Odyssey Online

Entries from December 2012

Book Stores and Holiday Reading

December 20th, 2012 · Comments Off on Book Stores and Holiday Reading

From our dynamic Collection Development Librarian, Michelle Gillie:Hoping to find an iPad or a Kindle in your stocking this year?   Don’t forget about OverDrive@SLU: our downloadable collection of e-books and audiobooks that you can enjoy on your shiny new e-reader, tablet, iPod, or other mobile device.   Use your SLU ID number to select and access titles whenever you like, for a loan period of up to three weeks.   Click here for more information about this service.

If you prefer to leave the wired world behind when you’re not at work, pay a visit to the ODY Browsing Collection located near Special Collections on ODY’s main level. Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, you’ll find plenty of bestsellers, award-winners, biographies, travel books, contemporary poetry, humor, and other popular fiction and nonfiction to relax with over the break. If you don’t see what you’re looking for, contact Michelle Gillie at ODY (mgillie@stlawu.edu or x5834).  We always welcome suggestions for new titles from the SLU community.

Also, I wrote of Atlantic Magazine being a great source for information on books, book recommendations, and Benjamin Schwarz has put forth their best books of 2012 list.  It’s a good list, and we have most of them.   Recommending a book is a great Holiday activity, well, it’s a great activity in the summer to, one part reflection, one part bravado (I know books and I’m going to make sure you know too), and one part verbal correspondence. When you are recommending a book you are giving a little bit of yourself, you are making a statement the way you might in a letter and just like a letter you have to wait for a response.  In talking with the digitally-oriented youth who prowl and patrol this northerly campus one of the aspects of letter writing they find alien is waiting on a response–that you don’t get with the send command a reply.  Same with recommending a book, you have to wait until the person to whom you’ve recommended  the book reads it.  So I suppose, taking my own logical postal, that the trip to the book store is itself letter writing…of a kind…a correspondence with an imagination out, above and below immediate experience.  Here’s hoping there are plenty of books in your holiday…

 

 

 

If you don’t see what you’re looking for, contact Michelle Gillie at ODY (mgillie@stlawu.edu or x5834).  We always welcome suggestions for new titles from the SLU community.

 

Tags: Books · Recommended Book

Booksellers and Bookselling

December 3rd, 2012 · Comments Off on Booksellers and Bookselling

Booksellers and Book sellling is a Library of Congress Subject Heading. If one does a subject search on said in ODYsseus (or Encore) one returns:

The holiday-shopping season metaexperience, reading about a small bookshop, while in a small book shop (or perhaps our Josephine Young Room).  If one accepts the thesis that buying books is not buying socks (or downloading apps), that it is something more expressive, more resonant of the real, then reading about books being bought and sold should have some measure of Emersonian sincerity.  Reading about book selling as a way to step out of all that is tinsel and trouble about holiday shopping? Couldn’t hurt to find one of these titles, a chair in the Josephine Young Room, and find out…

Tags: Books · Essay on Bibliography

St. Lawrence University