🥇 Library Champion Newsletter | Mask on or off: It's your call here at the library 😷
Library Champion,
Starting this week, masks are not required while visiting the library for those who are fully vaccinated or medically exempt. For those who are not vaccinated, mask-wearing is recommended but not required. It's your call here at the library! Read more.
Make sure to visit us this summer and take part in our summer reading programs for all ages. Read more.
Here is one book I am reading and some books that I just bought for the library’s collection, now including a list of all titles purchased this week! 🆕
I FINALLY finished The Terror by Dan Simmons. Here is my review: TLDR: the book is depressing and too long.
👉 Find the book: Adult fiction (F SIM), eBook, eAudio.
👉 Find the DVD: DVD TER (25 cents for a 1-week rental)
A few years back I watched the TV show version of The Terror on AMC. The story goes like this: in the 1840s two British ships are looking for the northwest passage. They sail north but eventually get stuck in the ice. Nearly three years later they are still stuck in the ice, only now they are running low on food to eat and coal to heat them, men are coming down with scurvy, there are growing whispers of a mutiny, and a spirit in the form of a polar bear is tracking the men and killing them in unimaginable ways.
Soon after watching the show, I started reading the book. I always like to read the book and watch the show/movie. I got a few hundred pages into the book (its 960 pages long) and I lost interest. Between the character flashbacks, countless nautical terms, and the never-ending bleak storyline, I had a hard time pressing on. One of the captains sums it up well: life here is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. I put the book down and went on to read other books. I figured I would never return to the book and finish it.
Fast forward to last month. I picked the book up again and wanted to try finishing it this time. I had just read Barack Obama’s latest book (which is over 700 pages long) so I had some reading endurance in me. But as I continued reading The Terror, I kept coming back to this thought: this book is way too long.
Simmons does not skimp on the granular details of the misery these men endured for years. Between the medical details of their calamities due to scurvy and lead poising from the poorly made tins that contained their food, to the weather that is unimaginably cold (ranging between -50 and -80 degrees on any given day), there is basically no hope in this story. Hope can help carry us through hard times, knowing that something good will come of things. But this book gives readers no hope, and it was at least 300 pages longer than it needed to be.
One captain is brutally murdered by the spirit bear and the other is a drunk who abdicates his position while he sobers up. The men hold a carnival on New Years to try and raise their spirits, knowing that they will likely abandon ship soon and need a boost in morale. Only their hope is trampled as the bear attacks them during the carnival and the entire area catches on fire, killing a dozen men, including all but one of the doctors.
The captains decide to abandon the ships (one sunk and the other is being crushed by the ice) and trek 800 miles across ice and gravel in hopes of finding open leads in the ice so that they can reach open water and eventual rescue. But things just continue to get worse. The bear is following them and is somehow smart enough to lure them out in the open and decapitates them. The whispers of mutiny reach a boiling point as a few of the men break into the gun safe and run away. The rest of the men continue the trek on the ice and wither away both physically, mentally, and emotionally. I honestly don’t know how they mustered the courage to get up each day and carry on.
This horror story finally comes down to only one man surviving: the drunk captain. Only he never returns to England. He knows that his naval career would be over and he would live out his days in shame if the captain of a ship returned while his whole crew died. He decides to live out the rest of his days with the Eskimo people, marrying one of them and having a few kids. A rescue party eventually reaches his village, but he tells the village leader to tell the men looking for him that he is gone. End of story.
If you are interested in this story, I recommend watching the TV show. It’s 10 episodes and on Hulu. It’s much faster than the book. If you would rather read the book, be warned: you may think the story will never end.
Click here or on the image below to follow my reading on Goodreads.
Some books I bought today that you should borrow (now with a list included)
Night, Neon: Tales of Mystery and Suspense by Joyce Carol Oates
(Adult fiction | Mystery & Detective | Collections & Anthologies)
Nightmares is an even more apt term than usual for these stories, whose meanings are developed not by well-made plots but through flashbacks, reflections, or complications of their powerful opening tableaux. “Night, Neon,” the longest tale, supplements its presentation of a heroine who’s just learned that she’s pregnant with a systematic account of her relationships with abusive men that makes this news a decidedly mixed blessing. In “Curious,” an unrepentantly intellectual novelist who's asked “Where do you get your ideas?” recounts his obsession with a supermarket checkout girl. “Miss Golden Dreams 1949” is spoken in the spectral voice of a Marilyn Monroe clone offered for sale. The relationship the heroine of “Wanting” strikes up with an artist reaches a dead end that reveals that “wanting has doomed her.” “Parole Hearing, California Institution for Women, Chino Ca” provides a litany of more or less self-contradictory reasons why a member of the Manson family should be paroled on her 15th try. “Intimacy” shows a professor’s relationship with a menacing student becoming increasingly fraught without becoming increasingly well specified. The title character of “The Flagellant” constantly punishes himself for an unspeakable crime for which he cannot express remorse to his jailers. The caretaker of an ailing mother spirals out of control in “Vaping: A User’s Manual.” And in “Detour,” the story that seems to be the exception to the anti-plot rule, a woman forced to take a detour two miles from her home slips the traces of her humdrum life and sinks into a hallucinatory alternate reality that shakes her to the core before releasing her.
Don't miss these new releases!
- The maidens / Alex Michaelides
- The damage / Caitlin Wahrer
- Hairpin Bridge : a novel / Taylor Adams
- The killing hills / Chris Offutt
- Widespread panic : a novel / James Ellroy
- Notorious / Diana Palmer
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Book sale date!
Our next book sale will be July 13th, 15th, 16th, 17th! Pick and choose which books you want and fill up a bag of books for $5. We also have BOXES of DVDs for only $1!
All the details below...⬇️
Schedule 📅
--Tuesday July 13th 4:00 PM -> 7:00 PM (Friends of the Library Members Only. You can join then or now!)
--Wednesday July 14th Library Closed
--Thursday July 15th 9:00 AM -> 5:00 PM
--Friday July 16th 1:00 PM -> 7:00 PM
--Saturday July 16th 9:00 AM -> 3:00 PM
Membership forms are available on the Friends bulletin board at the Library or on the Library website: https://www.juniatalibrary.org/donate/friends-of-the-library
To get to the book sale, enter the front entrance of the library where you will see a check-in table and get bags for the sale. Then go down the stairs and have a blast!
As always, please spread the word to friends and relatives about the Friends of the Library, who provide wonderful support to our great Library!
You can make a donation to the library in under 2 minutes. Click here to do just that.
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Thank you for being a library champion. You make a difference each day!
--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 be 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.