available through all the public libraries in the state. This collection (almost 15,000 electronic and audio books at last count) has been developed for kids in Pre K to fourth grade. It is a mix of fiction and non-fiction titles and there should be something for every interest. These books can be downloaded to computers, tablet and smartphones and all you need is a library card, your PIN and a connection to the internet to get started. If you don’t know your PIN, ask next time you are in the building and we will make sure you have one. Happy reading!