Blog Category: Director's Notebook
Posted by KChin on Tue, Jun 17
Director’s Notebook
June, 2008
Some writers are identified with a particular country or region, others with a specific period in history. Willa Cather is known for both. When I think of her, I think of the prairie states, especially Nebraska, and I think of the days of the intrepid pioneers of the prairies, struggling to make a life for themselves that was tenuous, at best.
Although Cather spent only a few years of her childhood on the vast prairie lands of Nebraska, she...
Posted by KChin on Wed, May 07
Library Director’s Notebook
May, 2008
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
This simple sentence, so ripe with the promise of countless tales, begins Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (the pen name of Baroness Karen Blixen) whose memoir of running a coffee plantation in Africa between 1914 and 1931 has captured the imagination of countless readers. I had never read the book, but I had seen the movie with Meryl Streep and Robert...
Posted by KChin on Fri, Apr 18
I have been reading Agatha Christie novels hungrily since I was a very young girl. I loved the English settings, the predictable but pleasing cast of characters, ranging from stuffy retired majors, to plucky society debs, to earnest war heroes, to finicky spinster ladies. I loved that there were always lots of clues, some red herrings, and a satisfying ending where good (usually) triumphed. Most of all I loved that there were so many of them, a prime requirement for a voracious reader like...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Mar 06
Before there was Carrie Bradshaw writing her column for Sex And the City, there was Dorothy Parker. As early as the 1920’s Parker was writing sexy, sardonic, stilletto-tipped stories about the battle of the sexes for such respected magazines as Vogue and Vanity Fair. In Parker’s ascerbic world, the women usually come across looking obsessive, silly, and shallow; but the men, shown usually as either clueless or feckless, don’t fare very much better.
Although many of...
Posted by KChin on Wed, Feb 06
Library Director’s Notebook
February, 2008
This year Lauri Burke and I will be leading book discussion groups focused around the Reading Across Rhode Island (RARI) selection Water For Elephants by Sarah Gruen. As part of our yearly participation, we like to pair discussion of the RARI selection with a fiction or non-fiction choice of our own that somehow relates to or expands upon the RARI theme.
Water for Elephants is set during the Depression and follows the...
Posted by KChin on Mon, Jan 07
Click on the book to check out our catalog for this title's availablity!
Posted by KChin on Mon, Jan 07
One of the statewide organizations I’m most happy to be associated with is the Rhode Island Center for the Book at Providence Public Library. Each state in the country has a state center for the book. In Rhode Island, our state center runs a very successful statewide reading program each year called Reading Across Rhode Island (RARI).
The purpose of RARI is to select one book a year and to encourage teenagers and adults to read the book and to discuss it formally in book groups and class...
