🥇 Library Champion Newsletter #99 | Book sale, passports, and more! 👀
Library Champion,
👋 Welcome to our new subscribers! I am SO GLAD to have you aboard!
What's inside this issue ⤵️
🫶 Support that counts: presenting the library's annual report to the county commissioners.
✈️ Passport services: get a passport and take a trip!
🛜 AT&T and Verizon mobile hotspot update
📆 April book sale dates!
📖 Book of the week
Support that counts 🫶
Thank you Juniata County commissioners for your continued support!
See all of the news articles about us: https://www.juniatalibrary.org/about-the-library/press
Passport Services at the Library! ✈️
It's wonderful weather outside today. Get your passport and take a trip!
✍️ Make an appointment at the Juniata County Library to get or renew your passport!
🛂 Visit our website to learn more about this service and how you can get a passport or renew your current passport.
📚 Travel books: https://www.juniatalibrary.org/search?query=Travel+fodor
Borrow a mobile hotspot 🛜
We received notice this past Friday (03/01) that the organization loaning us the AT&T and Verizon hotspots will be discontinuing their service. Their next cycle starts in April and the hotspots will stop working sometime between now and then.
We have 31 T-Mobile hotspots that you can choose from. You can check and see if they have service where you will be using it by following this link: https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/coverage-map
You can request to borrow a T-Mobile hotspot by following this link: https://juniata.sparkpa.org/eg/opac/record/11909415?copy_offset=0;copy_limit=50
If you currently have an AT&T or Verizon hotspot and it stops working before your due date, please let us know and we can credit that time towards the next hotspot you borrow.
What is a mobile hotspot? It’s a portable device that provides a Wi-Fi internet connection. It’s perfect if you live in an area that can’t get broadband internet or if you don’t have a data plan on your cell phone. Hotspots are also great to have if you want to go on a trip and take the internet with you.
Hotspots will work with laptops, tablets, phones, TVs and most other devices that can connect to a Wi-Fi internet connection.
Mobile hotspots can be borrowed from the library for only $20 for 2-weeks, $30 for 4-weeks or $75 for 3 months!
Thanks to the Friends of the Library we were able to purchase 5 more hotspots, bringing our total to 31!
Next book sale: April 15-18 📆
The next book sale will be held Monday April 15 (9a-7p), Tuesday April 16 (9a-5p), Wednesday April 17 (9a-5p) and Thursday April 18 (9a-7p)
Fill a bag for $7 (bags provided at the door.) Choose from books for all ages, DVDs, music CDs, magazines and puzzles.
Only cash or check is accepted.
The book sale is located in the book sale room (lower level of the library), which is handicap accessible. Access is available from the main entrance of the library via steps or lower level parking (no steps.) Click here for directions to the library.
About the book sales
The Friends of the Library book and media sales occur 3-4 times a year. The Friends of the Juniata County Library appreciate the wonderful donations of books and media from the public. Donations may be brought to the front desk of the library during regular business hours. Your book/media donations are instrumental in funding many of the Juniata County Library's programs and services each year. These programs include but are not limited to summer reading for kids and adults, programs for babies and children, current technological devices, furniture, and much more.
📖 Book of the week! – if you are going to read one book, give this one a try…
American Spirits by Russell Banks
(New adult fiction: small town & rural, literary, political) ~ 240 pages
In a nutshell: Three stories unearth the bitterness and violence seething in a working-class American town.
These long narratives by the late Banks are all set in the northern New York village of Sam Dent that featured in The Sweet Hereafter (1991). But where that story dealt with a tragedy that affected the whole town, these explore the welter of pain that can afflict a single house.
In “Nowhere Man,” a feud between neighbors escalates when one of them finds himself threatened on social media. This is a community where guns are commonplace and Banks’ choice of victim is pointedly cruel. He also weaves in Trump, the Proud Boys, and home-grown militias, expanding the range of one of his recurring themes, toxic masculinity.
“Homeschooling” has a Hallmark-wholesome, Trump-friendly family adjusting to next-door neighbors who comprise white married lesbians and their four adopted Black children. When those kids suggest that all is not well in their household, the adults trade bitter words that lead to an awful outcome. Banks plants doubt about the virtue and veracity on both sides, fostering an ambiguity that challenges any facile finger-pointing.
In “Kidnapped,” the grandparents of a young man who lost his father to war and his mother to drugs open their door one evening to find two drug thugs looking for human leverage in a deal gone bad. This is a dark tale in which death is dealt out remorselessly, family ties are fatal, and a change of heart or a well-meant deed can turn virtue into complicity.
All these stories include ruminations on the passage of time, changes and damage in the landscape, and the values and aspirations sustained from generation to generation.
Bottom line: The tone in these passages is almost elegiac: hymns to a past when fewer wounds were self-inflicted.
Borrow the book: American Spirits by Russell Banks
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Thank you for being a library champion. You make a difference each dayNice to meet you!
--Vince Giordano
Librarian and Director of the Juniata County Library.
P.S.- You don't need to make an account or jump through any hoops to donate to the library and become a library champion. I wouldn't say this if it wasn't true. You can make this happen in less than a minute. Just click here.