Well, we’re still open but still dealing with COVID-19 and its latest offspring, Omicron. Let’s hopes these are the death throes.
Library hours are as follows:
• Monday: 9:00-3:00
• Tuesday: 9:00-3:00
• Wednesday: 9:00-7:30
• Thursday: 9:00-3:00
Librarians and patrons are masked and everything is sanitized as per COVID-19 protocols. But if you feel uncomfortable coming into the library you can call your order in during library hours (403-931- 3919) or book through tracpac.ab.ca and we can place them in the lobby for pick up during library hours.
If you come into the library in the next few weeks you can check out the art display provided by the Millarville School Grade 3 class featuring “soap stone” carvings, dream catchers, Metis weaving and more.
The library could do with a few more volunteers to fill in as substitutes. Shifts are only three hours long and you will be given training. This is a great way to connect with your book-loving neighbours and check out what’s new and great.
New books for children and adults come in to our library and the system constantly.
Here are a couple that sound interesting.
Finding the Mother Tree (Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest) by Suzanne Simard is a magical book. Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence.
In this, her first book, she brings us into her intimate world of trees, brilliantly illuminating the fact that trees are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
This book and Simard’s research is a testament to how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology. Simard proves the true connectedness of the Mother Tree to the forest, nurturing the forest in the profound ways that families and humans nurture each other, and how these inseparable bonds enable our survival. An uplifting, important book.
Lawrence Hill (author of the Book of Negroes) has a just published a children’s book, Beatrice and Croc Harry. It is based on bedtime stories he told to Hill’s young daughters, Beatrice and Evangeline, who came into Hill’s life when he married their mother Miranda. The stories were about a fictional girl, Beatrice, who lived alone in a well-stocked tree house in a massive forest. Her nemesis was a 700-pound, 69-tooth, fast-talking crocodile named Harry. Each night Harry would use clever language and emotional appeals to lure Beatrice as close as possible and each night, when Beatrice decided that he might finally be trustworthy he would pounce. Beatrice got trapped in the most precarious situations but at the last minute she would always outfox Harry.
Hill ran out of bedtime stories and daughter Beatrice grew up but she always wanted her “own book”. It wasn’t until the summer of 2019 when Hill was struggling with another novel that he took the plunge into writing Beatrice and Croc Harry.
“It gave me the chance to explore the idea that a perpetrator of evil and someone who had been wronged might be able to meet in a place of healing and respect. And it allowed me to populate the story with concocted words (such as hypocroco-literosis, the phenomenon by which fewer and fewer crocodiles are reading books these days) and to revel in the play of language.”
One for reading out loud for all ages!
