Skip to main content

The Library is on STRIKE?!?!!

Luckily, their online offerings are still available, so I’m taking this opportunity to recharge the Kobo and download five exciting books free – well, I don’t know if they’re all exciting, but one is sure to be a winner.  Here’s what’s going on the Kobo tonight:

Two books by my high school classmate, Cory Doctorow, one fiction, one non-fiction:

Context

The Great Big Beautiful TomorrowContext

and

The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

 

Plus three food books:

Love in a Dish ...and Other Culinary Delights

Love in a Dish ...and Other Culinary Delights

A collection of classic food writing from MFK Fisher, the classic food writer herself, a foodie before there ever was such a thing, from the 1930s to the 1990s.  I have trouble reading “old writing”… the formal tone, the belaboured descriptions.  It all just FEELS dusty.  But I’m definitely going to give this a real try, because everybody who is anybody in food writing references her as an influence somewhere along the line.

 

Heirloom

Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer

By Tim Stark; I seem to remember reading this, but it was during a period where I was reading about nothing BUT food and this book blurs together with a whole bunch of others, including It’s a Long Road to a Tomato (loved it) and The $64 Tomato, a book I am doomed never to read again because I can never remember the $!% number in the title so I sit there searching randomly for “The $73 tomato?”  “The $86 tomato?” until I give up.  How did I find it just now to put in the linkie, you wonder???  I typed “The $ Tomato” into Amazon.  Clever Amazon.com!

The 100-Mile Diet

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating

Another one I definitely read, years ago, that was lost in the blur of foodie books.  And now, of course, both these trends have taken off and hopefully are just about over – the trend of eating more and more locally (and writing a book about it), to the point of ridiculousness… and the trend of doing “whatever it is” for a year (and writing a book about it). 

Please note that I don’t think eating locally is ridiculous!  But I recently read a nice article about ChocoSol, a Toronto-based chocolate company, that made the very good point that there are yummy things to eat even BEYOND that 100-mile radius, and the trick is finding ways to bring them in responsibly and convincing others to enjoy them in their highest-quality form, in moderation.  ChocoSol, for instance, brings its chocolate in only once a year, by boat, from Mexico.  This offers the lowest-footprint way of bringing the chocolate to Toronto, where they process it and distribute it in various forms.  Anyway, I don’t want to rant except to say that local eating really doesn’t go far enough… while at the same time, perhaps going a bit too far.  If you know what I mean.

Ooh – last-minute addition!

Allah, Liberty & LoveAllah, Liberty & Love:  The courage to reconcile faith and freedom.

By Irshad Manji, a lesbian Muslim (plus she’s Canadian, so I should probably just toss her a handful of hyphens and have her sort out the order in which she wishes to use these adjectives), who seems to think there is no problem reconciling Islam with her sexuality and a number of other things.  Should be interesting reading, though I prefer seeing her on video than reading the books.  Just lazy, I guess. 

image Anyway, grabbing all these books for the Kobo feels a little like being Mormon and building a food pantry against some kind of unspecified contingency which may never arrive. 

But having survived the garbage strike a couple of summers ago, I have little faith that this no-libraries thing will blow over quickly.  And if nobody is sitting at the front desks, there is a chance that there is nobody maintaining the website.  In which case, it’s better to check out the books now than take the chance on an epic fail further down the line.

If you homeschool, or just READ from time to time, do you have a plan to survive a library strike???

Comments

  1. Wow. I'm so sorry about the strike. I don't know what I would do without my library, and ours doesn't even have funds to buy new books this year. Ours had a choice between having a budget for new materials or to maintain positions and they chose to save jobs. I hope the strike is over quickly. In the meantime, maybe you could just hang out in your local bookstores. I know lots of people who will sit and read in the Barnes & Noble near us. Some forget it isn't a library and shush my kids. :o)

    Peace and Laughter!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Frankly, I'm just grateful that my fines aren't accruing right now :)

    Why not check out the Jewish Public Library at Lipa Green?

    ReplyDelete
  3. OMG -- I couldn't live without a library!! Even going to Japan with its insanely small English adult section will keep me from hyperventilating (for a bit anyways). I have decided to get some Kindles for our family for the year abroad and hope we will survive....

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I love your comments!

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You, here’s a

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful.  Three pages are included:  one page with two po

What do we tell our kids about Chabad and “Yechi”?

If I start by saying I really like Chabad, and adore the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, z"l, well... maybe you already know where I'm headed. Naomi Rivka has been asking lately what I think about Chabad.  She asks, in part, because she already knows how I feel.  She already knows I’m bothered, though to her, it’s mostly about “liking” and “not liking.”  I wish things were that simple. Our little neighbourhood in Israel has a significant Chabad presence, and Chabad conducts fairly significant outreach within the community.  Which sounds nice until you realize that this is a religious neighbourhood, closed on Shabbos, where some huge percentage of people are shomer mitzvos.  Sure, it’s mostly religious Zionist, and there are a range of observances, for sure, but we’re pretty much all religious here in some way or another. So at that point, this isn’t outreach but inreach .  Convincing people who are religious to be… what? A lot of Chabad’s efforts here are focused on kids, including a