Chill Out, New England

Liz Reed is the Adult and Information Services Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column in the June 26, 2018 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

We all know that one of the great benefits of living in New England is that we get to experience all the seasons. Our iconic foliage draws busloads of tourists every Autumn, we usually get to have a white winter holiday season, and our landscape becomes furiously and gloriously alive every Spring. As a result, our New England summers can feel all too brief, and many residents look forward to summer all the rest of the year.

 While we’re busy bundling up for the other seasons though, we can sometimes forget just how hot and humid our New England summers can be. Heat waves seem to surprise us because they don’t happen very often in the course of a year - remember that stretch of 90+ degree heat a few weeks ago? Brutal, right? And no wonder we feel this way: in the course of June 2018 we went from chilly Spring temperatures in the 40s to blazing 92F, according to AccuWeather.com. That’s a pretty big difference, especially after what seemed like a prolonged winter.

First, You Take a Swamp Tour

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the July 19, 2018 edition of the Norwood 
Transcript and Bulletin.

In The World on a Plate (2014), Mina Holland describes 40 world cuisines and the “stories behind them.” Reading her book, you travel across Europe and down through the Middle East, east to Asia and south to Africa. She ends the book with the “melting pots” of the Americas: the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese influences in South America and the French, Polish, Germany, African and Asian inspirations to the north.

City Girl, Country Girl

Lydia Sampson is the Technical Services Department Head at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column in the July 12, 2018 edition of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

As a kid I dreamed of living in the Big City. On weekends my mom and I drove into Boston from the suburbs to go shopping at the iconic Filene’s Basement. I got such a thrill out of walking through the scary “Combat Zone,” past shops and restaurants in Chinatown, and arriving at “The Basement,” where we shielded each other and tried on clothes in the aisles, and I learned math by figuring out the “automatic markdowns.” The variety of different people in the city fascinated me and I longed to live among them some day.

YA Books - Are They Really for Teens or Adults?

Kate Tigue is a children’s librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read Kate’s column in the July 5, 2018 issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

One of my favorite responsibilities as a youth services librarian is choosing new young adult books to purchase for the library’s expanding collection.  Young adult books (or YA as we say in the library world) is one of the most well-known and fastest growing literary genres in this decade.  Most people learn about young adult books through the popular trend of adapting their plots for the silver screen. Recent films like Ready Player One, The Hunger Games trilogy, and The Fault in Our Stars have turned public interest to the books these movies are based and sparked adult interest in books intended for adolescents.