Interviews with Authors Art librarian Megan Lotts recently published a new book entitled Advancing a Culture of Creativity in Libraries: Programming and Engagement. It gave us the idea to launch a new interview series about titles that Books We Read affiliates have written or are currently working on. Known for her imagination, creativity, and vision, … Read More
Banned and challenged books receive a great deal of attention from librarians, the champions of freedom of speech. Books We Read partnered with several other groups for Banned Books Week in 2020. In an introduction to banned books, we were tempted to sort them into categories based on the grounds for the ban or challenge: … Read More
The below was first written for a project funded by the American Library Association, for a pilot project using reading as a way to address issues of addiction. For more on the project, see here; for more information on bibliotherapy, see here. Addiction is, among many other things, bewildering and isolating. It’s an enormous and … Read More
Bibliotherapy, or guided reading, is defined as using books from a list created under the guidance of a subject expert in order to address a therapeutic need. It has been shown to help people when reaching a crossroads and facing critical decisions. A good book offering solace, enlightenment, and inspiration may become a factor in … Read More
I hardly remember birthdays. But come August 15, I can’t help asking “Who remembers Jellinek?” In an editorial for the Jellinek Special Anniversary issue of the CAS Information Services Newsletter, we (co-authors Judit H. Ward and William Bejarano) cited an article written in 1982 by Mark Keller, editor of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol, with … Read More
Tired of reading books? Tired of listening to books? Tired of talking about books? Here’s another creative activity related to books: book sculptures. Full disclosure: we never get tired of anything related to books (including dusting bookshelves). Book sculptures or, in other words, literary sculptures, range from a simple (?) origami using pages of recycled … Read More
In Diem Perdidi by Julie Otsuka, the narrator recounts her experiences dealing with her mother’s Alzheimer’s progression. Alzheimer’s is an unforgiving, unpredictable disease. Periods of lucidity are contrasted with periods of confusion. Memories are conflated in a cruel time-traveling continuum, as short-term memory is often erased, but long-term memories remain. As with all terminal illnesses, … Read More
July 22, 2021, Rutgers Cook Campus (Facebook, Twitter): “Photo taken today in Foran Hall with an overflowing Little Free Library: the SEBS book exchange program has officially survived!” The SEBS Little Free Library was launched in February 2020, a month before the lockdown, to facilitate free book swaps as part of the Little Free Library project. … Read More
If this story doesn’t speak to you, you are lucky. If this story doesn’t speak to you yet, it will. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, more than 6 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s Disease, the most common form of dementia. A progressive brain disease, Alzheimer’s actually starts decades before the first signs appear. Symptoms … Read More
Matapris oli. The only sentence I remember from my one-semester course of an endangered Finno-Ugric language called Mansi, as part of the Master’s program at the Kossuth Lajos University (KLTE), Debrecen, Hungary at the end of the 1970s. To fulfill the requirements in diachronic linguistics, we had to pick one language from the Finno-Ugric language … Read More