Debra Mann

I spend a fair bit of time in Novelist Plus. It’s one of my go-to sites for helping people find their next favourite book, and it’s not just for librarians; anyone with a Caledon Public Library card can use it. Considering the amount of time I spend on it, you’d think I’d know every feature like the back of my hand. Imagine my surprise, then, when I rediscovered that Novelist Plus has a section dedicated entirely to literary awards.

I usually start my search right on the main page without paying much attention to the menu at the top, but if you look under the Browse By tab, you’ll see an option for Award Winners. Clicking on that link opens a whole world of literary excellence, including a section specifically for Canadian awards – 158 of them, if we’re counting, all the way from the Alberta Reader’s Choice Award to the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley award.

Each award list is sorted in reverse chronological order so that you can see the most recent winners at the top, and clicking on the name of the winning book or author opens up a new screen with information on availability in our collection, recommendations, and readalikes.

Are you a fan of a particular genre? Novelist Plus has you covered with the Awards by Genre search, including 237 for romance alone! You can even browse the most popular awards by age group, so if you’re looking for something to help your teen rediscover the joy of reading, you’ll find the best of the best here.

Give it a try! You’ll find links to Novelist on our What to Read Next and Digital Library page. The site will ask you for your Patron ID; that’s your library card number. Type it in, and start exploring the world of award-winning literature!

Stacey wakes to the police pounding on her door. They search her home and seize her computer and her phone, telling her they’re looking for “illegal digital material.” Left to unravel what’s happened, Stacey must find a way to take back the privacy and freedom she feels she has lost. 

All I Ask is award-winning Canadian author Eva Crocker’s debut novel for adults, and it’s been chosen as the next title for the Together We Read Canada digital book club. Connect with readers through Canadian public libraries to enjoy the same ebook for two weeks. All you need is a Caledon Public Library card to get started. The ebook and audiobook can be read on all major computers and devices, including Kobo® tablets and eReaders, iPhone®, iPad®, Android™ phones and tablets and Chromebook™ without waitlists or holds through the library’s Overdrive collection and using the Libby app. The title will automatically expire at the end of the lending period, and there are no late fees. Download the Libby app or visit our Overdrive collection to get started.

Together We Read: Canada runs from August 11-25. Find out more at togetherweread.com/ca

We’re gearing up for the next Big Library Read, which is set to kick off on June 28 with S. F. Kosa’s The Quiet Girl. If you’re looking for your next tightly plotted psychological thriller, this is what you’ve been waiting for! Here’s a synopsis:

“When Alex arrives in Provincetown to patch things up with his new wife, Mina, he finds an empty wine glass in the sink, her wedding ring on the desk, and a string of questions in her wake. The police believe that Mina, a successful romance author, simply left, their marriage crumbling before it truly began. But what Alex finds in their empty cottage points him toward a different reality: Mina has always carried a secret. And now she’s disappeared. In his hunt for the truth, Alex comes across Layla, a young woman with information to share, who may hold the key to everything his wife has kept hidden. A strange, quiet girl whose missing memories may break them all. To find his missing wife, Alex must face what Layla has forgotten. And the consequences are anything but quiet.”

You may already know Kosa from books written under her pen name Sarah Fine. She is a clinical psychologist by trade, and The Quiet Girl is her first psychological suspense novel. We have unlimited digital titles available from June 28 to July 12 without waitlists of holds in our Overdrive/Libby collection. All you need is a library card; grab your copy today!

Did you know you can win prizes for participating in Big Library Read? Use the hashtag #biglibraryread on social media for a chance to win a Samsung Galaxy Tablet and a signed copy of The Quiet Girl (check the terms and conditions for more on how to win).

We hope you’ve enjoyed our Reading Other Lives, Oh Canada!, and It’s A Mystery online book clubs as much as we have, but with summer on the horizon it’s time to unwind and take it easy. With that in mind, we’ve created a book club that’s ready when you are, and matches your laid-back summer schedule. The 60 Second Book Club begins next week on CPL’s Facebook and Instagram. Each week we’ll feature a new book and tell you what we thought about it in 60 seconds or less. If you’ve read the book, leave your comments and questions whenever it’s convenient for you. If you haven’t read the book yet, borrow a copy from the library collection, then come back and tell us what you think! It’s easy peasy summer breezy – follow us on Facebook or Instagram, and enjoy the 60 Second Book Club anytime you like!

So here we all are in what is – hopefully – the downward slope of a worldwide pandemic, and we’ve all had to deal with massive amounts of additional stress in a bewildering number of ways. Fortunately for us, the latest selection for Big Library Read is exactly what the doctor ordered.

From a psychologist and stand-up comedian comes The Art of Taking It Easy, a practical, yet laugh-out-loud guide to embracing humor to reduce stress and live a happier, fuller life. Dr. Brian King got a degree in psychology before becoming a world-touring comic and the host of humor therapy seminars attended by more than ten thousand people each year. In this brilliant guide, he presents hands-on techniques for managing stress by rewiring our brains to approach potentially difficult situations through a lens of positivity. To do so, Dr. King explores what stress is, where it comes from, and what it does to our bodies and brains. He delves deep into how to address everyday stress—as well as anxiety, insecurities, repression, and negativity—and gives insight into resulting ailments such as anxiety disorders, depression, hypertension, obesity, substance abuse disorders, and more. Dr. King’s techniques are chemical and cost free, and embrace humor, resilience, relaxation, optimism, gratitude, and acceptance. Instead of a dry medical approach to dealing with stress, this unique volume is filled with life-changing tips and instructions presented with humor and a wealth of memorable, smile-inducing anecdotes.

Big Library Read is an international reading program that connects millions of readers around the world with an ebook through public libraries. The Art of Taking It Easy is the 24th selection of this program which began in 2013 and takes place three times per year.  This free program runs for two weeks starting today and only requires a Caledon Public Library card to get started. If you’re new to borrowing ebooks through the library, check out this guide on getting started with Libby.

Ready to take it easy? Me too! Grab your copy today and get started!

Hiking adventures abound in Caledon, and as the weather gets better and better, you’re going to want to get out and enjoy them! Lucky for you, we’re hosting an event on March 31 to help you plan your next big adventure close to home. Preparing to Walk the Bruce Trail is a program hosted on Zoom by members of the Caledon Hills Bruce Trail Club. They’ll share their best tips about hiking, including planning your hikes, how to hike, and where to hike. Registration is now open for the program, but between now and then, grab one of these books chock full of hiking inspiration!

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, Bill Bryon

“God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world’s longest continuous footpath–The Appalachian Trail. The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas. With his offbeat sensibility, his eye for the absurd, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humour, Bryson recounts his confrontations with nature at its most uncompromising over his five-month journey.”

Lines on a Map: Unparalleled Adventures in Modern Exploration, Frank Wolf

“Lines on a Map is a compilation of Frank Wolf’s best work from the past two decades. Some of the adventures include: two friends on a cycling and volcano-climbing odyssey across Java, the world’s most populous island, in the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia, in the wake of 9/11; a surreal private lunch with former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau during an 8000 km canoe journey across Canada; discovering the past and present on a 900 km hiking and kayaking journey from Skagway, Alaska, to Dawson City, Yukon; negotiating the cultural divide during a whitewater paddling expedition in Laos and Cambodia with Russian extreme kayakers; exploring the nature and politics of a multi-billion dollar pipeline in northern BC by hiking, biking and kayaking the GPS track of the proposed project route from the oil sands to the British Columbia coast; conducting a mammal tracking survey in the course of a 120 km ski traverse of Banff National Park; discovering the truth about the existence of Sasquatch in northern Ontario; retracing Viking history during a canoe trip across Scandinavia. Complete with dozens of colour photographs, Wolf weaves together humour, drama and local knowledge to transport readers to some of the outermost corners of the globe in an epic quest to celebrate the freedom to move, explore and be wild.”

Wild, Cheryl Strayed

“At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State–and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone. Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her”.

If you’re looking for some more local inspiration, check out the books by Nicola Ross in our Read Local Caledon collection. Her Loops and Lattes books are especially handy if you’re looking for a good hike and some tasty snacks along the way!

Descriptions provided by Novelist Plus

It’s Groundhog Day, and in honour of the comedy classic, here are some other time-loop movies and books you might enjoy:

7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

“The Rules of Blackheath: Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m. There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit. We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer. Understood? Then let’s begin . . .
Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others…”

The Midnight Library

“Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.”

Edge of Tomorrow

Based on the book All You Need is Kill. “In a near future, an alien race has hit the Earth in an unbeatable assault. Major William Cage has never seen a day of combat, but is dropped into a suicide mission and killed within minutes. Cage now finds himself thrown into a time loop, forcing him to live out the same day over and over, fighting and dying each time. With each ‘life,’ Cage learns more fighting skills, so that when he and warrior Rita Vrataski take the fight to the aliens, they are one step closer to defeating the enemy.”

Before I Fall

The book, and subsequent movie, asks the question: what would you change if you knew today was your last day?

“They say ‘live every day as if it’s your last’ – but you never actually think it’s going to be. At least I didn’t.
The thing is, you don’t get to know when it happens. You don’t remember to tell your family that you love them or – in my case – remember to say goodbye to them at all.

But what if, like me, you could live your last day over and over again? Could you make it perfect? If your whole life flashed before your eyes, would you have no regrets? Or are there some things you’d want to change…?”

Life After Life

“Ursula Todd is born on a cold snowy night in 1910 — twice. As she grows up during the first half of the twentieth century in Britain Ursula dies and is brought back to life again and again. With a seemingly infinite number of lives it appears as though Ursula has the ability to alter the history of the world, should she so choose.” BBC is currently adapting Life After Life into a four-part series.

Descriptions provided by Novelist Plus

Kick off 2021 by joining readers across the country for One eRead Canada, the first national, bilingual (English and French) digital eBook club, featuring the exquisite and celebrated novel Vi by Kim Thúy. Readers from St John’s to Nanaimo to Whitehorse, along with more than 600 public libraries, will be taking part in this simultaneous reading party. From January 1 to 31, 2021, 85 per cent of all public libraries in Canada, including ours, will offer free, unlimited access to Vi in eBook and eAudiobook formats. The book will be available in both languages, without holds or waitlists, to everyone with a CPL library card.

Vi is a masterful novel about the lives and experiences of Vietnamese refugees in Canada. It was a finalist for the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award in translation and longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize. This is your chance to have a taste of Vi’s life, a journey of self-discovery that will take you across the globe from Vietnam to Canada to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

So how to take part? You’ve got a few options. The main one is to grab a digital copy of the book from our Overdrive collection. From Jan. 1-31, Vi is available in eBook or eAudiobook format, in English or French, with no waitlists and no holds. Borrow it on your computer, or download the Libby app (App Store | Google Play) to read on your tablet or phone. If you’ve never used Overdrive or Libby before, here’s a tutorial to help you get started. If you don’t have a library card, fill out this form to request a temporary digital card.

If you’re not able to download or prefer a print book, you can join us at our newest book club, Reading Other Lives. It meets for the first time via Zoom on Jan. 15 at 1pm (registration is now open), and you can place a hold on a copy of the book to pick up at your nearest branch.

You can start connecting with readers across the country right away by joining the One eRead Canada Facebook Group or by using the hashtag #1eReadCanada. Every week in January, you’ll be invited to discuss a question on the themes, characters, and overall impressions of the eBook. Then, join book lovers from coast to coast to coast on the One eRead Canada Facebook group  on January 19 (in English) and January 20 (in French) at 7 pm for a live Q&A with the author to discuss some of the many themes that arise from this profoundly moving work.

In addition to being a bilingual, cross-country simultaneous reading experience, One eRead Canada underlines the Canadian Urban Libraries Council’s ongoing campaign, eContent for Libraries. Libraries want to work with the big publishers to establish fair pricing models that can benefit everyone and ensure equitable access to digital content such as eBooks and eAudiobooks. Collaborative library initiatives like One eRead Canada introduce readers and listeners to new books and authors, positively impacting sales of digital content – to the benefit of publishers, authors, and readers.

We hope you’ll enjoy Vi and this unique country-wide reading experience.

There’s no doubt about it – the holidays are going to be super weird this year. All of our fun family gatherings and meetups with friends are firmly on hold, and that means fewer opportunities for holiday noshing as well. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t cook up a storm just for your own household! Remember in the spring when we all rediscovered banana bread and sourdough? I predict the same thing is going to happen with our festive favourites. Now that you don’t need to make a massive turkey for 34, there’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t try something really different, and really exciting, instead. Your library has a ton of fantastic cookbooks that are sure to inspire you. Here are a few ideas to get you started!

Vegan Holiday Cookbook: Festive Plant-Based Meals and Desserts for the Thanksgiving and Christmas Table, Katie Culpin

“Holiday feasts have always been contentious for vegans and  their nonvegan family members–when a supposedly welcoming season of loved ones dining together becomes divisive when animal products are cooked as part of tradition. Vegan Holiday Recipes addresses this issue head-on and unites family and friends, vegan or not, over simply delicious, easy, healthy, seasonal food.”

My Drunk Kitchen Holidays! How to Savor and Celebrate the Year, Hannah Hart

“In the style of her first hit humorous cookbook, My Drunk Kitchen, which has sold close to 100,000 copies, My Drunk Kitchen Holidays! will celebrate holidays from Valentine’s Day to Graduation to Pride Month to International Bacon day (really!). The book will cumulate with the fall holidays that get so much deserved attention: recipes for Oktoberfest, Halloween, Thanksgiving with a twist, and a celebration of Hanukah/Kwanzaa/Christmas that is celebratory, inclusive, and incredibly hilarious.”

Set for the Holidays with Anna Olson, Anna Olson

“When does the festive season begin for you? For Anna Olson, it’s when she bakes her first pumpkin pie of the year. Pumpkin pie isn’t something she bakes on any old Tuesday evening, so it signifies something very special when she does- the start of the holidays! For Anna, the holidays are a time for spending with family and friends, for coming together, celebrating traditions and, of course, cooking delicious food! In this festive cookbook, Anna shares the recipes she loves to make during the holiday season (and, really, almost every day).”

The Artisanal Kitchen: Gluten-Free Holiday Cookies, Alice Medrich with Maya Klein

“Holidays are the time for baking and enjoying cookies and treats, and those with gluten sensitivities shouldn’t have to miss out. Baking with flavor flours–oat flour, sorghum flour, teff, coconut flour, and nut flours, like almond and hazelnut–means that everyone can enjoy holiday treats, from the classic Chocolate Chip Cookie to the decadent Peanut Crunch Brownies. Alternative flours make these cookies and bars gluten-free. And rather than simply adding starch and structure to a dessert (as is the case with wheat flour), these flours elevate the taste of every cookie and bar too. With seasonal favorites like Quince and Orange-Filled Chestnut Cookies, Chocolate Sablés, and Brown Sugar Pecan Cookies, these recipes–adapted from Alice Medrich’s Flavor Flours–make a must-have mini compendium of decadent gluten-free holiday desserts.”

The Unofficial Hogwarts for the Holidays Cookbook, Rita Mock-Pike

“What better way to celebrate any occasion than by whipping up a magically delicious meal in your kitchen? From sumptuous autumn and winter feasts to delectable desserts and tea-time treats, this book has all of your holidays and special occasions covered, with an extra magical twist. Celebrate in true wizarding world style with recipes like: Pumpkin Pasties, Cauldron Cakes, Exploding Bon Bons, Licorice Wands, Chocolate Frogs, Rock Cakes, Pumpkin Tarts, and many more!”

(Summaries provided by Novelist Plus)

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that a little bit of prevention saves us from a whole lot of trouble. But while you’ve been washing hands, wearing masks, and sanitizing high-touch surfaces, have you given any thought to your cybersecurity?

October is Cyber Security Awareness Month, and it’s the perfect time to give your digital life a health check-up, especially if you’ve been working away from the office or using your devices more than usual. Your first stop should be the Get Cyber Safe website, where you’ll find all kinds of great tips and features on how to protect your accounts, devices, and connections.

Then, if you’re interested in learning more, or if you’re not yet convinced that this is something you really need to care about, check out these books that investigate the concept of cyber security from a variety of perspectives:

Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier

You might recognize this author and academic from his website Schneier on Security or from his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In this book, he “reveals the unsettling ways in which corporations and governments track and monitor everyday activities, profiling the technological, legal, and social solutions available for enabling better privacy and avoiding cybercrime.”

Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith

To get an industry perspective, Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, offers “frank insights into the responsibilities of companies that create technology to work with governments, keep pace with innovation and safeguard their innovations from being used as weapons.”

Exploding Data by Michael Chertoff

Providing a government perspective is former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, who “outlines powerful arguments for new laws and policies to protect society and individual autonomy from cyber-security threats.”

(descriptions provided by Novelist Plus)