The School for My Girl

Read Charlotte Canelli's column in the October 26, 2012 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin or listen to the podcast on SoundCloud. Podcasts are archived on the Voices from the Library page of the library website.

                I’ll never forget the moment I decided to let my daughter drop out of school.  That sounds a bit shocking, I know, but the reality was that I needed to rescue her from failure in the traditional school setting and it was the only idea we had.

                It was 1994.  Ciara was ten years old and she was in the fourth grade.  It was the evening of her first day back in the classroom after the Christmas holiday vacation and the two of us were at dinner together in her favorite Chinese restaurant.  I can remember vividly where we sat and how helpless I felt when we discussed how uncomfortable she was in school, how hard math was, how much she felt like an utter failure.  My child’s self-esteem was suffering, she was miserable and she was not learning in that environment. 

Agatha's Express

Read Charlotte Canelli's column in the October 19, 2012 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin or listen to the podcast on SoundCloud. Podcasts are archived on the Voices from the Library page of the library website.

On the evening of Friday, December 3, 1926, Agatha Christie disappeared. At the time, she was the well-known author of “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, her seventh mystery. Her car was found abandoned several hours after she had announced that she “was going for a drive.” She left several notes; in one to local authorities, she declared that she feared for her life. In another, to a relative of her husband, she stated that she was going on a vacation. Her friends and fans were very confused and they speculated that she might have committed suicide. A local lake, one in which one of the characters in her novels had drowned, was dredged. 15,000 volunteers searched for Ms. Christie high and low.

Although Agatha’s mother had died months before, and admittedly Agatha was suffering from that loss, the story that emerged was that she was actually grief stricken over a very blatant affair that her husband was having. In the end, Agatha might have wanted to publicly embarrass her husband and at the same time escape the humiliation caused by his affair. In any event, husband Archie Christie was forced to travel eleven days after her disappearance to the Old Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Yorkshire, England. His mission? To identify Agatha, a resort guest and an identical match who was refusing to admit she was the one and only Ms. Christie. Or so the mystery goes.

Twenty Five Years of Discussing Books

Margot Sullivan is a part-time reader's advisory and reference librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column in the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin this week or listen to the podcast on SoundCloud. Podcasts are archived on the Voices from the Library page of the library website.

When I came on board the Morrill Memorial Library as a fulltime staff member the first thing I wanted to do was to start a book discussion group! Little did I know that twenty five years later the “discussing” and pondering of books with much laughter thrown in would still be as rewarding and enjoyable as those first tentative years. I think we started off with 8-10 “regulars” and now we often have 20-25 people attending in the morning and 10-15 in the evening.

Defending the Art of Hoarding

Read Charlotte Canelli's column in the October 5, 2012 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin or listen to the podcast on SoundCloud. Podcasts are archived on the Voices from the Library page of the library website.
From the Library October 5, 2012: In Defense of Hoarding read and written by Charlotte Canelli

Several months ago we moved to Norwood and in the process I came across a lone, small bag that contained a book. It was something that I had meant to go into a donation bin years ago but it never got there. Sadly and forlornly, the book sat in a corner of my basement for several years in a home I owned before I remarried. We sold that house and the book then founds its way, undiscovered, to our garage in Norfolk and remained there until a few months ago. It never made it to a donation bin, of course, but got stuck in my “stuff.”