Wilsonville Spokesman Online

Warming your heart by the fire of new programs

Library Corner with Greg Martin

• By: Greg Martin  
• Published: 12/31/2009 9:40:00 AM

Library book club
This adult club will be discussing "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society," on Jan. 14, from 6-7 p.m.

Merry Christmas Wilsonville! Let’s get the business (and the dregs of the old year) over with first. On Thursday, Dec. 24, we’ll be closing early, at 2 p.m. (Not so) shockingly, we’ll be closed the whole day, Dec. 25, but will then reopen on Boxing Day, Saturday, Dec. 26, at 10 a.m. With the dawning of the New Year — you guessed it — we’ll be closed on Jan. 1. The library then reopens for its usual run on Jan. 2 at 10 a.m.

Perhaps by that point someone will have folded up our smelly plastic tree and put it back in its tired cardboard box, to be trundled laboriously up to the attic and collect another few layers of dust. It’s at this point too, that all our far-flung Christmas CDs will begin straggling in too. Then they’ll sit quietly on their recently-empty shelf, undisturbed and unheard for another 11 months or so. Perhaps we should promote them in June, and see if we get any takers.

Fun events also arrive with the New Year. On Saturday, Jan. 9, from 2-3 p.m., we welcome Lee Hiway for the first Booknotes Concert of 2010. Lee plays country music, but we nixed the authentic-but-flammable hay bales for him to sit on. Maybe we’ll give him the tired cardboard box with the plastic tree inside. Then I’ll request the old Jerry Reed standard “She Got the Goldmine, and I Got the Shaft.”

On Thursday, Jan. 14, from 6-7 p.m., the Wilsonville Library Book Club will discuss Mary Ann Schaffer’s “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.” In January 1946, writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The Society was born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island. The novel boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all. It’s free, so don’t miss it.

And just when the ball gets rolling, the library is going to take yet another holiday. On Monday, Jan. 18, we celebrate MLK day, which may, by this point, seem to stand for “My Library’s Klosed.” Take heart — we’ll once again be back on Tuesday at 10 a.m. to celebrate MLO day with you.

Have you heard about our newest public program? The Conversation Project: A New Chautauqua offers free programs that engage the community in thoughtful, challenging conversations about ideas critical to our daily lives and our state’s future. Conversations are facilitated by some of Oregon’s most respected humanities scholars.

So under the august aegis of this doughty  description, we welcome Elliot Young, on Wednesday, Jan. 20 beginning at 6:30 p.m. Dr. Young earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and his master’s and doctorate degrees in Latin American history from the University of Texas-Austin. He can facilitate with the best of them, and will be putting his talent to use in presenting “Borderless: Migration, Globalization, and Changing Communities.”

In this time of cataclysmic change in our country and our world, it is important to ask not only how to get the economy back on track, but what kind of economy we want to work toward.

Dr. Young will lead a discussion about the new ways that local communities in the 21st century can think about the relationship between migration and globalization, and what effect these increasingly important movements will have on Oregon communities. All facilitation and related actions are free — so come and learn. We’re hoping to make 2010 the library’s best year ever — we invite you to help us do it.

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