Blog Category: Director's Notebook

Posted by KChin on Thu, May 08
Library Director’s Notebook May 2014 The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce Some wise advice that has been given to novice writers of novels is to start their story as close as possible to the “day that was different”.  Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, certainly heeds this advice with remarkable skill. Harold Fry is a newly retired man whose life has fallen into an uncomfortable, albeit typical rut.  With very little to occupy his...
Posted by KChin on Sat, Mar 29
Library Director’s NotebookApril, 2014 Somerville and Ross were two women writers and cousins who wrote rollicking stories about the Anglo-Irish and their trials and tribulations in Ireland during the late Victorian period.  Their best known work, which was dramatized by the BBC is Some Experiences of an Irish RM.  Yet Somerville and Ross considered The Real Charlotte to be their best work. Part farce, part drama and in the end, part tragedy, The Real...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Mar 06
Library Director’s NotebookMarch, 2014 For the past few weeks I have been enjoying the novels of Anthony Trollope, who although a contemporary of Dickens and a more prolific author, is not as well known and not usually as highly  regarded as Dickens by modern readers.  Trollope has written nothing, for example, as loved and universally lauded as  A Christmas Carol, yet in his own way, Trollope had as keen an eye for both the sublime and the ridiculous...
Posted by KChin on Tue, Feb 04
Library Director’s NotebookFebruary, 2014 A new novel by Lee Smith is always a much-anticipated event by thosel of us who love her work.   Known to some of a “southern writer”,  Lee Smith both fulfills the finer expectations of  that label and extends far beyond its boundaries.  It is hard to find a writer from the South, the North, or any place betwixt or between who has a greater capacity to spin a tale, craft a sentence,  provoke a startled laugh, or...
Posted by KChin on Tue, Dec 31
Library Director’s NotebookJanuary, 2014 The Collector of Lost Things by Jeremy Page is a book about rare, priceless, irreplaceable things, lost forever, not due to some cataclysmic eruption of the universe, but through the banal brutality, and senseless acquisitiveness of mankind.  It is very difficult to read the detailed, bloody descriptions of the slaughter of animals by sailors, explorers, and even by scientists.  Paradise is not always to be...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Dec 05
Director’s NotebookDecember, 2013 I have just finished reading The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of the bestseller Eat, Pray, Love).  I have spoken with a few people who finished reading The Signature of All Things, and I find it interesting that there appears to be a wide range of opinions about the book.  One reviewer said she  loved it and found it endlessly fascinating, while...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Dec 05
Library Director’s NotebookDecember, 2013 I have just finished reading The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of the bestseller Eat, Pray, Love).  I have spoken with a few people who finished reading The Signature of All Things, and I find it interesting that there appears to be a wide range of opinions about the book.  One reviewer said she  loved it and found it endlessly fascinating, while another reader...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Oct 31
Library Director’s NotebookNovember, 2013 While I am certainly a strong proponent of the belief that the book is always better than the movie , I have many times been pleasantly surprised by watching the movie first, and then following up by reading the book.  This would seem counter-intuitive to some—if the book is always better, why not read the book first?  Well, for one thing,  I  often will see a movie and not realize it is based on a book (rather than...
Posted by KChin on Mon, Oct 07
Library Director’s NotebookOctober, 2013 I’ve written in my notebooks a few times about the Number 1 Ladies Detective Series by Alexander McCall Smith.  I enjoy that series not just for its unusual setting in modern day  Botswana, and its likeable cast of characters, including Precious Ramotswe, the lady detective of the title, but also for the strong values and the humanity that inform the stories. Those values and that humanity are also at the center...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Aug 29
Library Director’s NotebookSeptember, 2013 As someone who has been passionate about reading since she was a little girl, I do quite a bit of reading every day; yet it seems no matter how much I read, I still miss some important books along the way.  The pleasure of finally “catching up” with those  excellent books is similar to the enjoyment of finding money in your coat pocket that you hadn’t realized was there—in other words, the  startled excitement of...

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