Reach Out and Dial Someone (@ Your Library)

Happy Telephone Day! Given the ubiquity of telephones in today's society, it can be hard to believe we ever survived without them. Amazingly, it's been less than 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone invention. While others also lay claim to the birth of this revolutionary device, the telephone, even as Bell knew it, has gone through innumerable changes since it first appeared in 1876. It's doubtful that he ever imagined a device that could call, send messages and letters, store tons of files, photos, and other information, and still fit in a pocket or a purse. While all those bells and whistles are fun and revolutionary, libraries have found unique ways to harness the power of a simple phone call in the service of literacy and information. 

It's a Poetry Party!

April is National Poetry Month, which makes it an ideal time to go to your bookshelves and pick out your favorite verse, sonnet, ballad, haiku, or limerick. Predating modern history, poetry stands as one of the earliest forms of artistic expression with the Epic of Gilgamesh being one of the oldest recorded poems dating to circa 2100 BCE. With poetry being so essential to our history, it’s of no surprise that no matter where you go you can find rich, poetic traditions in any place or culture, including Mississippi. With such an abundant and rich literary history, Mississippi no less offers its own voices to the poetic craft, including works from the likes of Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams, as well as other unique voices such as Etheridge Knight, Charles Henri Ford, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. You'll find some suggestions of local Mississippi poets below, as well as a breakdown of poetry styles.

Read With MLC: Celebrity Memoirs

Welcome to April, and the fourth reading prompt for our 2024 Read With MLC reading challenge: read a celebrity memoir. Is there anything more delicious than escaping your own life to peer into the intricacies of someone else's? Affairs, addiction, divorce, abuse... seeing how others deal with adversity somehow makes our own more manageable. Add in the shiny gloss of reading a tell-all book about someone famous? You can see why celebrity memoirs are a booming business. 

If you look at the past five years, the top US sales slots go to famous people from a variety of backgrounds. In 2020, Barack Obama's A Promised Land sold 17 million copies. He was closely followed by Prince Harry's Spare, with 16 million copies, Michelle Obama's Becoming, with 14 million copies, and Britney Spears's The Woman in Me, with 11 million copies. And these are figures for just the first week of sales! If you're wondering which memoirs your local librarian liked as opposed to national sales figures, you need look no further than below this graphic!

Total Eclipse of the Sun

Hear ye, hear ye! There is a total solar eclipse happening on April 8th, 2024, the last total eclipse for 20 years. According to timeanddate.com, Jackson, Mississippi, will experience approximately 90% totality at 1:52 p.m. In celebration of this momentous occasion, I wanted to share what MLC has done to help public libraries, and therefore all Mississippians, enjoy this event. 

The WPA Files: Fewer Aliens, More Gossip

Have you ever wanted to learn more about your town? Do you like gossip and facts about trees? You need to check out the WPA files! WPA stands for Works Progress Administration, which was organized as part of the New Deal to provide jobs for unemployed Americans during the Great Depression. One of the projects of the WPA was to gather local histories by going into each county, interviewing the residents, and compiling research. MLC has files for all of Mississippi’s counties except for Sharkey and Wilkinson. The source material for these files can be found at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 

I Am Woman, Hear Me Write

It's Women's History Month. Quick! Name your favorite female Mississippi author!

There are a slew of wonderfully talented authoresses hailing from our great state and they have written (and continue to write!) in a number of genres: romance, mystery, biography, and more. Whatever your preferred reading style is, these women have covered it. Sometimes, though, it feels like they're overshadowed by the Faulkners and Grishams in the state. According to an article published by the website Quartz, only 18% of published authors in the 1960s were women. Fast-forward sixty years to 2020--a new study proclaims that women have surpassed men in book field, now publishing more than 50% of the written word. Whether or not this study was sound methodologically, it points to the fact that women writers in Mississippi and world-wide have come a long, long way.

Read with MLC: Graphic Nonfiction

Welcome to March and the third reading prompt of our 2024 Read with MLC challenge: read a work of graphic nonfiction. Nonfiction comics have been around for longer than you might think. Thomas Nast, who created political cartoons, started drawing as a teen in 1856. The Republican elephant was one of the artistic brainchildren of his decades-long career. He brought other popular figures to the forefront of American consciousness, figures just as beloved and enduring as, say, Superman, like the Democratic donkey, Uncle Sam, and Santa Claus. Robert Ripley and his Ripley's Believe It or Not franchise started in 1918 as a single panel comic and grew to encompass a wealth of researchers to back up his claims. There are many more examples, here in America and across the world. While fiction comics dominate the reading landscape, there is a wide world of graphic nonfiction available that has literally exploded onto our reading shelves. If you have a thirst for knowledge and a love of art, this may be the perfect type of book for you.

So... Just what is available out there? I scanned our shelves for some of our top graphic reads and found some in an array of subject areas that are sure to tickle your nonfiction reading taste buds.

Clay-ke It to the Limit

MLC’s Craft Club had its sixth meeting in February. We tested MLC’s polymer clay kit and let out our inner sculptors. Attendees had the option to create earrings or design their own sculptures. The earrings didn’t work quite as planned: MLC’s main meeting room was in the middle of a technology makeover and we couldn't use the projection equipment. It is much easier to have people create something with an example, so most of the attendees chose to make their own sculptures. They turned out great!

That All May Social Media

That All May Read. That's the slogan of the National Library Services for the Blind and Print Disabled. I think about those words a lot. In 2018, the National Health Interview Survey found that over 32 million American adults experienced vision loss--that's loss of vision that can't be corrected, even with glasses or contacts. A different source, the American Printing House, estimates that over 55,000 children under the age of 21 had the same diagnosis. In a world that has become increasingly visual -- with eye-popping memes and long, drawn-out hashtags, marketing floods our consciousness from early in the morning to late every night, day after day after day. When we aren't intentional about reaching everyone, we omit huge chunks of the population. You can make your social media more accessible for others using the tools and ideas below.

Finding Your Nonfiction Niche

We all know fiction genres: romance, science fiction, fantasy… all types of books that have their own shelves in bookstores everywhere. But what about nonfiction? Most people know what nonfiction is: books about real world concepts, people, or events. You might not know it, but there are different types of nonfiction. Much like fiction genres, there aren’t any hard and fast rules for nonfiction genres—if you ask ten different people about these genres, you’ll get ten different answers. But if you want to dig deeper, here are some categories you might start with. 

Reading Black Mississippi

February is Black History Month, which makes it a great time to visit the bookshelves and refocus your reading on some of the great Black authors out there. There are a ton of Black Mississippi authors--historical and modern--just waiting for you to discover them. Their perspectives on Mississippi life and culture are must-reads, but you might not know where to start if you're not familiar with the local writing scene. These suggestions cover a multitude of writing styles and genres, so you ought to be able to find something in your favorite areas to get yourself started. 

Read with MLC: Reread a Book You Love

Welcome to February and the second reading prompt of our 2024 Read with MLC challenge: reread a book you love. There's something incredibly special about a book you enjoy so much that you want to reread it. Setting aside a wedge of time to experience something again is a unique act, but especially when it's something as time consuming as reading a book. I don't do a lot of rereading--there are so many books out there I want to get to--so I was curious about what drives other readers to reread. Here is what a few of my fellow library workers had to say about their favorite rereads.

Squeaking Into the Public Domain

American copyright is a strange beast. The law can be a bit complex, but to sum it up, a creator (or the creator’s estate) can hold exclusive copyright to a work for 70 years after the author’s death or 95 years after publication. After that time, the works are released to the public domain. When a work is in the public domain, it can be rebroadcast, reworked, streamed, performed, and so on and so forth free of charge! This can spur a massive amount of creativity and help bring to light some older classics.

Works entering the public domain this year include: 

• Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag (the oldest American picture book still in print)
• House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne (Tigger’s first appearance) 
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (a silent French film, often considered a landmark of cinema and known for its unique cinematography) 
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (a book at the center of multiple famous obscenity trials) 
• Animal Crackers (a film by the Marx Brothers. The songs written for the film, such as “Hello I Must Be Going” and “Hooray for Captain Spaulding!” also enter the public domain). 
• The Man Who Laughs (an influential German Expressionist film, best known for its influence on Universal horror movies and the Batman villain the Joker)

All About That Braille

Braille: it's the bumpy bits that Blind people use to read, right? Invented by Frenchman Louis Braille (1809-1852) in 1824, this writing system is known worldwide as an aid for those without vision. It can be found nearly everywhere, from elevators to the tops of fast food drink lids, but that might be all you know about braille. There are some pretty cool facts about the little bumps that connect the visually impaired to both the written word and a world designed around those who have sight. Let me share a few of my favorite nuggets about how braille came to be and why we love it so much, because here at MLC? We're all about that braille.

Dr. King in Mississippi

Dr. Martin Luther King was a lasting inspiration for our country. Born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, his leadership helped millions of Americans achieve civil rights and changed the country for the better. His name has become synonymous with the idea of perseverance against adversity. He is celebrated across the United States and the world with bridges, schools, churches, and libraries that carry his name. According to Wikipedia, in Mississippi alone there are at least 22 towns with a Martin Luther King road, street, or boulevard. While he himself spent less time campaigning for change directly in Mississippi, Dr. King still held her people close to his heart. During his speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, King specifically calls out Mississippi as a place he hoped to see "transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice." King did visit our state several times during his short life and was present for some significant points in our history. Check our our brief timeline of some of the events below.

Looking For a Few Good Readers

Talking Book Services (TBS) is one of the best kept secrets in Mississippi, and, truth be told, in the entire nation. Thing is, TBS is something everyone should know about. It provides thousands upon thousands of books and magazines directly to people who want to read them, so that every American, regardless of disability or reading ability can access the reading material they want. But when did this amazing program come about, just who is eligible, and what do they even get? Well, let me tell you...

Read with MLC: Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

There's something about clearing out the holiday decorations and putting up a new calendar that makes anything and everything seem possible. Start exercising? You got this. Eat healthier? You can do it. Learn a new language? Research your roots? Read more? Turns out there's probably a book for that, and we've got you covered at the library.

Alongside those New Year resolutions, we challenge you to join our 2024 Reading Challenge. January's prompt is to read a book that has the word "New" or "Year" (or both!) in the title. There are quite a few books that qualify in our library catalog (surprise, surprise), but here are a couple of wide-ranging suggestions: