How Does Your Garden Grow?
I’ve been very slowly redesigning my front garden and planning where I want to put some fruit trees. Several things are helping me through this process: my grandmother and mother’s advice, my garden journal packed with notes and observations from the past few years, and lots and lots of books on gardening in general and garden design in particular. I can’t provide you with a grandmother or a pre-filled garden journal, but I can share the books that I’ve found most helpful in my garden design process.
Women’s Voices: Great Audiobooks Read by Their Authors
Those of us who spend lots of time commuting or on long walks, or who enjoy listening to books while we’re engaged with chores or stationary hobbies can attest that getting lost in an audiobook is easy to do, but it’s a real bummer when you don’t vibe with the narrator. Sometimes the voice gets on your nerves, sometimes you don’t feel like the tone of the narrator matches up with who you imagine characters to be, and sometimes you don’t really know what’s bothering you about it, but a voice just rubs you the wrong way. One (almost) sure-fire way I’ve found around this problem is in listening to memoirs.
New Locally Produced Title: Little Pennsylvania
LBPH is proud to a share a new locally produced title available for loan or download from BARD. Little Pennsylvania was narrated by volunteer Sandy Olanyk and produced and edited … Continued
Three Fairy Tales to Read After You Watch Beauty and the Beast
Did you see the Beauty and the Beast live action film yet? I recently did, and it made me think of all the fairy tale retellings that are published and made. Fairy tales were first told to teach children lessons; it wasn’t until Disney’s series of animated films like Snow White and Cinderella that they became more like the stories we see and hear today. That hasn’t stopped people from retelling them in a variety of ways. Here are three recent retellings that you may find interesting if you love Beauty and the Beast.
New Locally Produced Title: Speaking Pittsburghese
LBPH is proud to a share a new locally produced title available for loan or download from BARD. Speaking Pittsburghese: The Story of a Dialect was narrated by volunteer Thelma … Continued
Celebrate Reading with the Reading Warriors!
Every day Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (CLP) staff work to empower teens to be builders of their own future by connecting them to mentors, resources and opportunities that reflect their interests. This school year, CLP is thrilled to be collaborating with Neighborhood Learning Alliance (NLA) and its Reading Warriors program in which high school students act as reading mentors for elementary school children.
New Locally Produced Title: The Train to Lulu’s
LBPH is proud to a share a new locally produced title available for loan or download from BARD. The Train to Lulu’s was completed in collaboration with Obama Academy, with narration … Continued
Best of BARD: March 2017
“Life comes at you fast”, Ferris Bueller once warned us, but he may have just as well been speaking about King James Patterson’s book releases. When he comes at us … Continued
Novels and Memoirs Told in Poetry
When most people think of poetry, they think of rhyming lines broken into stanzas that go on for about a page or so. Rarely do they think of the many novels, memoirs, and folktales told entirely in verse, whether it be formal (i.e. Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter) or free. These are often great places to start for those who find poetry intimidating or difficult to understand, as I once did.
How Bad Feminist Inspired My Writing
Recently, I finished reading Roxane Gay’s memoir, Bad Feminist, and I really enjoyed it. The memoir was funny and relatable. One example of this is when Gay mentions the fact that she feels that she’s a bad feminist because she loves rap music. Gay mentioned this a few times in the book, and I was thinking “Me too!”