Staff Picks

Spring is here! I always get a burst of energy when the seasons change, especially as we’re moving towards the warmer months, and it’s a good time to try and get caught up on all the chores that you let slide during rougher winter months.

 

The library may not seem like the most useful place when it comes to getting chores done, but we’re actually a terrific resource for any number of goals. Are you planning to do some gardening? Check out our terrific collection of gardening books, waiting for your perusal on the second floor; there’s also our seed library, where you can grab up to three seed packets per family, per week.

 

Going to do some home renovations? We’ve got a great selection of interior and domestic design books. Planning a trip? Our travel section is well-stocked with guides about places all around the world.

 

If you’re cleaning up around the house, why not put on a TV show in the background to keep you company? We’ve got plenty of old favorites to keep the quiet from getting to you. There’s also our excellent audiobook collection, if you want something more substantial to keep your ears busy while you work.

 

If all of this sounds a little too ambitious for you, relax; there are still plenty of great books and movies to get lost in, all waiting for your attention on the first and second floor. And I haven’t even mentioned all the exciting programs available to our patrons once summer reading kicks off. Rain or shine, it’s always a good day to visit the library.

 

 

I’m always looking for the next book to read. It’s an intuitive process for me; sometimes I’m sure I know what I’ll be reading three or four novels ahead, and sometimes, I’ll just grab something off the shelf when the whim catches me. I particularly enjoy the latter–I love waking up and finding myself fixated on some title I’d never thought of before.

 

It’s a good reason to work in a library. A couple weeks ago, I got it into my head that I should finally read Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. The recent movie adaptation directed by Emerald Fennell had put the book back in the news, and it’s one I’d wanted to get around to eventually–I’d been assigned it in high school, but couldn’t stand it as a teen, and I was curious to see if I’d better be able to appreciate the story as an adult.

I was, thankfully. I had a lot of fun revisiting Heights, although it is not, on the surface, a particularly “fun” novel; over the course of its three hundred plus pages, we read about physical and psychological abuse, rape, obsession, and misery, and nearly every major character dies young. But there’s a tremendous vitality and passion moving the story forward, an energy that makes it thrilling to read no matter how grim things get.

 

I would highly recommend Wuthering Heights to anyone, especially those who have seen the new movie and are curious about its source material. (From what I’ve heard, they make for very different experiences.) It’s an intense story about the awful things people do to one another when they’re trapped in the circumstances of their culture and birth, and, sadly, it doesn’t seem to have aged a day.

 

Happy New Year…

Not the Gregorian New Year (January 1st), the Chinese Lunar New Year (this year on Tuesday, February 16th) – by the way, Happy Year of the Fire Horse, or the pagan/Celtic New Year (Samhain/Halloween – October 31st-November 1st). A fun bit of trivia I learned while writing this post is that until 1752, the New Year was celebrated on March 25th (my birthday!), before shifting to January 1st. 🙂

[Read more…] about Happy Astrological New Year 2026: The Beginning of a New Cycle & the End of a Blog Series

Sometimes, Movies Are Better

 

In case you missed it, our latest Reader’s Circle book pick was The Club Dumas, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. It made for interesting reading, and we had some good talk about it at our Thursday night meeting. I found the book mildly disappointing, though, as its author introduced a number of compelling ideas but then failed to deliver on any of them.

 

Dumas was adapted into a movie in 1999: The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp. While it’s difficult to recommend given Polanski and Depp’s off-screen behavior, I found it much more enjoyable than the book–the movie is more focused, doing away with a number of go-nowhere subplots. It got me to thinking: the rule of thumb is that the book is always better than the movie that inspires it, but what about those odd cases where the opposite is true?

 

The most obvious example, at least from my experience, is Jaws. I grew up a fan of Steven Spielberg’s movie, and in high school, I decided to track down the source material, a novel by Peter Benchley. While the plots are largely similar (with one big exception), the novel is shallow and sordid; not the worst read in the world, but, outside of its premise, not a memorable one. The movie, on the other hand, is an out-right classic, with Spielberg taking the story and elevating it, first as a terrifying wildlife thriller, and then to something almost mythic.

 

“Elevation” may be the key word here, because I could say the same for another classic movie that improved on its source: The Godfather. Mario Puzo’s original novel is, like Benchley’s, a page-turner, but it’s not a particularly deep one, and some of the subplots (wisely-excised for the movie version) are distracting and borderline absurd. The Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation is more focused on the family drama, using the visceral thrills of crime and violence as spice in a drama about how a family born of immigrants found its own way to the American Dream

 

If you’d like to do your own comparisons, you can check out either book or movie (or both!) from the library. Meanwhile, what are some of your favorite adaptations? And have you ever tracked down the novel that inspired a beloved movie only to be disappointed?