Weds, 8 March Pop-Up Library About Town
Now that the weather is warming up, we are breaking out our Pop-Up Library and visiting a new neighborhood. This spring semester we are "popping-up" at Hunter's Chase every other Wednesday, starting March 8. From 3:00 - 4:00pm, we will be set-up in the center green at the entrance to Hunter's Chase apartments, prime placement for bus drop-off.
The Pop-Up Library was born from a partnership with Thomas County Public Schools, who supported the purchase through their L4GA Grant back in 2019 with the goal of reaching those who are a little more literacy-stricken where they are rather than waiting for them to come to us. This round bookshelf is easily transportable, simple to set-up and light to carry. Our iPads connect us directly to our PINE catalog and allow us to do practically everything we can do in the library out on the green. We curate a small selection across all age groups to fill up the shelves.
Near the end of 2021, the Thomasville City Schools system joined the Thomas County Public Schools in partnering with us in the PLAY Card Program. This program provides a public library card to all students enrolled within a public school system using their student number as their library card number. There are only two differences to this card than a normal library card: 1) it is fines free (that's right: fines free); and 2) it allows for only five (5) material check-outs at one time. This is an excellent program that has broken the barriers to literacy-stricken youth gaining access to library resources.
Since the beginning of 2022, we have targeted one lower-income neighborhood a semester to open the library to those youth who may not have the means or adult support to enriching their homes with words. The PLAY Card playing a huge role in easy youth literacy access. We are looking forward to another successful six-week visit this spring!
If you or someone you know lives in Hunter's Chase, spread the word that The Library Is Coming!
Programs for Adults
VITA Assisted Tax Filing
Tuesdays, Feb 7 - April 18. BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
Volunteers from the IRS's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program will be will be offering free basic tax return preparation to qualified individuals. These qualifications include:
-People who generally make $50,000 or less;
-Persons with disabilities; and
-Persons 65 years or older.
Appointments must be made via phone or in person with our Reference Desk. Call 229-225-5252 for more details.
Friends of the Library Used Book Sale
Every Tuesday, 10:00am - 5:00pm
Our Friends the the Library used book store is open every Tuesday, from 10am to 5pm. Here, you will find hardbacks, paperbacks, DVDs, magazines, puzzles and more. All softly used and in good condition. Nothing over $5.00. All proceeds are used to help fund library programs and materials.
Story Time: Toddlers + Tykes
Thursdays, 10:30am
Join us every week in the Children's Department for an hour of stories and fun! Enjoy a few great books, sing songs and recite rhymes designed to enhance the literacy of your child. Every Story Time is wrapped-up with a fun, simple art + craft project. An excellent space to meet others in the community!
LEGO Club
Thursdays, 4:00pm
Calling all kid LEGO masters and first-timers! Our LEGO group meets every week to create and build whatever they can imagine. A great place to meet and mingle with other children interested in 3D creation. We also offer larger LEGO bricks for those who may find the smaller bricks tasty. Intended for ages 4-11 years with their caregivers.
PROGRAMS AT OUR BRANCH LIBRARIES
Boston Library -
Quiddler Club
Every Tuesday, 2:00pm
Every Tuesday the Quiddler Club meets to socialize and enjoy a few rounds of the word-card game, Quiddler. The object of the game is to get points by combining the lettered cards in your hand and make words.
To join or have any questions answered, call Suzanne Moore at the Boston Library at 229-498-5101.
Coolidge Library -
Bingo (18+)
Tuesday, March 7, 2:30pm
Arts + Crafts for Kids: St. Patrick Edition
Wednesday, March 8, 4:30pm
Ochlocknee Library -
Arts + Crafts for Kids
March 6 - 9, Drop-In Activity
Activity this week: Thing 1 & Thing 2 bookmarks. Complete in the library or at home.
Pavo Library -
LEGO Play
March 6 - 9, Drop-In Activity
Book recommendations
Book that rethink our narrative about health and healing
Anne Boyer The Undying
In her 2019 memoir, Anne Boyer expertly weaves together her experience with cancer and her research on the industries and images that have arisen around illness. In prose that is both accessible and personable, as well as neatly divided into digestible chapters, Boyer charts a conversation between everyone from Aristides to Audre Lorde to Siddhartha Mukherjee, and cites sources ranging from prestigious medical journals to YouTube comments and Wikipedia pages. Boyer not only invokes the traditions we have developed for speaking of illness, but also investigates them—and then initiates her own tradition. Contrary to convention, Boyer insists that pain doesn’t destroy language. It changes it. And with this very book, Boyer develops a new language, demonstrating how it might become possible to talk about illness more fully, in all of its intricacy and incongruity.
Colson Whitehead Apex Hides the Hurt
This 2006 novel from Colson Whitehead is not always considered among his best, but don't exclude it just yet! The novel features a plot so odd it feels like a fable: a nomenclature consultant has been hired to rename a town in order to settle a dispute amongst the community leaders, who respectively represent old money gone stale, new money on the hunt for the next shiny thing, and a local political dynasty. Given this plot, it is no surprise that the novel considers the particular rites and references involved in any name. But it also dwells with profound effect on what happens when we paper over our wounds instead of confronting and caring for them. Like many of Whitehead’s novels, Apex Hides the Hurt has no interest in redemption. It tackles the long-term consequences of the structures, from racism to consumerism, that have harmed its characters, and traverses the uneasy path of navigating a world with our injuries visible and still bleeding.
Jesmyn Ward Men We Reaped
It has become a truism that “healing isn’t linear” a concept that Ward makes literal and also the subject of scrutiny in her 2013 memoir. Her reflections on the young Black men she has lost represents an utterly unique approach to narrating one’s own past, especially significant amid the current memoir boom. In alternating chapters, Ward moves forward in time from the 1970s and backward in time from 2004, desperate to make sense of the loss of her brother by approaching it from every angle. This structure prompts readers to see traces of the past in the present and of the present in the past. With heartbreaking honesty, Ward endeavors to show the tangled, traumatic reality of living with grief and of how healing can be strikingly nonlinear. Indeed, Ward reveals herself to be less healed than haunted, except in Ward’s framing, the haunting is itself a privilege, a reminder of her loved ones’ enduring presence. The memoir functions as an ode to these men’s lives, a critique of the systems that endangered them, and a testament to storytelling for its power to sustain connections.
Maddie Mortimer Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies
Maddie Mortimer narrates her novel from the points-of-view of a cancer patient named Lia, her husband, her daughter, her mother, and her actual cancer. In entangling these perspectives, Mortimer depicts with both candor and compassion what happens to our bodies, our minds, and our communities when we are sick. Making cancer a narrator itself, with surprising insight into and even sympathy toward Lia, unsettles our narrative expectations of healing—an unsettling that is also mirrored in the novel’s inventive form. Throughout, words take the shape of spirals, doves, and fireworks; they are scattered, bolded, and boxed on the page. In giving illness a voice and a shape, Mortimer creatively addresses a central question in all illness narratives: what language effectively represents the experience of being ill? Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies shows us how unexpected, unconventional representations best capture not just a dense and difficult experience, but also the myriad ripples it makes on the lives it touches.
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