🥇 Library Champion Newsletter #93 | 📢 Final week of 2023 youth summer reading
Library Champion,
👋 Welcome to our new subscribers! I am SO GLAD to have you aboard!
📢 Final week of 2023 youth summer reading
This is our final week of Youth Programs for the 2023 Summer! What a fun 8 weeks we've had together!
Teens will be meeting for the final time this summer on Wednesday at 1:00 PM. We'll be having a blind snack tasting/rating and a books swap - if you have any books you're done reading in good quality, bring them along and hopefully we'll all go home with something new and interesting! If there are extra books at the end that people don't want, we will donate them to the book sale. We also have our July book club meetings on Thursday!
If you have reading logs to finish - don't worry! You have until August to get them turned in. We're also waiting to hear about a pool party as our wrap-up - we will make a post about that when we know more.
Storytimes will begin again in September - keep a lookout on the Youth page of our website for more info.
📢 No new interlibrary loan requests at this time
📣 Due to the strong likelihood that UPS workers will strike, we will be suspending all new interlibrary loan requests effective immediately (July 5th 2023.)
We depend on UPS to supply materials between libraries. The strike will have a great impact on our ability to receive and return materials.
Updates on our interlibrary loan services will be shared in this newsletter as well as on our website.
Passport Services at the Library! ✈️
Make an appointment at the Juniata County Library to get or renew your passport!
Visit our website to learn more about this new service and how you can get a passport or renew your passport.
Passport agents: Vince Giordano, Christine May and Mercedes Berrier
Book of the week! – if you are going to read one book, give this one a try…
Crooked Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
(New adult fiction: historical, African American history, literary)
In a nutshell: Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Whitehead continues his boisterous, incisive saga of late-20th-century Harlem and of a furniture dealer barely keeping his criminal side at bay.
The adventures of entrepreneur, family man, and sometime mover of stolen goods Ray Carney, which began with Harlem Shuffle (2021), are carried from the Black Citadel's harried-but-hopeful 1960s of that book to the dismal-and-divided '70s shown here. In the first of three parts, it’s 1971, and Carney’s business is growing even amid the city’s Nixon-era doldrums and the rise of warring militant groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. Carney barely thinks about sliding back into his more illicit vocation until his teenage daughter, May, starts hankering to see the Jackson 5 perform at Madison Square Garden. And so he decides to look up an old contact named Munson, a seriously bent White NYPD officer and “accomplished fixer,” who agrees to get free “up close” seats for the concert if Carney will fence stolen jewelry stuffed in a paper bag. But the job carries far more physical peril than advertised, culminating in a long night’s journey into day with Carney getting beaten, robbed, and strong-armed into becoming Munson’s reluctant, mostly passive partner in the cop’s wanton rampage throughout the city.
In the second part, it’s 1973, and Pepper, Carney’s strong, silent confidant and all-purpose tough guy, is recruited to work security on the set of a blaxploitation epic whose female lead inexplicably goes missing. The third and final part takes place in the bicentennial year of 1976, the nadir of the city’s fiscal crisis, marked by widespread fires in vacant buildings in Harlem and elsewhere in New York’s poorer neighborhoods. When an 11-year-old boy is seriously injured by a seemingly random firebombing, Carney is moved to ask himself, “What kind of man torches a building with people inside?” He resolves to find out with Pepper’s help.
What recurs in each of these episodes are vivid depictions of hustlers of varied races and social strata, whether old-hand thieves, crass showbiz types, remorseless killers, or slick politicians on the take with the business elite. Whitehead’s gift for sudden, often grotesque eruptions of violence is omnipresent, so much so that you almost feel squeamish to recognize this book for the accomplished, streamlined, and darkly funny comedy of manners it is. Assuming Whitehead continues chronicling Ray Carney’s life and times, things should perk up, or amp up, for the 1980s.
Bottom line: It’s not just crime fiction at its craftiest, but shrewdly rendered social history.
Borrow the book: Crooked Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
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--Vince Giordano
Librarian and Director of the Juniata County Library.
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