For Adults

Blog by Melissa Mason

Tired of being stuck at home with nothing to do? Time to try out a new hobby! Here are some books featuring some unique hobbies to get help get those creative juices flowing.

Create a fantastic world of delight with these 35 inspiring projects–all made from old books!

Follow Clare Youngs’ simple step-by-step projects to make a huge variety of creative book art projects. In the first chapter, Folding Books, get folding and make a beautiful bird, a sailor’s knot, and a shining star. They look impressive but are deceptively simple to make. In Chapter 2, Making Scenes, you will learn how to cut and glue splendid scenes such as tiny paper mushrooms and ferns under a glass bell jar, a fairytale castle, and a tiger in the jungle, all of which would make great gifts, or just keep and display them all yourself! Chapter 3, Refashioned Pages, has ideas for transforming the pages cut from books–make greeting cards, a botanical print lampshade, and hanging birds. All the projects have helpful step-by-step instructions and illustrations so all you need are a few old books and you are ready to start

Full of handmade goodness meant to be chewed, rummaged in, chased around, and worn proudly, DIY for Your Dog is a treasury of delightful DIY projects to make for your furry companions. Suitable for all breeds, from Chihuahuas to Great Danes, these sweet and easy projects are presented in four sections–“Eat,” “Nest,” “Play,” and “Wear”–and include everything from a cozy traveling dog bed, a knitted blanket, and a throw-and-catch bone to an adorable neckerchief, a colorful crocheted leash cover, and a made-to-measure coat for gray days.

There are even recipes for wholesome and easy-to-make treats like Doggie Pops, Bite-Size Biscuits, and the ultimate Doggie Birthday Cake. Fun, practical, and irresistibly cute, DIY for Your Dog will inspire dog lovers everywhere to replace standard pet items and pamper their pups with handcrafted treasures.

Sometimes it’s good to be a little…improper. Profane, funny, and smart, Haley Pierson-Cox’s The Improper Cross-stitch invites the modern crafter to bring personality and humor to their cross stitch projects. From a fully designed “Damn it feels good to be a crafter” to the beautiful Art Deco inspired “fuck,” Haley’s patterns are fresh, lively and just what the crafter ordered. In this book, she’ll introduce readers to the joys of stitching the naughty, the profane, the irreverent, and the just plain awesome. First, she starts with a basic lesson in cross-stitch technique, no previous experience required, and then moves on to the designs–35 in total. Her easy to follow instructions and colorful designs can make a cross stitcher out of anyone. In all her years of crafting,

Haley has learned many things, but this simple fact remains one of the most important: There is absolutely nothing in this world quite so satisfying as enshrining something deeply inappropriate within the delicate stitches of a cross-stitch sampler.  It’s truly one of life’s great delights!

Carve modernizes a mindful hobby that people have turned to for generations to help them slow down, relax, and connect with the outdoors. Choose from a dozen projects with bespoke details, all are designed to be useful at home or while camping. And because these objects are small, they require only a few hours and a tool or two to complete. You’ll also learn how to choose the right knife and wood, helpful information on techniques and safety, and tips for refining, personalizing and maintaining your piece.

Whether you’re headed to the woods or just to the porch, this pocket-sized guide will have you carving your own unique designs in no time.

Pie making should be simple and fun. Kate McDermott, who learned to make pie from her Iowa grandmother, has taught the time-honored craft of pie-making to thousands of people.

In Art of the Pie she shares her secrets to great crusts (including gluten-free options) with instructions for making, rolling, and baking them, as well as detailed descriptions for ingredients, methods, and tricks for making fillings. Organized by type of fruit, style of pie, and sweet versus savory, recipes range from apple to banana rum caramel coconut, raspberry rhubarb to chicken potpie. Along with luscious photography, McDermott makes it very easy to become an accomplished pie maker. This is the only PIE cookbook you need.

Extraordinary Hand Lettering opens your eyes to the endless possibilities in the world of creative lettering, showing you how to work with types of surfaces, such as wood, glass and acrylic, chalk, and even mirrors.

First, learn the simple tools and tricks of hand lettering essentials–cursive and basic typefaces, creating balance and composition, and how to draw letters, as well as secret tips on what words you should choose to spotlight or shadow.

Then, discover the lettering potentials of everyday items by transforming household objects or discarded items, such as old vintage mirrors, jewelry, and furniture, into a customized gift, unique decoration, quirky art piece, or stunning signage–all with the right lettering and choice of pen, pencil, or marker. For all DIY art-and-crafters, homemakers, and small business entrepreneurs, lettering is a versatile and necessary skill that can repurpose the old into something that is new, beautiful, and functional.

Combine the art of lettering and upcycling crafts to bring beauty into your everyday lifestyle.

Remember to check out Creativebug in our Digital Library on CPL’s website. Creativebug offers a wide selection of online tutorials that teach skills such as painting, knitting, quilting and more!

Caledon Public Library is hosting a new program called Podcasts & Pints. Our experienced podcast-listening staff will be leading a discussion about great podcasts and sharing some recommendations. We welcome all podcast lovers, new podcast listeners and those who don’t know what a podcast is. Podcasts & Pints runs on the first Thursday of the month at 7pm and is a virtual program that you can join on Zoom. The next meeting will be November 5th. Here is the link to join us: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86812900597?pwd=S3RjUlB6bnZjV1dFYURoWWZZeDN3Zz09 . So pop in and discover some popular podcasts, hidden gems and even offer up your own recommendations.

I thought that I could offer a sneak peak of some of the podcasts that we may discuss at our next meeting.

The Daily is a daily news podcast and radio show by the American newspaper The New York Times. Hosted by Times political journalist Michael Barbaro, its episodes are based on the Times’ reporting of the day with interviews of journalists from the New York Times.

Radiolab is a New York Radio podcast and it’s known for its deep-dive journalism and innovative sound design. It is a platform for long-form journalism and storytelling.

Heavyweight is a podcast created and produced by humorist Jonathan Goldstein where he helps people try to resolve a moment from their past that they wish they could change.

Reply All features stories about how people shape the internet, and how the internet shapes people.

Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast that goes back and reinterprets something from the past: an event, a person, an idea. Something overlooked. Something misunderstood.

This American Life is a weekly public radio program and podcast. Each week they choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. Mostly they do journalism, but an entertaining kind of journalism that’s built around plot.

Dark Poutine is a podcast about notorious Canadian crimes, dark history and other creepy topics, as told by real live Canadians.

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.  They’ll be featuring different resources each week of the month on their Cyber Security Awareness Month page, and there’s even a contest you can enter via their social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).

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)

While this list may not interest everyone, the fact is we ARE living through a pandemic so I figured some people might want to read books about or set during a pandemic. These books just might fit the bill for you.

FICTION:

Blindness by José Saramago

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is heartbroken, but he is a romantic.

As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

NON-FICTION

Pale Rider by Laura Spinney

With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster, not only of the twentieth century, but possibly in all of recorded history. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I.

In Pale Rider, Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain, and from South Africa to Odessa. She shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered; and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test.

The Great Influenza by John M. Barry

At the height of WWI, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research and now revised to reflect the growing danger of the avian flu, The Great Influenza is ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, which provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon.

The Great Mortality by John Kelly

The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholarly and general readers. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story: how many people died; how farm output and trade declined. But statistics can’t convey what it was like to sit in Siena or Avignon and hear that a thousand people a day are dying two towns away. Or to have to choose between your own life and your duty to a mortally ill child or spouse. Or to live in a society where the bonds of blood and sentiment and law have lost all meaning, where anyone can murder or rape or plunder anyone else without fear of consequence.

And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts

By the time Rock Hudson’s death in 1985 alerted all America to the danger of the AIDS epidemic, the disease had spread across the nation, killing thousands of people and emerging as the greatest health crisis of the 20th century. America faced a troubling question: What happened? How was this epidemic allowed to spread so far before it was taken seriously? In answering these questions, Shilts weaves the disparate threads into a coherent story, pinning down every evasion and contradiction at the highest levels of the medical, political, and media establishments.

Shilts shows that the epidemic spread wildly because the federal government put budget ahead of the nation’s welfare; health authorities placed political expediency before the public health; and scientists were often more concerned with international prestige than saving lives.

Music festivals, once a staple of the summer season, are largely on hold or have moved to a screen or drive-in near you. But you can still get that music festival feeling with these fiction and non-fiction titles that are all about the music:

Daisy Jones & the Six
by Taylor Jenkins Reid

“When singer Daisy Jones meets Billy Dunne of the band The Six, the two rising 70s rock-and-roll artists are catapulted into stardom when a producer puts them together, a decision that is complicated by a pregnancy and the seductions of fame.”

Twilight of the Gods : a Journey to the End of Classic Rock
by Steven Hyden

“The author of the critically acclaimed Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me presents a frank and revelatory assessment of the current state of classic rock, assessing its past and future, its enduring impact and what its loss could mean in economic and cultural arenas.”

Space Opera
by Catherynne M. Valente

“A century ago, the Sentience Wars tore the galaxy apart and nearly ended the entire concept of intelligent space-faring life. In the aftermath, a curious tradition was invented by the remnants of civilization…something to bring the shattered worlds together in the spirit of peace, unity, understanding, and the most powerful of all social bonds: excluding others. Once every cycle, the great galactic civilizations gather for Galactivision–part gladiatorial contest, part beauty pageant, part concert extravaganza, and part, a very large, but very subtle part, continuation of the wars of the past. Thus, a fragile peace has held. This year, a bizarre and unsightly species has looked up from its muddy planet-bound cradle and noticed the enormous universe blaring on around it: humanity. Where they expected to one day reach out into space and discover a grand drama of diplomacy, gunships, wormholes, and stoic councils of grave aliens, they have found glitter. And lipstick. And pyrotechnics. And electric guitars. A band of human musicians, dancers, and roadies have been chosen to represent their planet on the greatest stage in the galaxy. And the fate of Earth lies in their ability to rock.”

A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan

“Working side-by-side for a record label, former punk rocker Bennie Salazar and the passionate Sasha hide illicit secrets from one another while interacting with a motley assortment of equally troubled people from 1970s San Francisco to the post-war future. By the National Book Award-nominated author of Look at Me.”

There You Are
by Mathea Morais

“Octavian Munroe is haunted by the life and death of his older brother in one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Mina Rose has never quite fit in and wishes she was anything but white. Once lovers, now estranged, they both left St. Louis for fresh starts in the wake of grief and heartbreak. Octavian and Mina travel homeward in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death and the awakening of the Black Lives Matter movement. In search of answers, they seek out the music that once gave their hearts a steady beat and their lives a sense of direction. The record shop where they fell in love as teenagers is closing for good, sparking a desire for closure. This raw, powerful story of love and loss reckons with how fear shapes even the most fleeting collisions between friends, neighbors, and strangers”

Utopia Avenue
by David Mitchell

“The members of a music band in 1967 London navigate the era’s parties, drugs and politics as well as their own egos and tragedies while exploring transformative perspectives about youth, art and fame. By the award-winning author of Cloud Atlas.”

(book descriptions provided by Novelist Plus)

Are Travel Guidebooks Still Relevant?

By Sheila Howlett-Soltysiak

In the age of technology, are travel guidebooks still helpful for us? Do they have a place in vacation planning?

Guidebooks can be used ahead of time to research the popular or ‘can’t miss’ sights, and to learn about local tips, tricks or caveats.

The benefit of guidebooks is they are professionally written and edited. Some publishers use professional travel writers and others use local writers. They are considered trustworthy sources of information.

What can you expect from travel guidebooks? Here are some of the most popular.

DK Eyewitness – Full colour guides with beautiful photos for over 200 destinations, they are famous for their tagline “The guides that show you what others only tell you”.  Great if you like maps, floor plans and cutaways.

Rick Steves – These guidebooks are available for European destinations only. There are also Rick Steves videos showcasing dozens of destinations which can help provide a visual in your planning process. Great for those on a budget or who want to steer away from restaurant & hotel chains.

Fodors – They’ve been publishing travel guides since 1936 and are considered the gold standard by some. There are more than 300 guides covering basically the entire world. Each guide includes some great info on understanding local culture.

Lonely Planet – Lots & lots of detail, great for planners, and more than 500 titles available.  Their guides are typically several hundred pages and jam packed with information. They also have a range of Pocket guides, generally for cities or small regional areas.

Frommer’s — A guidebook series developed in 1957, Frommer’s offers opinions on what not to miss and what you can skip. The guides are generally filled with a lot of useful information and are available in four travel book series: full-color, comprehensive Complete Guides, portable EasyGuides, itinerary-driven, Day by Day guides, and pocket-sized, photo-laden ShortCut Guides.

Typically, guidebooks are updated every 2 years or so. This is where the internet can be helpful – to check on up-to-date details such as entry hours, admission fees, unexpected closures, special exhibits, and even to make an admissions reservation, as is beneficial for some extremely popular sites.

Almost all guidebooks are available in both print and e-book version, meaning whether you prefer to carry a book along on your holiday, or to access guidance from your phone or tablet, there will be a travel guidebook that meets your needs. And we will be travelling again someday soon!

Bon Voyage!

Written by Justine Shim

Joanna, Ursa and Gabe are brought together in an unexpected, touching and emotional story in Glendy Vanderah’s debut novel Where the Forest Meets the Stars.

Joanne Teale is a graduate student researching nesting birds in rural Illinois.  She buries herself in her work as she heals from the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer.  Then, one day Ursa shows up.  A 10 year old girl that claims she’s been sent from another planet to witness 5 miracles on Earth.  Joanne is of course concerned for the girl and makes every effort to insist Ursa goes back to her home.  Joanna frequently checks the missing children website but finds nothing.  Ursa sticks to her story and eventually convinces Joanna that there is no home to go back to and Joanna reluctantly lets her stay.  She enlists the help from her reclusive neighbour, Gabe Nash to help her.  As the days and weeks go by, Joanna, Ursa and Gabe form a special bond and uncover stories of their own lives which bring them even closer.

At first, Where the Forest Meets the Stars may sound like it is a paranormal or fantasy story, but it is a tale of true friendship, love and kindness.  An emotional, heartwarming story about 3 people and their life stories that bring them together to form an incredible bond.