Skip to main content

2014 Staff Picks: Part 1

We're kicking off 2015 with a new series here on the blog!  Throughout the month of January, I will be sharing our Staff Picks of 2014.  This is the first part of a multi-part series in which library staff will share their favorite books, movies and/or literary websites or blogs from the previous year.  We're starting off with Miss Sheila's picks for 2014.  So keep on reading to find out what Miss Sheila's been reading over the past year!

Although she has read many books during 2014, Miss Sheila is hard pressed to name her favorite novel.  That’s because all the books she enjoyed throughout the year fell into the nonfiction category.  Oddly enough, her favorite topic to read about is ... physics.  

“The discoveries being made daily in the science of physics, as well as the discoveries made during the last one hundred years or so are nothing short of  fascinating”, Miss Sheila tells us.  “The ideas and theories brought together by today’s physicists, Michio Kaku, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the late Carl Sagan and Edwin Hubble are breathtaking.  Stories about the Large Hadron Collider, quantum mechanics and string theory are filled with words that read like science fiction, yet many physicists work daily to prove that those very theories are reality.  Reading physics always creates, at least with me, a new enchantment with our place in the universe.”

Some of those titles are: The Quantum Moment by Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber;  Absolutely Small by Michael Fayer;  The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene and The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll.

Aside from the physics lessons, Miss Sheila says the book she most enjoyed during her reading time in 2014 was Say Kids! What Time is It? Notes from the Peanut Gallery by Stephen Davis.  “It is a wonderfully researched book about the early TV show, Howdy Doody.  I enjoyed the book so much because I enjoy puppets so much.  It was a great story about the early days of television and children’s programming.”

Miss Sheila doesn’t recall seeing any new movies throughout 2014 but does enjoy watching Twister, Men in Black, and Independence Day whenever the opportunity arises.  “Those are my three favorite movies and they never get old for me.”

Miss Sheila most enjoys websites and blogs  that help her plan Children’s StoryHour.  “I love providing a good, old-fashioned Children’s StoryHour.  A StoryHour  that features classic children’s storybooks with lovely illustrations, some flannel board stories, finger plays, songs and Puppet Theater  followed by a craft that’s  just right for the preschooler.  The children seem to enjoy that very much.  Many librarians share their ideas for StoryHour on blogs and I’m always grateful for the exchange of  ideas.”

 --written by Miss Sheila




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip.  I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage.  The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it.  It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger.  Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i
Post a Comment
Read more

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read.  Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one.   Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment.  The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story.  It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve.  Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week.  This  particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in
Post a Comment
Read more

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst
Post a Comment
Read more