The Teaching Company

"A lot of people ask me what I’m reading and how I learn about new topics that interest me. I am fortunate to have time to read a lot and I also like to view courses online from MIT’s OpenCourseware, Academic Earth, and others. These courses have ignited a passion of mine, which is to think about how to harness this approach so students who otherwise wouldn’t have access can experience these great courses and learn from these great teachers. One of my favorite sources for great lectures is The Teaching Company. Most of their courses are available as audio downloads and on DVD. I had a chance to meet with The Teaching Company team, and the way they find the very best professors and best courseware is impressive and it shows in the overall quality of the teaching. "

~Bill Gates, from a post on his GatesNotes blog

We were delighted to find that Bill Gates is a fan of The Teaching Company materials, because so are we! You'll find many of The Teaching Company's materials in the library catalog, from Superstring Theory to the Life & Work of Mark Twain; Alexander the Great & the Hellenistic Age to the String Quartets of Beethoven; Nutrition Made Clear to Museum Masterpieces...explore them all! (You can also search under The Great Courses-some of these will be DVDs, some audiobooks.) Each disc usually contains several lectures of about 30 minutes each taught by university professors from around the United States. The Teaching Company materials are geared towards lifetime learners, but may be helpful or of interest to teenagers as well.

Getting Ready for The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society

It's time to start reading The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society for our online reading group! Don't forget to post comments & questions either on the blog or on the abc book banter forums.

Click here to visit the official website for the book-the blog links to articles, contains virtual book group discussion questions, the recipe for potato-peel pie, & more!



About the authors:

Mary Ann Shaffer, who passed away in February 2008, worked as an editor, librarian, and in bookshops. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was her first novel.

Her niece, Annie Barrows, is the author of the children’s series Ivy and Bean, as well as The Magic Half. She lives in northern California.

Click here for the novel's Barnes & Noble page, which gives a longer biography of author Mary Ann Shaffer, an excerpt from the book, recommended further reading, & discussion questions.

Some things to think about as you delve into your reading:

What was it like to read a novel composed entirely of letters? What do letters offer that no other form of writing (not even emails) can convey?

What historical facts about life in England during World War II were you especially surprised to discover? What traits, such as remarkable stamina, are captured in a detail such as potato peel pie? In what ways does fiction provide a means for more fully understanding a non-fiction truth?

Discuss the writers who capture the hearts of the members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Does a reader's taste in books reveal anything significant about his or her personality?

Who was your favorite character in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society? Do you think books have the power to lift people out of their circumstances? What role did books play in the lives of the Guernsey Literary Society?

This novel is currently in development to be filmed. Do you think this book will translate well onto the big screen? What do you think of movies that are literary adaptations in general?

Just for fun, consider the recent article from a British paper: "Guernsey: Channel isle with a literary landscape".

Serial Readers Unite!

We had a customer come in today & recommend a site caled Fictfact.

From their website:

"You read books in series. You want to keep track of what to read next. You want recommendations on what to read next. You want to know when new books are coming out.

"That's why you need FictFact!FictFact is a tracking site focused on book series. Let us know what books/series you've read and we'll let you know what you need to read next and what's coming out soon. Registration is free, so let us know how you like it, and what series, books & authors we might be missing."

We like to read the books in a series in order, so we think this will be a great tool for us!

U.S. Poet Laureate #17 is Announced

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced on July 1st the appointment of W.S. Merwin as the Library’s 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2010-2011. Merwin's duties will begin in October.

"William Merwin’s poems are often profound and, at the same time, accessible to a vast audience," Billington said on making the announcement. "He leads us upstream from the flow of everyday things in life to half-hidden headwaters of wisdom about life itself."

Interest in the U.S. Poet Laureates? Join us for our Poetry Circle on Wednesday, July 14th at 3:30 PM. For the Summer Poetry Circle, we will be featuring a Poetry Bout: Kay Ryan vs. Carol Ann Duffy! The (current) Poet Laureates of the United States & the United Kingdom are going head to head! Join us as we compare & contrast Kay Ryan’s “A Ball Rolls on a Point” with Carol Ann Duffy’s “In Your Mind”. Pick up copies of the poems at the Cherry Hills Library Information Desk.

More about W.S. Merwin

Poetry page of the Library of Congress website.

About the position of poet laureate

A poem about summer by the future poet laureate

Happy Independence Day!

Have a safe & festive holiday, everyone!

The Cherry Hills Library is closed today,

but will open again at 10 AM on July 5th!

The Gastronomical Me: Remembering M.F.K. Fisher

“People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do. They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it."
~ M.F. K. Fisher

In the past couple of years, Julia Child has been a name on everyone's lips-her cookbooks, her TV show, her unabashed love of butter. Today is the birthday of another light of the culinary world-M.F.K. Fisher.

M.F.K. (Mary Frances Kennedy) Fisher (July 3, 1908 – June 22, 1992) was a writer & gourmet, a contemporary of Julia Child who also lived in France with her husband as a young married-in her case in Dijon, then "the gastronomical capital of the world". Fisher wrote more than twenty books, beginning with Serve It Forth (included in the collection The Art of Eating) in 1937. "Serve It Forth was was so unlike other 'women' writers on the subject of cooking that many critics thought it was written by a man," according to Lori Gama's Gastronomic Memoirs. "Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the 'arts of life' and explored the art of living as a secondary theme in her writing," according to Wikipedia. For more books by & about M.F.K. Fisher, check the library catalog.

All's Fair in Love & War

In honor of the anniversary of the publication of Margaret Mitchell's historical fiction Gone with the Wind on June 30, 1936, we'd like to offer up our own list of 'Masters of the Past'. From books based 35,000 years ago to multi-generational sagas, this list has it all! Expanded from articles in Bookmarks magazine.

Or, for some campy fun, consider reading the sequels, making-of books, the screenplay, & related titles that come up in our library catalog! (Note: the catalog search linked to this post is a keyword search of 'Gone with the Wind'. Some titles listed may only be included because title or description may contain those keywords, though the items themselves have nothing to do with Margaret Mitchell's book.) Also recommended: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall-"Think of Margaret Mitchell's epic Gone with the Wind condensed and told from the perspectives of Mammy and the Tara slaves," Library Journal says.

We were in Atlanta in the '90s and visited the Margaret Mitchell home. If you're in the area, it's worth a look-see! Apparently there is also a Gone with the Wind museum in Marietta called Scarlett on the Square.