Hello and welcome to Episode Twenty Nine of Page Turn: the Largo Public Library Podcast. I'm your host, Hannah!
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The Spanish Language Book Review begins at 13:34 and ends at 19:00
The English Language Transcript can be found below
But as always we start with Reader's Advisory!
The Reader's Advisory for Episode Twenty Nine is A Song For a New Day by Sarah Pinskey. If you like A Song For a New Day you should also check out: The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz, The Resisters by Gish Jen, and A Beginning At the End by Mike Chen.
My personal favorite Goodreads list A Song For a New Day is on is Queer Books About Fictional Plagues.
Happy Reading Everyone
Today’s Library Tidbit is about our new Read Woke Initiative.
Read Woke is a reading initiative that was started by Cicely Lewis a school librarian in Georgia. Lewis saw injustices happening around the country in the news and how it effected her students and decided to educate herself through books, podcasts, documentaries, and through connecting with other people and listening to their lived experiences. From that education she created a reading theme, Read Woke, to share with her students to get them engaged and to get them to self-educate not only about issues that effect them personally but also about issues that are effecting their peers.
According to Cicely Lewis in order for a book to qualify as a “woke” book it must: challenge a social norm, tell the side of the oppressed, provide information about a group that has been disenfranchised, seek to challenge the status quo, and shed light on an issue that many may not perceive as being an issue.
The Read Woke Initiative is being adapted by the new Diversity and Inclusion Committee. This committee, which is made up of library staff from all the different departments, was put together to further the library’s goals of being a more equitable, a more diverse, and a more inclusive place.
You can find the library's policy and definitions for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion here.
You can learn more about the Read Woke Initiative and join it here. The Read Woke Initiative is open to all ages with activities and materials geared to specific age ranges so everyone in the family and community can join.
And now it's time for Book Traveler, with Victor:
Welcome to a new edition of Book Traveler. My name is Victor and I am a librarian at the Largo Public Library. Today I'm going to talk to you about a new book we have in the Spanish collection titled The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison.
Synopsis: What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?
Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison’s fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books―Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy.
If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century.
