Month: November 2016
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Refer Madness: Playing Favorites
Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk. Every librarian has favorite patrons. Like parents we aren’t supposed to admit it, but it’s true. My favorites have developed because of how nice they are, for their interesting requests, or for their particular outlook on life. One of my favorites is an older woman, a regular,…
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Innocents & Wonder
Synchronicity strikes again. I recently watched Anne Fontaine’s The Innocents, a new film set in post-WWII Poland focused on Mathilde, a young French Red Cross nurse compelled to help a convent of Polish nuns with a dark secret. I watched it while in the midst of Emma Donoghue’s new novel The Wonder, which is also told from the perspective of a nurse,…
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Who I’m With
Just over a year ago, I was lying on a hotel bed in Peoria, Illinois, after a day of attending sessions at a library conference, and planned to finish off my evening reading. But instead I turned on the TV (always a big mistake) and was immediately thrust into the Select Committee on Benghazi’s marathon…
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Thousands
Tonight I was standing in a private room of a restaurant for a party when a middle-aged Asian woman in a kimono entered the room and approached me. She was holding a stack of leaflets and shoved one in front of me. “I’d like to talk to you about who to vote for on Tuesday,” she…
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The sunrise, it comes to me
A poem The sunrise, it comes to meA rippled grace bound for the trees.Coming and coming, it comes,sent from the yonder colors, that arebillowed in atmosphere.What is otherwise clear must contendwith a cloudy obstruction thatgets the best view of all:A panopticon dawn,but for me, the mere morning. The melange, elementalin joining sky and water into…