Hello, Universe!

Youth Media Award season is a heady time for Librarians in Youth Services. We’re all trying to figure out what the best book will be, while waging our own mental campaigns for our favorites by thinking very compelling arguments at the selection committee. Like the Oscars, we wait all year to find out which books…
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The Anglophile’s Guide to (Bloody Brilliant) Historical Fiction

Dear Reader, there is nothing that brings me such unbridled joy as what I consider to be a richly-written, atmospheric historical fiction novel. I have never been one to wish for times past, because I am a modern lady who enjoys modern amenities such as public works systems, vaccinations, and air conditioning units. However, I…
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The Magic of Mushrooms

Mushrooms are the new superfood craze you may not have heard of yet. Though they’ve been used medicinally for thousands of years for things like boosting the immune system and reducing inflammation, they’re only now becoming popular in mainstream culture due to the immense research that’s been done to assess their health benefits. Tero Isokauppila’s Healing…
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The Tao of Another Now

Amazon released an original series adaptation of The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s classic depiction of a postwar world ruled by the Nazis and Japanese. Hearing this, I headed for the basement to track down my old copy, a paperback on the inside cover of which I had scrawled my name and…
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Republish or Perish

Back in 3rd grade, my best friend hipped me to the wonders of Bertrand Brinley’s novel The Mad Scientist’s Club, about a group of boys who float a mannequin over their town’s Founder’s Day celebration, construct a remote controlled “monster” in a local lake, and wreak further havoc with various other products of their tinkering…
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Cranky Kirkus

“It has come to this: werewolves on The Titanic.” Favorite first lines of novels make great discussion fodder, but book reviews rarely begin with sentences as memorable as that one, which led off a review of Claudia Gray’s Fateful in the curmudgeon of professional book review journals, Kirkus Reviews. Kirkus is so notoriously grouchy there…
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May It Carry On

“One of those could beat me,” said my son, Ray. I had just read an item from the morning paper declaring the Greenland shark to be the oldest living vertebrate species on Earth. Between bites of his breakfast, Ray peered into a fishbowl full of freshwater clams he was training up for the Most Unusual…
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Shirley

Readers' Services Assistant 785-843-3833 x 130 sbraunlich@lplks.org Nature Reveler, Social Justice Advocate, Book Club Leader, Readers' Advisor, Fan of Local Authors & Artists, Community Involvement, and Angelique Kidjo!…
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