Reading with Libraries Podcast

Thank you for joining us on this season of our Reader’s Advisory book group podcast! It’s always better when you are here with us to talk about books. We have more genres to discuss, new books to recommend, and we’re so glad you’re here to join us. We always enjoy our book group podcast, and we hope you do, too! You can find our , with links to everything we share with you today. This week we are sharing a special pop culture episode with you! We are looking at the movie West Side Story. IMDB describes the plot: “An adaptation of the 1957 musical, West Side Story explores forbidden love and the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks, two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds.” The amazing Rita Moreno stars in this, and is an Executive Producer, along with Steven Spielberg. You may remember her from dozens of TV shows, movies, and more - she is an EGOT winner! We have more to discuss, so let’s settle in and get to the fun part: the book discussion! This week we are taking a quick look at some books about music, to celebrate this new movie. Sit back with a beverage you will enjoy, and let’s share some books you might enjoy. We always enjoy hosting these book groups with you, and want you to have everything you need for the best experience! And of course, if you are in a library, you can add these books to your collection, or use our suggestions as a place to start in setting up a display for your community members! Do you want to talk about some materials or programming ideas? Check out our Discord channel, talk to us on Twitter or Facebook, or just send us an email! We are here to share ideas across libraries.

This season we are moving through the state of Minnesota, looking at an interesting fact about each county and giving you a book prompt from that fact. We will share six book suggestions to meet that prompt, to get you started on reading new books. You can also take that prompt and find any other book to meet the challenge! This week we look at Pennington county. Its county seat is Thief River Falls - a beautiful area!. Celebrate this by reading a mystery, especially a story with a theft. We give you links to each of these books on , taking you to Amazon.com. If you click on any of them, and buy anything at all - including a nice book - Amazon will send us a small percent of the profits they made on these sales. Thank you for supporting CMLE!

Welcome to Linking Our Libraries! We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, a multitype library system where we support libraries of all types. And today we have two special guests with us: Ann Walker Smalley, who is the director of the Metronet multitype system; and Ann Hokanson, the director of the Traverse des Sioux library system. We are sharing this special episode to help promote the latest annual Minnesota Library Association conference! It’s coming up Wednesday, Oct. 6 through Friday, Oct. 8. And of course we are still having a global pandemic, so this conference will be virtual. We will preview a few of the interesting events coming up, so you will be ready for all the different activities. And of course, we want to take special notice of probably the most exciting session at this conference: the Multitype Library systems are presenting a session to talk about the very cool work we are all doing together and individually! Our session will be Friday, Oct 8 at 10:00am. It is called Mapping Minnesota's Multitypes. Let’s give you a quick preview of this session.

At CMLE we’ve absolutely talked about romance books before. Check out our past episodes , , and of course our FIRST EVER episode of this podcast was a . Clearly, we love talking about love! And it’s even better when there’s humor involved. Any genre of book can include romantic elements, but today we’re talking about books where romance and humor take center stage: romantic comedies! You can read our , to get links to the beverages we enjoy, the resources we discuss, and the books we suggest today. And we are overjoyed to welcome back CMLE Podcast Correspondent Ariel Kirst! Thanks for joining us again!

This week we are sharing a special pop culture episode with you! We are looking at the movie No Time To Die - the latest James Bond movie. IMDB describes the plot: “James Bond has left active service. His peace is short-lived when Felix Leiter, an old friend from the CIA, turns up asking for help, leading Bond onto the trail of a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology.” Daniel Craig is back in his fifth, and maybe final, turn at being James Bond. And our villain this time is the wonderful Rami Malek. (You may remember him from the tv series Mr. Robot, or the movie Bohemian Rhapsody.) We have more to discuss, so let’s settle in and get to the fun part: the book discussion! This week we are taking a quick look at some books about spies, to celebrate this new movie. Kick back with a beverage you will enjoy, and let’s share some books you might enjoy. We always enjoy hosting these book groups with you, and want you to have everything you need for the best experience! And of course, if you are in a library, you can add these books to your collection, or use our suggestions as a place to start in setting up a display for your community members! Do you want to talk about some materials or programming ideas? Check out our Discord channel, talk to us on Twitter or Facebook, or just send us an email! We are here to share ideas across libraries.