Hobbying it Up in 2015!

New Year's Day is fast approaching and a lot of folks are considering resolutions, goals, or even new hobbies to embrace in the New Year. Are you wanting to flex your artistic muscles, write a book, or publish your first academic article? Maybe you want to try canning, growing your own healthy food, or homesteading with your back yard as your own personal farm. Or perhaps you want to try a new exercise activity. We've got you covered!
Come by the Mississippi Library Commission to check out a few of these highlights from our collection. Who knows? Maybe you'll find a new hobby!

• Cyclopedia: It's All About the Bike by William Fotheringham
• The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
• The Elements of Style: illustrated by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
• Print Liberation: The Screen Printing Primer by Nick Paparone & Jamie Dillon with Luren Jenison
• Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword
• Put 'Em Up!: A Comprehensive Home Preserving Guide for the Creative Cook from Drying and Freezing to Canning and Pickling by Sherri Brooks Vinton

Book of the Day: The Drunken Botanist

The Book of the Day, The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create The World's Great Drinks by Amy Stewart, happens to be one of our new books (and graces our New Books display)! If the whimsical cover and title doesn't grab your attention, we're sure the contents will. This book contains little to well-known facts about various alcoholic drinks and the many syrups, infusions, garnishes, etc., that go in them. And if that wasn't enough, they include drink recipes!
Neat facts in this books include....

Lorikeet

• Drunken Lorikeets! - Eucalyptus nectar is their normal food source, but these Australian parrots become intoxicated when they consume it after it has been fermented on the tree. This causes them to be unable to fly, stumble, and become vulnerable to predators. Luckily, "bird rescue organizations routinely take in drunken lorikeets and help them sober up" (Stewart 246).
• Waspy figs? - While figs can be distilled or infused, for example, in vodka, it's their waspy origins that stuck out to us. According to this book, around 11,000 BC figs had to "be pollinated by a wasp in order to set seed and reproduce, but the wasp lays her eggs inside that fruitlike structure and often dies inside" (270). So what happened when you picked it and opened it up? You'd find bits of wasp corpses. Today's figs have longer flowers that doesn't require the wasp to go inside the actual fruit. Some figs today don't even need to be pollinated at all.
• Not the snails! - The book describes an "interesting" recipe following a much more normal one from the year 1737. The recipe from that era "called for boiling snails with milk, brandy, figs, and spices" (271) and was offered "to people with consumption" (271). Drink up!

This book is sure to delight if you love nuggets of information mixed with your cocktails. So come on by and check it out!

Stewart, Amy. The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create The World's Great Drinks. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; Chapel Hill, NC 2013. Print
Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Swainson%27s_Lorikeet.jpg

Book of the Day: The Tilted World

We have found your next great read! The Tilted World is the latest offering by Tom Franklin (Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter) and Beth Ann Fennelly (Pushcart Prize winning poet). This novel has it all--there's romance, there's mystery, there's history, there's poetry... Maybe that's why everyone here at the Mississippi Library Commission can't get enough of this engrossing read. Come check it out before someone else snatches it up!

Already finished the book and hungry for more? Whet your whistle with the authors' interview with the Oxford-American, dig deeper into the 1927 flood and check out Rising Tide, or get a feel for the times from Lanterns on the Levee, a memoir by William Alexander Percy, the head of the Greenville Red Cross during the flood.

Book of the Day: Bottle Trees...and the Whimsical Art of Garden Glass

In celebration of the second day of Spring, our Book of the Day is Bottle Trees...and the Whimsical Art of Garden Glass. The author of this wonderful little book is Mississippi's own acclaimed horticulturalist, garden writer, photographer, and host of MPB's The Gestalt Gardener, Felder Rushing. Felder takes readers across America and England (and our very own Mississippi!) with fantastic pictures illustrating the bottle tree phenomenon. Not only does Felder reflect on his own personal history with bottle trees in this book, but on the historical (and superstitious) significance of these works of yard art!

Come and visit us at the Mississippi Library Commission to check out this neat book, or get suggestions for other books by Mississippians!


http://www.felderrushing.net/
http://mpbonline.org/gestaltgardener/