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For the past five years or so, I have been reading holiday-themed books to help put me in the mood for the upcoming holiday season. There is something about reading those delightful books that make me want to drink copious amounts of hot chocolate, eat sugar cookies, and wear ridiculous sweaters. What can I say? I am a walking advertisement for a Hallmark movie. If you too want to feel the joy of the holidays through the written word, here are a few titles that are available for check out at A. K. Smiley Public Library. Warning: may induce holiday cheer!

The first book on our holiday tour is “A Holly Jolly Diwali” by Sonya Lilli. Niki Randhawa is a data analyst and is known for being practical and strategic until she is unexpectedly laid off and finds herself questioning everything. Newly unemployed, Niki makes a spur of the moment decision and goes to Mumbai, India for a friend’s wedding, just in time to celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights, where she meets Sameer Mukherji. Could this be love or is Niki caught up in the holiday spirit of Diwali?

The next book on our holiday tour is “The Matzah Ball” by Jean Meltzer. Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt loves Christmas. She loves it so much that she writes Christmas romance novels, which isn’t a bad thing, except that she is Jewish and has hidden her career from her family for years. Trying to find inspiration for a new novel, a Hanukkah romance, she attends a music festival, The Matzah Ball, where she finds more than inspiration: she finds love from the past and love in Hanukkah.

The last book on our holiday tour is “A Magical New York Christmas” by Anita Hughes. It’s Christmas week in New York City at the infamous Plaza Hotel and journalist Sabrina Post will be staying there as part of her latest writing assignment, ghost writing for a famous art dealer and former employee of the Plaza Hotel. Her week is going as one would expect it to, perfect, until she meets another guest staying at the hotel, Ian Westing, a Brit who may or may not related to the British aristocracy. Ian is also under the guise that Sabrina is someone she isn’t. Will love prevail against the case of mistaken identities? Anything is possible at The Plaza Hotel at Christmas time.

Dash on down to A. K. Smiley Public Library to check out these festive reads and many more.

With the holidays drawing near, it’s the perfect time to create handmade gifts. Smiley Library has a large crafting collection suitable for all skill levels and interests. Our books will be sure to spark ideas for those who appreciate quilting, jewelry making, sewing, rock painting, origami, paper craft, embroidery, and so many other endeavors. Adding a personal touch to your gifts is fun, thoughtful, and one-of-a-kind.

I love the idea of enjoying the outdoors while collecting supplies for a crafting creation. “52 Nature Craft Projects” by Barbora Kurcova showcases designs using nature’s beauty. Instead of buying store-bought wrapping paper, scout out acorns and fir branches, dip them into paint and press their shapes onto brown paper. Tie it up with a pretty ribbon for a unique gift wrap. If you’re looking for a beautiful autumn present, try the Conker Wreath project, made of acorns, pine cones, and foraged fall treasures. The Twig Letter project, which details how to bend twigs into a chosen letter, creates a striking and personalized initial to hang on a door or wall. If you decide to head out to the San Bernardino National Forest, check with the local ranger station first to see what rules apply for collecting forest items, such as pine cones or greenery. A permit may be required. Other outdoor places to find supplies may be Christmas tree lots or perhaps, even your own backyard. Kurcova’s book is filled with projects that are enjoyable, natural, and best of all simple.

“Mini Amigurumi Animals: 26 Tiny Creatures to Crochet” by Sarah Abbondio is perfect for crochet fans who have a little leftover yarn they need to use. These cute creatures will be great toppers for presents, tree ornaments, or additions to a key ring. Clear instructions and patterns are provided. Although the book is written in UK crochet terms, Abbondio provides equivalent terms for those in the U.S. With so many different animals to choose from, you’ll be sure to find a favorite or two. Make a whole troop of monkeys, a skulk of foxes, a tower of giraffes, or a scurry of squirrels.

For those with a newborn or infant in their lives, “One-Stitch Baby Knits: 22 Easy Patterns for Adorable Garments and Accessories Using Garter Stitch” by Val Pierce will help you create something truly special. Pierce takes you step-by-step through each project, incorporating color pictures and skill level ratings so you know which project to tackle first. The Striped Yoke Cardigan and Sleepy Cow Hat and Drawstring Mittens are darling.

On order and available for checkout soon, knitters will also enjoy “Knit Hats with Woolly Wormhead: Styles for the Whole Family” by Woolly Wormhead. Her innovative hats have such a fun sense of fashion and flair. This is definitely one to look out for.

Don’t worry if you’re brand new to a certain craft; just find something that interests you and begin. If all else fails, you can always strive to get your project into a book like “CraftFail: When Homemade Goes Terribly Wrong” by Heather Mann.

For my first needle felting project, I tried sculpting a bee and for some reason, it came out looking like it had a head of short spiky hair. Basically, it had a “buzz cut,” which in retrospect is quite the appropriate hairdo for a bee.

The Redlands Adult Literacy Program recently published its fourth volume of Our Stories, A Collection of Writings, composed of writings from adult learners enrolled in the Redlands Adult Literacy program. This year’s anthology is especially significant because many of the stories were written by adult learners who worked with their tutors remotely during the pandemic. Diane Shimota, Adult Literacy Coordinator, shared: “The community can celebrate the dedication of tutors and learners who prioritized writing during this difficult year. The anthology is filled with heart-felt and powerful stories, poems, and letters. The commitment to literacy expressed by each participant in the literacy program is evidence of the learners’ resilience.”

The anthology includes learners’ stories of overcoming challenges in their lives, including taking the first step to ask for help with reading and writing, choosing to leave home for a better life, or supporting relatives suffering from the Coronavirus. Manuela Ballesteros described her experiences of the past year in How the Pandemic Affected Me, sharing, “Fear and panic can paralyze you at any time and in any circumstance.” In her story, My Experiences During COVID-19, Maribel Mejia shared her experience as the mother of four children who spent the past year learning remotely from home. “It was stressful for everyone, but I am glad my kids were able to manage this situation and help each other with assignments. Two of my kids play the trumpet; you can imagine how noisy it was, but my other kids didn’t complain too much… they knew how important it was for their brothers to play an instrument.”

Personal stories highlight the authors’ transformative experiences or personal connections to people in their lives. Some learners shared their dreams for the future, their interests, or their important memories. In The Story of “Smallpox,” Yanhong Zhou shared the poignant story of her son’s love for his pet frog, a story that will touch the heart of any parent whose son has experienced love and loss of a pet.

Stories in this collection reflect the wide range of writing levels of adults in the literacy program. Each author worked diligently through the writing process with the assistance of a volunteer tutor. By working with their tutors, learners develop vital literacy skills.

Our Stories, A Collection of Writings, Volumes 1 through 4 are available for checkout at A.K. Smiley Public Library. Additionally, many of the authors who submitted writings for the anthology accepted an invitation to read their stories on videotape and share them with the Redlands community. These stories will be available for viewing soon on the literacy webpage, www.akspl.org/literacy.

Adult learners, their tutors, and the community can celebrate when an adult learner reads their first book or newspaper article, attends a computer class and sends their first email, or writes a letter or story that expresses their hopes and dreams. These literacy skills enable adult learners to step forward to achieve new successes and change their own and their families’ lives. We are grateful for the continued support of the community, the city council, the Library, and the volunteers who make adult literacy, and now family literacy, available in Redlands.

If you would like to volunteer with the Redlands Adult Literacy Program, please contact Diane Shimota, Adult Literacy Coordinator, at (909)798-7565 ext. 4138 or email literacy@akspl.org. You can learn more about the adult literacy program by attending the next volunteer tutor orientation scheduled for January 2022.  Please contact Diane for more information.

If you know of someone who needs help in reading and writing, please encourage them to take the first step in changing their life by contacting the Redlands Adult Literacy Program. Tutoring is free and confidential.

Halloween has arrived, so have you been scared enough yet? All over town, folks have decorated their yards with extremely scary, spine-tingling scenes which may yield a scream or two! Let me take this opportunity to give you a good, old-fashioned fright with some scary book recommendations for your young readers!

First on our recommended list is “The Doll in the Hall and Other Scary Stories” by Max Brallier, the first volume in the series of “Mister Shivers.” This book will have your young reader turn page after page to get to the end of each of the spine tingling tales.  Will your young reader be able to finish all five of these scary stories before dark?! Written for younger readers with large print and pictures interspersed throughout the book, this spooky book may need to be read over and over again!

The second chilling book recommendation for your youngster is “Attack of the Vampire Weenies and Other Warped and Creepy Tales” written by David Lubar. This foreboding book has not five, not 10, not even 20, but 35 terrifying tales to read! Short, but not sweet, stories of creepiness and eye-rolling adventures that will deepen the trance your young reader will be under as they navigate through each tale. Let us know which tale scares you the most!

Our next suggestion for a day or night of frights is part of the “Eerie Elementary” series by Jack Chabert, “The School is Alive.” Were you a school monitor when you were in elementary school? I remember being able to wear the important vest to signify that I was the monitor for the day! In our featured, hair-raising book list, this title will most likely end up on top! Let Sam and his friends help you decide if his school is really alive! Then when your youngster arrives at their school on Monday, they can decide if their school could be alive as well?!

You’re not afraid of a few zombies walking around town…are (say “are” for 10 seconds) you? When is the last time your sleepover had a zombies invasion? In “The Zombie Chasers” Zack and his buddies found out the hard way how to eliminate the zombie attack: with a little brain power and with his werewolf buddy assisting, maybe the sleepover can resume tomorrow night? This unnerving story will elicit a few giggles throughout the pages, intermingled with a lot of goosebumps!

Speaking of a book giving you goosebumps, you’ll need to come right over to the library and check out ”Only If you Dare, 13 Stories of Darkness and Doom” by Josh Allen. This book has 13, nightmare-bringing stories for your youngster to read and get chilled to the bone!  Let us know which one of these 13 tales keep lurking in your brain after you have read each and every evil tale!

Have a safe and fun Halloween!

Alarm bells are sounded daily concerning our environment: we are bombarded with disturbing news topics such as climate change bringing about hotter temperatures and ‘extreme heat events;’ increased wildfires; increased drought; warming, rising oceans; more severe storms; loss of species; pollinator decline; lack of nutritious foods; increased health risks; poverty and displacement; and so much more (from United Nations, www.un.org). It can be a lot to take in, so we tend to tune out much of it. When we do think about the challenges we are charged with as caretakers for our planet, we are concerned, but we’re not sure what we can do. . . Someone else will figure it out.

Dara McAnulty would ask each of us, however, to be that someone else and to attempt to find at least some small way to aid in ‘figuring it out.’ He too is burdened with the static of the world around us, but to a degree many of us have not experienced. Dara is an Irish teenager, environmental activist, and author of Diary of a Young Naturalist, who also happens to be on the autism spectrum. He shares with us his gift of a unique perspective–reminding us that each of us has one as well.

When he was diagnosed, Dara’s parents were told that he “will never be able to complete a comprehension.” That his book, which won the 2020 Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing, exists at all is a revelation. His memoir is one of a young man, wise beyond his years, who displays deep thinking and succinct writing. He is well versed in all things nature, and spills his hopes and fears and knowledge out onto the page with such lovely, lyrical honesty that we want to stand up and cheer, and then sit back and relax into his world. Dara’s diary is what we all need—a breath of fresh air.

He finds relief from his anxieties by reveling in the details of the natural world of his Northern Ireland home, and in serving as a herald for the needs of his beloved environment. He experiences it so profoundly that he can share minutia from the ecosystems of a variety of birds, insects, animals, plants, trees, landscapes, seascapes, etc., which he misses deeply when they are absent for a season, or when they have been destroyed altogether.

Dara writes, “I spy coltsfoot, bursts of sunshine from the disturbed ground. White-tailed bumblebees drink and collect hungrily. Dandelions and their allies in the daisy (or Asteraceae) family are often the first pollinating plants to flower in spring, and are incredibly important for biodiversity. I implore everyone I meet to leave a wild patch in their garden for these plants – it doesn’t cost much and anybody can do it.”

Here then is one way we can foray into our own activism, aiding biodiversity and providing for our pollinator friends, which also include birds, bats, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, wasps, small mammals, and most importantly, the bees, especially the prolific Native Bee. Many of these populations are in decline, which Pollinator.org attributes to a loss in feeding and nesting habitats, as well as pollution, the misuse of chemicals, disease, and changes in climatic patterns. “In some cases,” the site reports, ‘there isn’t enough data to gauge a response, and this is even more worrisome.”

This need for more data brings us to another featured book: The field guide to citizen science : how you can contribute to scientific research and make a difference. This primer is written by Darlene Cavalier and Catherine Hoffman, the minds behind Scistarter.org, an online citizen science hub where there are registered more than 3,000 projects, searchable by location, topic, age level, etc. This new movement means we can easily join a project and assist a scientist, finding that ‘one small way’ (or big way!) that Dara requested we do in aid of our mother Earth!

Besides the titles listed here, Smiley Library holds many more books on various topics concerning the natural world and the needs of the environment. Come explore the Library (or ask a librarian–we love to be of service!), or search our online catalog, find topics of interest to you, and discover how you can help.

 

If we each can do a little, together we can do a lot.

 

• Hope matters : why changing the way we think is critical to solving the environmental crisis
• The pollinator victory garden : win the war on pollinator decline with ecological gardening : how to attract and support bees, beetles, butterflies, bats, and other pollinators
• Where have all the bees gone? : pollinators in crisis
• 100 plants to feed the monarch : create a healthy habitat to sustain North America’s most beloved butterfly
• How to attract birds to your garden
• Trees in trouble : wildfires, infestations, and climate change
• How to love animals : in a human-shaped world
• The climate diet : 50 simple ways to trim your carbon footprint
• Can I recycle this? : a guide to better recycling and how to reduce single-use plastics **
• Plastic : an autobiography
• 
• The new climate war : the fight to take back the planet
• How to avoid a climate disaster : the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need
• The physics of climate change
• Unsettled : what climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters
• Overheated : how capitalism broke the planet–and how we fight back
• Brave green world : how science can save our planet
• Disasterology : dispatches from the frontlines of the climate crisis
• Toxic legacy : how the weedkiller glyphosate is destroying our health and the environment
• How to prepare for climate change : a practical guide to surviving the chaos

2020

• What can I do? : my path from climate despair to action
• Our house is on fire : scenes of a family and a planet in crisis
• The fragile earth : writing from the New Yorker on climate change
• As the world burns : the new generation of activists and the landmark legal fight against climate change

**For more information on recycling in the City of Redlands, visit the City’s website,  https://www.cityofredlands.org/solid-waste-recycling-services