Go Red for Heart Health Day @ Your Library

Staff at Avon Lake Public Library is observing Wear Red Day today to call attention to women’s heart health.  Did you know heart disease is the number 1 cause of death for women?  Today, we’re encouraging each other and our patrons (women and men both) to take care of our hearts.

Along with wearing red and eating chocolate (there’s evidence that chocolate, especially dark chocolate is actually good for your heart), we have a display of books on heart health.  Here is a sampling of some of the titles:

A Woman’s Guide to a Healthy Heart by Carol Simontacchi and Frances E. FitzGerald explores the role of emotions on your cardiovascular health and shows you how to start making natural changes to help you live a fuller, healthier life.

Topics include safe weight-loss tips, simple heart-healthy exercises, supplements to take and those to avoid, and the benefits of certain common foods and less common herbs.

Simontacchi is a certified clinical nutritionist and expert on weight and health management.

The Heart Mind Connection by cardiologist Windsor Ting and psychiatrist Gregory Fricchione looks at the link between heart disease and depression and explores the biology of emotions.  They examine the effects of antidepressants on heart patients, tips on managing anxiety and anger, survival strategies for bypass surgery and heart attack recovery and women’s risk for heart disease and using hormone replacement therapy.

The Heart Speaks: a Cardiologist Reveals the Secret Language of Healing was written by Mimi Guarneri, a cardiologist and founder and medical director of Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine.  Guarneri says that the heart is not simply a mechanical instrument but a “powerhouse of its own, possessing intelligence, memory and decisionmaking abilities that are separate from the mind.”  She encourages us to know our whole heart – mental, emotional, intelligent and spiritual in order to heal.

Love in the Time of Cholesterol: a Memoir with Recipes by Cecily Ross describes how her marriage changed to accomodate the new realities created by her “fit and vigorous” 44 year old husband’s sudden heart attack:  their changing relationship to food and “all the desires that were pulling at their hearts and spirits.”  This lovely book is written with heart, humor and tasty recipes!

Heal Your Heart With Wine and Chocolate: and 99 Other Ways Women Can Protect Their Hearts by Deborah Yost is my favorite of all these books (no surprise there!).

These are the enjoyable health tips: drink a glass of wine a day, savor the flavor of chocolate, enjoy the blues, watch funny movies.  And best of all, the experts tell us these are really important (along with maintaining proper weight, lowering cholesterol, getting exercise, etc.).

Yost is a health journalist, not a medical expert, but she names her expert sources and vetters in her introduction.

This is just a sampling of our collection of books on heart health.  We’ve got a number of excellent heart-healthy cookbooks, diet books and health books.  Our display includes some children’s books on the heart and circulatory system too.

Online, you can find lots of good information at these sites:

Mayo Clinic on heart disease: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/heart-disease/DS01120

Medline Plus on heart disease in women: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/heartdiseaseinwomen.html

National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (of the National Institutes of Health): http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov//educational/hearttruth/

American Heart Association: http://americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=1200000

Yours for a healthy heart!

Sacred Feasts From a Monastery Kitchen

OK, I’ll admit it: I selected this book for its cover.  The picture of fresh cut vegetables spilling out of a soup kettle, as from a cornucopia, was just too yummy-looking to pass up.  Fortunately, sometimes you can indeed judge (accurately) a book by its cover.

This is a delightful collection of recipes, mostly of soups, salads and vegetable dishes, arranged by both natural and church seasons.  Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette, chef at Our Lady of the Resurrection Monastery in upstate New York, includes short reflections throughout the book, weaving together menus and religious faith.  He describes the monastic approach to cooking as characterized by “simplicity, tastefulness, and resilient frugality.”  This isn’t gruel!  At the same time, most of the recipes feature only a small number of ingredients and wouldn’t require much fuss to cook.

The menu for Candlemas (February 2) is polenta and a tian of vegetables (zucchini, eggplant, onion and garlic).  For February 6 he writes about silence and music and prepares Mushroom-Barley-Squash and Garlic Soup.  I’m getting hungry just writing about his writing!  And I’m making plans for many future meals.

Cleveland/ Lorain & 44 Scotland Street

Having now read five of Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street books, it’s occuring to me that Cleveland and Lorain need their own McCall Smiths.

These books started out (and actually continue) as a long-running “daily novel” in a newspaper, The Scotsman.  Each day, a short chapter runs in the paper advancing the story.  Every hundred chapters or so, McCall Smith gathers them into a book.  He describes the inspiration of the series as “captur(ing) the very particular romance of living in Edinburgh, one of the most beautiful and entrancing cities in the world.”  The books are populated with characters drawn on the Edinburghians he meets in the streets of the city, and he draws them with both amusement and admiration.

I’ll bet this has drawn many a tourist to visit the city he so lovingly portrays, and it must do a pretty good job of selling newspapers too. (Each week, a synopsis of the story’s events are published online but readers only get the full story in the print editions.)  I don’t know if the citizens of Edinburgh are given to to the negativity we sometimes give into in Northeast Ohio, but these loving stories about one’s city would have to be the perfect antidote.

We need a McCall Smith in Lorain and Cleveland.

Question: Do you know any likely local writers?

44 Scotland Street

I’m a huge fan of Alexander McCall Smith’s No.1 Ladies Detective Agency books.  These are warm and heart-filled stories about a wise female detective in Botswana who goes about setting things right in the lives of her friends and clients.  The eleventh book in the series, The Double Comfort Safari Club,  is due out in February, and you may check it out after I finish it, thank you very much.

Given the wait between installments in the series, it’s good that McCall Smith does write other highly readable books.  Last week I wrote about La’s Orchestra Saves the World, unusually for McCall Smith, a stand alone title.  Today I want to tell you about another series, 44 Scotland Street.

This set of books started as a serialization in The Scotsman, “the national newspaper of Scotland”.   Each brief chapter in the series, now comprising five books with a sixth coming out this year, is first published separately in the print edition of the paper.  Those of us who don’t receive The Scotsman daily on our front stoop have to wait for the books to come out and make their way across the Atlantic.

The novels, set in Edinburgh,  have several ongoing plot lines and a wide variety of characters, some of whose lives intersect more than others.  They range from the rather fusty portrait painter Angus Lordie and his beloved gold-toothed mutt Cyril to the long-suffering Bertie, a six-year old with the mother of all helicoptor moms.  Like most of McCall Smith’s novels, not a lot actually happens in these stories, yet they contain a good number of laugh out loud moments and a great deal of charm. Much like real life, little ever gets resolved; events just keep meandering along.  Reading one of these books is like sitting in a brightly-lit, warm cafe eating buttery scones and marmalade while watching the world go by.  Delightful.

Like all of McCall Smith’s series, you’ll want to read this series in order.  Check here for lists of all of his series.

Question: What’s your favorite comfort reading?

What are we, then?

Jaron Lanier is a humanist computer scientist who first coined the term “virtual reality” and offers up a challenge to the webbed-up, wired-together world:  who are you?

Are you more than some comments on a chat board, aggregated even if anonymized marketing data?

Are you willingly sacrificing your individuality to join a smart mob, and how smart is that mob?

Are you willing to think like a machine because that’s easier than asking a machine to think like you?

Lanier is concerned about the effects of unlimited connectivity and collaboration on creative thinking; about the effects of anonymity on civil discourse; about the reduction of our information needs to “if its not available conveniently online right now it doesn’t exist and I don’t care.”

As a librarian, I am too.

As a citizen, what about you?

Check it out at our Library or visit Lanier’s website here.

La’s Orchestra Saves the World

Alexander McCall Smith’s novels hold a special place in my heart.  His writing is simple and straight forward, and his heroines are wise and loveable.  La’s Orchestra Saves the World and its protagonist La (Lavender) Stone are no exceptions.

In this stand alone novel, La finds herself a young widow alone in rural Surray at the outbreak of World War II.  In quiet and understated ways, she becomes one of those ordinary heroes who keep faith through difficult times.

Not a lot happens in this quiet story, in much the same way that not a lot happens in most of our lives.  But in La’s story, McCall Smith demonstrates the heroism possible in the ordinary.

It’s been said that women writers can write men, but male writers can’t write women because they leave out their minds.  McCall Smith’s female characters have plenty of heart and mind, but he does leave out the dark side of most of his female characters (Irene in the 44 Scotland Street series is possibly the only exception to this rule, and she’s not a well-rounded character either).  La, like the rest of McCall Smith’s female protagonists is too perfect to be entirely believable.  Yet there is something comforting and even inspiring about these wonderful women.  It’s good to spend time with them.

Questions:  Who are your favorite fictional characters?  What qualities make a fictional character you want to spend time with?

Layoff Lit

Layoff Lit is the newest genre in publishing:  stories, both fiction and nonfiction, about living through job loss and other financial traumas.  The term was coined by New York Times book reporter Motoko Rich.  Apparently, we’re facing an uptick in the number of novels and memoirs about dealing with tough times, both in the Great Depression of the Thirties and the Great Recession of today.  The harbinger of this new genre is the movie Up in the Air in which George Clooney plays a professional layoff consultant.  That is, he goes into companies to do the dirty deed.  Much too depressing an “entertainment” for me right now.

It’s too early to know how this genre will go over; most of these books are awaiting publication later this year.  (Interestingly, many of these books were written by recently laid-off editors and other publishing industry workers).  Other sources report a rising demand for escapist fare: romance, fantasy and sci-fi where everything goes right in the end or the troubles are truly out of this world.

I find myself seeking out books about people making it through earlier tough periods in history (check out La’s Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith,  Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy starting with Regeneration or The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen).  I might be able to handle literary treatments of today’s troubles in another couple decades, maybe.

Question: What kind of reading is drawing your interest these days?  Do you think your choices are in any way a reflection of current economic conditions? Does reading about the hard experiences of others, in fiction or nonfiction, help you cope with your own challenges?

This Will Change Everything!

This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future.

It’s a truism that the only thing we can count on is change.  Here’s a chance, maybe, to get a leg up on what’s next.  John Brockman, founder of the edge.org website and online think tank, presents this fascinating and frustrating collection of short essays by leading scientists and thinkers all in answer to the question “What will change everything? What game changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”  Over one hundred allegedly brilliant indivduals contributed short essays (most of them one to two pages) answering the question.

Contributors include physicist Lawrence Krauss, writer Ian McEwan, musician Brian Eno and actor Alan Alda though scientists and philosophers predominate.

The pleasure of this collection is dipping in and out, reading the essays that catch your attention.  This isn’t a book that’s best read from cover to cover but sampled.  Most of the essays will give you lots to mentally chew on and likely argue with.  Since they’re short, you can read one or two on your lunch break or in a waiting room.  But it’s most fun if someone else is around to debate with.

Question: What do you think will change everything in the near future?

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

One of the newest books in our collection:

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink

Author of bestselling A Whole New Mind, Pink describes what he calls Motivation 2.0.  For most of the twentieth century, managers, fairly successfully, motivated employees by carrots and sticks.  As the needs of the workplace have changed and organizations need employees to work more creatively and with more initiative, this old style of management is much less successful.  Employers need to switch to a new operating system that encourages internal motivation.

Based on the science of the last forty years, Pink describes three elements of motivation: autonomy (workers are able to decide for themselves how to carry out their jobs), mastery (workers have plenty of opportunity to learn more and continuously improve their performance at complex and interesting tasks) and purpose (workers are doing things they find important and meaningful).

Pink takes us inside companies that have adopted Motivation 2.0 and shows us how it is put into practice in different settings.  He also includes lots of tips and exercises to help readers develop their own capacity for internal motivation.  The book is a fun and fast read with lots of ideas to chew on and the appendix is full of a variety of tools to help readers realize the principles in the book.  Pink’s website will soon feature an online assessment to help readers find out just where they fall on the internal – external motivation continuum.

Question: What motivates you to do your best work?

At the closing of the year….

Well, here I am.  It’s quiet in the Library on this last night we are open of 2009.  This has been quite a year for us of ups and downs.

From my perspective as Assistant Director, there are many things we can be proud of.

I am responsible for collection development. Our staff continues to improve our collections and keep them interesting and relevant for you.  We listened to everyone’s suggestions; looked at materials on shelves, on carts and in hand;  produced report that counted circulation transactions;  and looked at dates to make sure we used our scare resources and space for the best purposes.

We made a lot of difficult decisi0ns with materials, there are some things we’d like to have but cannot justify or afford anymore.  Books and other items are put here to be USED.  Part of that process is “weeding out”  materials that have not been used (or appear to be useful) for a long time.    At least many go into the book sale, they may find another home with you, as well as raise money for our Friends.  If we remove what nobody wants, it makes it easier to find the good stuff and makes room for the new stuff.

As always, we try to make the materials and collections the right size and in the right location.  We shift, we add shelves, remove shelves, put some things together and separate others.  We strive for a balance — make things you are looking for easy to find, while making it possible for you to find things you didn’t know you were looking for!

Libraries in Ohio faced a major challenge in June when our state funding was threatened like never before — to be reduced by half.  It is part of the economic crisis that has been brewing for years and boiling since last fall — not enough coming in.  At a time when more and more people turned to public libraries for learning, job searching, networking, entertainment and enlightenment — we were hard pressed to deliver everything we have in the past with less resources.

Things are bad but could have been worse.  Our representatives in Columbus heard you loud and clear.  We were humbled and awed by the support our patrons all over Ohio showed us with calls, emails and letters.  It still inspires us keep going when things look dark.

We trimmed everything we could in the background, but we need to keep the lights on, the doors open for starters.  We could not cut back or stop buying new materials any further than we had.  That is why most of you come in.  So we had to make other cuts.

We are no longer open Sundays.  We stopped filling most open positions.  Just recently, we laid off four part-time staff members, which has never happened here before.  NOBODY is getting a raise next year. There will be three additional days closed next year and we will not be paid for them.  It is painful for everyone.

However,  we kept delivering great service with a smile to everyone, introduced new programs, services and collections and expanded others.  Tough times mean we have to be creative and choose priorities carefully.

We will keep doing so in 2010.

It is always a pleasure to work with you, the patron — across the desk, over the phone, by email.  Now I must close the building for the New Year’s holiday.  See you next year.