#Kingsbridge Library

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

Most people don’t pay too much attention to this creature who hangs out at the service desk. But recently, it was greeted by a child who said, “What are YOU doing here, Mr. Hedgehog?”

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

FYI, if you have a library card (and if you don't, get one ASAP!) check your library's website for databases and other resources that are available FOR FREE for library members. For example, you can browse the New York Public Library's databases (many of which are available from anywhere with a NYPL library card number and PIN) here:

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

[barbarawar]

9 Books for 2025!

Tagged by @cdyssey to share 9 books I plan to read in 2025! (thank you kindly <3)

(I have 67 books in my physical TBR and don't generally plan my reading because I never stick to reading plans so take these with a pile of salt)

Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory - I've had the Norton Critical Edition sitting on my shelf for a little over a year now because it's in Middle English, a thousand pages, and I'm intimidated. But I'm totally gonna start it tomorrow. Hopefully.

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel - Alison Bechdel's memoir about her dad was one of my absolute favorite reads last year and I just got my hands on this one, I'm super excited to read it.

A Ilíada (The Iliad) by Homer (tr. Leonardo Antunes) - Just got my hands on this and I've never read the Iliad, I really like a lot of this translator's work so I wanted this edition in particular.

"Caramba"/"A la vache!" by Getúlio Antero de Deus Júnior - this is a self-published bilingual (Portuguese/French) book of poetry that I did not win in a contest because I couldn't partake but the guy that won it didn't know what to do with it and I'm trying to get good at French, so I bemoaned not getting it and he gave it to me.

Une Femme m'Apparut (A Woman Appeared to Me) by Renée Vivien - I'm hoping to read this close to the end of the year and actually understand it.

Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands) by Euclides da Cunha - it's a non-fiction book written by a reporter about the War of Canudos, it's best known internationally for having inspired The War at the End of the World, I believe. I think I'm gonna love it but I've also heard that it has a lot of uninteresting extraneous stuff so I've been putting it off.

William Shakespeare - I have the Wordsworth Complete Works edition that I'd love to finish this year, but if I read a play a month I'm happy with that (I've only read Macbeth so far and that was last year).

Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelarie - I was reading an edition in French and a translation in Portuguese in tandem and I need to finish that (I borrowed them from the library, didn't finish, accumulated a lot of fees I was thankfully able to pay by donating a book I hated, anyway I need to borrow it again). I'm gonna be so good at French by the end of this year. Please.

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follet - Honestly this is a punishment for buying the whole Kingsbridge series before I read the first one (The Pillars of the Earth) because I was so sure I was gonna love it. I have to finish this, I can't take it anymore. At least it doesn't seem as bad as A Column of Fire and Ken Follet seems to have learned about fade to black if not that rape scenes are unneeded.

Tagging @lonely-night @elssbethtascioni @royalarmyofoz @sapphicstaring @aquila1nz

[birbwell]

Tell us about different monastery burning motifs! Would be interesting to hear how each of them work narratively

hi! this was mostly explored when @st-vesta and I were yelling incoherently about it. I also don't have a very good grasp on The Name of the Rose as I've only watched the show. tbh I'm really only confident of my interpretation of PotE SO WITH THAT IN MIND

[SPOILERS FOR THE NAME OF THE ROSE, THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH AND PENTIMENT]

Right from the get-go their burnings are very different in when they come into the narrative. It comes very early on in Pillars of the Earth, with Kingsbridge Cathedral burning down right near the start. It's the force that drives the plot. Pentiment's Kiersau Abbey goes up in flames in the end of the second act as a culmination of the long-standing tensions over the course of five (?) years. The Name of the Rose ends its story with the burning of its mountain monastery.

How do they happen? Till the last second, Kingsbridge's fate was kinda just strung on a line of bad luck and split-second decisions. A forest boy named Jack tags along with a mason's family, becomes refugees of a burgeoning civil war, and ends up in Kingsbridge. He gets the idea to burn down the cathedral to give the kindly mason a job, and isn't even fully sure of his decision as he lights the vault boards on fire. He’s just a child. 

And yet.

Fire is a catalyst. As much as it is a catastrophe, it also presents three groups of people all fucked by the hellscape of 12th century England with an opportunity to build something brighter. Aliena’s family and earldom taken by the Anarchy, Philip and his languishing priory, and Jack, coming from the fringes of society all working together to pull their futures out of the ashes of the cathedral… Kingsbridge and its town start thriving again. 

(Fire is very much a motif in PotE. Someone as powerless as Jack using this volatile force of nature to bring down something as grand and sacred and built-to-last as a stone church! The Church controlling fire to produce a ‘miracle’ and restore faith in the institution! Fire as Hell, the only thing that has ever scared William Hamleigh! Fire as hope, Philip treading the aftermath and watching the sun rise with Tom!! I;m very ill)

Kiersau and Tassing, on the other hand, have been fostering tensions that would eventually destroy the monastery. It is the powder keg’s inevitable explosion. Neither the village nor the abbey are willing to back down, so it culminates in a situation where one or the other caves in. Nobody has been having a Good Time for a Long Time. Especially not Claus. In his grief, he walks into the library and sets it on fire.

Fire is an answer. It is a terrible, terrible night. We are told that the Benedictines scattered to the wind. We don’t get to see the immediate aftermath, but does it matter? Magdalene explores the abbey and it is still the same derelict cathedral from years ago. She wasn’t there to witness it, but there its soot-stained carcass stands as a reminder of tragedy. Some saw it as a victory, certainly- the humble villagers triumphing over their Benedictine landowners. Things grew from it, though- Wojslav and Matilda find their new chapter of life here, Mathieu and Illuminata find new, loftier prospects outside of Tassing, and Andreas finds a way out of an unhappy life.

The mountain monastery in The Name of the Rose has a long-kept secret, and attempts to unearth it are met with death. It goes up in flames after a week of murders as a last-ditch effort by Jorge to destroy its library and bury its secret for good.

Fire is the end. No matter how grand and complex the library labyrinth was, it would have never held up against fire. William and Adso didn’t succeed. They couldn’t have saved the library and they couldn’t stop the deaths. Jorge did what he set out to do! The elusive Finis Africae is still shrouded in mystery and anyone who knew of the contents is dead! The monks disband and William comes out of it disillusioned. 

TBH, all three of them make use of monastery burnings to destroy some hidden truth or secret. The history of Tassing? Records largely in flames, and even given to distortion, since we, the player, are able to interpret that segment! The truth about the White Ship? Gone with Prior James’ bones! And Finis Africae. Fire, if anything, can hide and rewrite. 

TL;DR: fire do many thangs and pyromaniacs everywhere are right.

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

Hi, everyone. YA librarian (and YA Lit fan) chiming in!

I remember going to the young adult section of my local public library in the 1970s. That’s where you could go to find authors like Judy Blume, Robert Cormier, Richard Peck, Norma Klein, Norma Fox Mazer, M.E. Kerr, William Sleator, S.E. Hinton, Paul Zindel, Lois Duncan, and many more. If we’re going to say that YA as a “genre” was invented at any time, I’m going to say that it took place in the 1970s. Here’s a list of YA books that came out during that time, if you’d like to explore more titles and authors.

YA Lit has definitely gone through many booms in the decades since then, where one book became a huge hit (like Twilight or The Hunger Games), and then there was suddenly an explosion of books in that same genre.

The publication of Harry Potter was unique in my experience as a librarian because it’s the only time in my experience at NYPL that I remember a book being ordered for our CR, YA, and AD departments all at once. The Harry Potter series is still ordered for our children’s & young adult collections today, although you’re more likely to find copies on the shelf in the Children’s Room.

So, like, the thing you have to understand is that prior to the mid-2000s, the "Young Adult" genre as we now know it didn't exist. The expectation was that you would graduate to the adult aisle of the book store at, like, 13-14. This worked because the only people still reading long form novels into their teens were precocious bookworms who were better read than their parents.

Harry Potter changed all this. The success of the Harry Potter books convinced the publishing industry that selling full length novels to normie children was a business model. The thing about the Harry Potter books, though, is that at least for the early books, the target audience was a bit younger than what we think of as the YA demographic; tweens, rather than teens. Now, the publishing very much wanted to keep all these normie kids buying books into their teens and beyond, but the previous model of treating teens as functionally adults for marketing purposes would not work; there was simply no way that normie parents were going to let their normie kids read fully adult novels where the characters, like, do drugs or have unprotected sex and stuff. So, in order to be allowed to market to the teen demographic, the YA genre was created.

However, teens have an inherent interest in reading about sex and violence and drugs, and so authors who are able to incorporate these kinds of themes into their YA novels in a discrete way such that it flies under the radar of the moral guardians are met with success. But this is a precarious tightrope to walk. Not enough "mature" themes and the teens will loose interest, to much or to blatant and the teens won't be allowed to read it. And so, it should come as no surprise, that the first person to successfully navigate this tight rope was a Mormon housewife with a vampire fetish.

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

Looking for a book that’s good enough to eat?

Check out Bake Me a Cat by Kim-Joy!

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

Hi, everyone, and WELCOME BACK!

The Kingsbridge Library social media accounts have now returned from our much-too-long hiatus. Also, if you'd like to follow our Facebook account, you can do that right here!

In case you're wondering what we've been doing over the last several months, here are some highlights from our programs, displays, and outreach visits to our local and not-so-local schools!

Stay tuned for many more highlights, coming SOON!!!

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

This is great book, but we should also give a very special shout-out to another of Gauld's collections, Revenge of the Librarians!!!

Comic Book Saturday

I’ve read a bunch of compilations or collections by Instagram comic creators recently. This is sorta like that, but retro, since these are cartoons/comics that have been published in print.

Tom Gauld is a cartoonist for the New York Times Magazine as well as the Guardian and this particular collection is of cartoons done for the Guardian (for those that don’t know, it’s a paper in Britain. He has a weekly cartoon in the Saturday Review section). His humor is definitely unique (and at times dark), but, it can also be super observational (like a lot of the Instagram ones) and most of it was super super hilarious (or if not hilarious at least very very pointed). It was a fun read.

You may like this book If you Liked: Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton, Cyanide and Happiness by Kris Wilson, or Inappropriate by Gabrielle Bell

You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack by Tom Gauld

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

While we prefer that you not put stickers on library books, we DO appreciate the sentiment!

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

Are you ready for some PARANORMAL ACTIVITY? Check out our latest display, featuring:

Jackaby by William Ritter

The Agony House by Cherie Priest

We Don't Swim Here by Vincent Tirado

Howl by Shaun David Hutchinson

The Woods by R.L. Toalson

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

What Do Library Staff Do All Day?

We prepare Take-Home Kits!

Our latest Teen Take-Home Kit, Make Your Own Zine, has been one of our most popular kits lately, and we’ve been making more to keep up with the demand! Here is a sample kit, plus a big tote filled with all of the components that go inside these kits. Each kit includes zine templates and instructions, writing / drawing tools, an assortment of colorful paper, pages from deleted books, and a glue stick.

You can learn all about the Teen Zine Challenge on the New York Public Library website!

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

There’s our Protect the Freedom to Read (banned and challenged books) display on the left. There’s our Black History Month display on the right. But what’s the new display in between them?

It’s a display of the latest book in NYPL’s Teen Banned Book Club series! It's in the perfect spot because it's a graphic format memoir about civil rights icon and congressman John Lewis and also because this book has been challenged.

You can pick up a free copy of Run: Book One as well a discussion guide from our display, while supplies last!

BTW, if you're not able to pick up one of our free copies of this book, you can find a copy through the NYPL catalog, and you can also access ebook copies of the books in our Teen Banned Book Club series through Libby!

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

What Do Library Staff Do All Day?

Sometimes we weed books and other items!

We weed our collections using different criteria including shelf space, circulation stats, and condition. Here are examples of two items that we weeded for poor condition yesterday — the book for (a LOT of) water damage and the DVD for being so scratched up that it would no longer play correctly.

While we're on the subject, please please PLEASE remember to take good care of items that you check out from the library. When items are damaged, we need to weed them from our collections. Unfortunately, we can't always afford to replace them until we have enough money in our budget ... and if the damaged items are out of print, then we can't replace them at all!

📚☹️💽

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

Here are some highlights from yesterday’s Button Making For Kids program!

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

Because sometimes, we ALL need a pick-me-up!

[WOO HOO! YOU’RE DOING GREAT! By Sandra Boynton]

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

We found this artwork in our scrap paper box recently.

And hey, NYPL ❤️ you, too!