AliceBakerBlog

The Return of Oprah's Book Club

After an extended period of wound licking and recovery from the James Frey debacle, Oprah's Book Club has been resurrected with Cormac McCarthy's The Road. 

McCarthy is reputed to be only slightly less reclusive than J. D. Salinger, so his reaction to the Oprah treatment should be very interesting.

But as always, Oprah's canonization has immediate results even at a library as small as ours--our copy of The Road flew out of here early this morning.

Mindless Eating

Powells blog reprints a New Republic review of Mindless Eating by Brian Wandsink.  Fascinating stuff--explorations into why we eat like we do and why 27% of us are obese.

And yes, we do eat mindlessly.  Wandsink explores the topic with tales of ingeniously diabolical experiments with test subjects eating from automatically refilling bowls of tomato soup, and moviegoers eagerly chomping days-old popcorn.   

We're sheep, all of us.  And we're pretty stupid about it all.

Why are so many Americans fat? At one level the explanation is rather simple. We gain weight when we consume more calories than we burn. So any theory for why we are gaining weight has to explain why we are eating more, exercising less, or both. A traditional economic argument would be based on rational calculations and technological change. Innovations in packaging, preserving, and cooking have greatly decreased the time it takes to prepare food. And if you lower the cost of something, rational consumers will buy more of it. American consumers eat more, and more often, than they did fifty years ago. Technology has also made it easier for us to avoid exercise. Many of us ride an elevator down to our car, drive to work, and then ride another elevator up to our office. The most strenuous exercise we exert is at the keyboard, or hoisting a glass. According to this view, obesity is a rational choice. When faced with the choice of swapping a Big Mac for an apple or climbing the stairs instead of riding, some people buy a larger pair of pants instead.

Read more...

Music

Our tiniest patrons got a good dose of music this morning at Ms. Lynette's Baby and Me Lapsit.  Here are the books and CD they enjoyed.  At last look, everyone was still dancing.

Mother Goose Rocks by Various Artists

The Real Mother Goose Classic Animal Rhymes

Clap Hands by Helen Oxenbury

Inch by Inch by David Mallett

If you're Happy and You Know It! by Jane Cabrera

Three Gems of Eagle

The Library and the Eagle Historical Society sponsored a co-event on Wednesday, March 15.  Celebrating the new Eagle Diamond Exhibit at the Hisorical Society, the community was invited to enjoy hors d'oeuvres at the Historical Society headquarters and dessert and coffee at the library.

The night was rainy and cold, but a good number of friendly Eagle folks attended and had very complimentary things to say about the Eagle Diamond exhibit.  We presented demos of our genealogical resources to those interested.

Check out some views of the evening in the photo gallery.

By the way, this is the 400th post to the AliceBakerBlog, a blogiversary of sorts.

Badgerlink

Badgerlink is a collection of databases brought to you by the State Of Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction, and not nearly enough people take advantage of the benefits it offers. 

Looking for the full text of a magazine article?  Badgerlink's EBSCOhost database can lead you there.  Articles from Wisconsin newspapers? Check out the ProQuest database.  How about the front page of your hometown newspaper from the day you were born?  Badgerlink's Access Newspaper Archive probably has it.

In addition, there are two excellent literature databases, one (TeachingBooks) for kids, and one (LitFinder) specializing in poetry and much, much more.  Author profiles?  Full text of poems, speeches, and essays?  All are there at your fingertips.

All these databases and more can be found at Badgerlink.  And it's all accessible, from home, to users of most Wisconsin ISPs.

Badgerlink offers topic and image searching capability tailor-made for children, both primary-grade (Searchasurus) and upper-grade (Kids Search).  Many searches can be scoped to yield hits at the reading level of the student.

If you have kids with homework assignments, or if you have a need for print information, do take a good look at Badgerlink.  It's accessible both from our library homepage and from our Databases page. 

It's your tax dollars working for you, in the best possible way.

OverDrive Videos

Lots of our audio book-loving patrons have been enjoying OverDrive, the Wisconsin Public Library Consortium's audio download service.  Great news--OverDrive's capability for VIDEO downloads is live as of this week.  A quick browse shows all sorts of interesting offerings.

Users download a bit of software and are then enabled to download videos.  It works much the same as the audio download setup.

Check it out soon and happy viewing!

Baby and Me Lapsit

Ms. Lynette shared stories about Cats and Dogs at this morning's Baby and Me Lapsit gathering.

The Wee Little Woman by Byron Barton.

Yip! Snap! Yap! by Charles Fuge.

Friday Morning Coffee Hour

Several years ago, we were reading about bigger and better endowed libraries opening coffee shops on the premises.  This sounded so warm and welcoming to us.  But with small facilities and even smaller funds, what could we do to be part of the coffee shop scene?

Here's what we did: we inaugurated a Friday morning coffee hour.  And we got the word out, not quite knowing what to expect. 

Long story short--it was an immediate and enduring success.  We draw a wide spectrum of folks--some moms with small kids, some babysitting grandparents, some retirees.  There are the regulars, who take turns bringing in much-welcomed treats, and there are the drop-ins, always so pleased to discover a warm oasis.  When we have a lot of children, we pop in a video to occupy them, so the moms and grandmas can chat in relative peace.

Our F.A.B.L.E. volunteers have cheerfully set up and cleaned up each Friday morning.  Along the way, a large coffeemaker and a bottomless supply of coffee were donated to us.

The lesson here:  lack of funding needn't be an obstacle to anything.  Creative thinking and our tireless volunteer help have made our library coffee hour the Place To Be in Eagle each Friday morning, 9:30 to 11:00 a.m.

Please join us!

DailyLit

Check out DailyLit, a book site that will email you segments of classic literature.  Register, find a book, and DailyLit will do the rest, all for free.  No one can claim to be too busy to read now.