 Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Got a mouse going across the table here. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We are our online show, webinar, webcast. We're here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. However, we do record the show every week. If you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always just go to our website and I will show you that at the end of the show today. And you can see all the recordings there. If we have any slides like we have here or any websites people go to, we include that in all the recordings as well so that will be available to you as well after the show. Both the show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So if you see any topics that you may think may be of interest to any of your colleagues who aren't here today or haven't seen the show, friends, neighbors, anybody who's interested in anything, send them to our website, have them check out what our upcoming shows are in our recordings. We do a mixture of things here, book reviews, mini-training sessions, interviews, basically anything library related. We have it on the show. That's really our only criteria, something having to do with libraries. Pretty broad. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations and we have guest speakers. And today we have a mixture of that. Together today with us all the way over to the left is Aaron Willis, who is from our Lincoln City libraries just up the street. The Jane Pope Getsky Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors. And Lisa Kelly, who's from here at the Library Commission, our Director of Information Services. And they're going to talk about, we had Aaron on earlier, previously, a month or so ago. Exactly about a month ago. Talk about the new Nebraska 150 Books program. But we're going to dive more into that today and specifically how you can use that with your book groups. So I'll hand it over to you guys, take it away and tell us everything you want to tell us about Nebraska 150 Books. Good morning. I'm hopeful that Aaron can recap some of the session from last month talking about what she, and many people did in determining a list of 150 books for the sesquicentennial. Yes, certainly. Well, I'll just start from the beginning that Nebraska is celebrating 150 years of statehood on March 1st, 2017. And so we initiated in early 2016 a community statewide community reading initiative in partnership with the Nebraska 150 Commission. And our initiative is called Nebraska 150 Books. And we're celebrating the sesquicentennial through literature. And the idea and impetus behind the program was to come up with a list of books that represented Nebraska history, culture, geography, just represented Nebraska as a whole in scope. And so the committee, there's a committee of individuals in the library world and the reading world and the bookstore world, teachers. We all got together and developed a reading list that was then sent to community members for betting and to determine the final list of books. So on the Nebraska 150 Books website you can see a complete list of 150 books to read for the sesquicentennial and then a shorter list that's part of our reading challenge. And these are just, these are books that have been narrowed down so that there's one book from each of four different categories, which is fiction, nonfiction, young adult, and poetry. And so one book from each category each month that we're focusing on and that's what comprises the short list. And so today what we're going to talk about are some of the books from both of those lists, the short list and the long list. And we're talking specifically about books that are available through the library commission in their library reading. Is it that book club collection? Book club collection. And to talk about why these were chosen and why they would be good choices for your reading groups. And I just want to say if you did want to, I did briefly say you were on, I looked it up just to make sure. August 17th, so just last month Aaron was on talking. So if you want to know more about all those titles that were selected and the top list and everything, we've got that recording on our website and I'll show it where that is to you at the end of day show as well. And I apologize. We're going a little out of order, so I hope you don't mind. We're just going to wing it. When you want to, if you would like to choose a book from the Nebraska 150 list for your book club to read, you could go to the library commission's web page and appear as search box. If you search book club kits, our IT people have verified that you will find it any number of ways. And those are the results. And you'll get to our book club kit page. And Vern has made a criteria for Nebraska 150 books. Now we don't have all of them, but we do have about a third of them in various numbers. So let's just do that. Book club kits and book club kits from the Nebraska library commission. And here are the 150. Now some we don't have many copies of, but we're working on it. And so these would be some of the titles that we have and the number of copies that we have. And for anyone that you want, just press request this kit. And it will remind you how many copies we have. And it will be sent to a staff member here who will get back with you and let you know if that will work for your book club. And the cesspotennial is not until next year officially. So we have time to get more copies of this. So that's a work in progress as of today. That's correct. We've been working with local bookstores and all sorts of people to gather titles. So these titles I think what we want to feature today is what would make them good for your group? Why do we think you should pick these titles for your book group? Obviously there's, as Erin has indicated, there's a variety of titles that it's fiction, nonfiction, young adult, short stories, poetry, memoir. Don't feel that there isn't something that would fit your group for your book club. And you might want to choose two or three throughout the year. Probably these are going to be some new titles for your readers. And maybe there might be a possibility for an author visit. Some of these authors are really gung-ho to visit, some more than others. But I've known of some that are really agreeable to visiting. And I've had a local author come to my book club. And boy, did that make a lot of difference. It's true. Authors are more accessible than you might think. And they do enjoy opportunities to share about their books and to learn what other people have to say about their books. Who was the author you had visit your book club? We've had a couple, Karen Shoemaker has visited one of our book groups. And then I'll talk about this a little bit more later. But we're having LaDette Randolph is coming to the library in December. And she's bringing with her a number of authors who are represented on the book list. So I'll talk about that a little bit more when we talk about it differently. She came to my book group too. She's excellent, yes. She's really a lovely, lovely woman. So the criteria and Erin can speak more about this. Right. So there are two sets of criteria. The first set of criteria is what makes someone a Nebraska author. And this is the criteria we use at the Jane Hope-Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska Author to determine who is collected in our Nebraska authors collection. The first criteria is that an author was either born or grew up in Nebraska. Second is that the author was educated in Nebraska. So a lot of times if somebody was at the university for a long time or if they spent their summers here and then taught school here, which is the case with one of our authors who I'll tell you about. So the third one is then that Nebraska authors must have spent their productive writing years here. So they must meet one of these criteria. And sometimes we make an exception for somebody who might have a combination of these criteria. So this is our Nebraska author criteria. And then the Nebraska book criteria is that books need to be about Nebraska or have a Nebraska setting that they'll be available in libraries or bookstores. And that's a difficult one because a lot of the books that are so representative of the Nebraska history are not in print anymore. And so we had to not choose some books that might have been a good pick for the list because people would not be able to access them easily. And so we had to make sure that they're available. We used OCLC website to learn that. So it's possible that they might be out of print, but we have verified that they're in enough libraries in Nebraska that you can still access the book. So in some cases you might not be able to purchase it from Amazon, but there should be an option to borrow it from Inner Library Loan or from the Library Commission or just borrow it from your library. And the third criteria is that the titles will reflect a variety of work that have appealed to Nebraskans over time. And so this one, I think it would be easy to put all of Willa Cather's books on the list, but we did want to have a greater scope for the list and to have books that represent geographically with the understanding that you need geography, the types of people, the age groups, and the time in history really. We wanted to have a great scope for all those things. So that's the Nebraska book criteria. So for the short list, for the books that we're really focusing on, the books had to meet the criteria for both a Nebraska author and a Nebraska book. And then for books on the longer list, we've made an exception and said if it has a Nebraska theme but wasn't necessarily written by a Nebraska author, it can still be included on the list. Or on the other side, if it was written by a Nebraska author but doesn't have an overt Nebraska theme, we were still included on the list. So those are the criteria for the books that made the short list and the long list. And there are the URLs. That's where you can find them. So Nebraska150books.org will tell you everything you need to know the initiative as a whole. And then should we just click on that and go to it if you want to show it? Yeah, it's a pretty easy website to navigate. There's not too much superfluous information there. Pretty much just what you need, who we are, what the books are, and the ways that you can participate in the reading challenge. And then these are our sponsors at the very bottom. We are sponsored by a grant from Humanities Nebraska. And they are paying for Nebraska book materials, bookmarks, posters, reading challenge entry forms, things like that to be mailed to libraries. So if you would like any of that information, we can send those to you. And that is an initiative supported by Humanities Nebraska. And then to learn more about the NLHA, which is the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association, the organization that initiated this program, you can learn more from that link. And then we are the endorsed book list for the Nebraska150 celebration. And so you can learn more about Nebraska150 from that link. Excellent. And while we're here, we could just go, if you want to go back to the website, we can just show you how to get straight to the books. So if you go to the Nebraska Books tab right there, and then just go down to the Nebraska Sesquicentennial book list, click on that. That's how you can find your downloadable list of books. You can also see it embedded. You can either print it from that downloadable list or you can see it embedded below. And then the short list is on a separate tab. But that's how you can learn more about the books. Okay, brilliant. Okay, let's get to the books. Erin and I each selected books that we've read recently, maybe not so recently, but they come from the long list and they come from the short list. Sometimes just one of us has read the books. Sometimes both of us have read the books. So we'll both be contributing to some and maybe not to others. But we're starting it off with a very, very popular book. Eleanor and Park, if you haven't read this book, you've probably at least heard about it. This is likely the most popular book to have come out of Nebraska in a long time by Rainbow Rowell. This came out in 2013 and immediately made every best seller list, made every best reading list in 2013-2014. In Nebraska, it was the Omaha Reads Pick for 2015. And so we're all becoming more aware of Eleanor and Park in this state. It is targeted to a young adult audience, but it resonates really with readers, adult readers as well. It's a story that takes place in the late 1980s with two high school students, Eleanor and Park. And it's told in a dual narrative literary form. So you have the perspective of both Eleanor and Park and their perspectives on their environment and their relationship. Some of the themes are considered more adult and in fact there was some controversy about this book. I'll tell you a little bit about this. High school in Minnesota, Anoka High School challenged the book's placement in school libraries. A parent group called it vile profanity because of the crude language and there is quite a bit of language. I think it is representative of the way kids talk, but it is in there. And the group that objected to the book cited 227 instances of course language and sexuality and that's why they demanded it be pulled from the shelves. And the district responded to that by pulling the author Rainbow Rowell from a presentation that they had scheduled for her. And so if anything makes a book more popular, it's a good controversy. So the book was popular before that, but then it really launched in a big way after that controversy. The irony of that whole incident was that it happened during Band Books Week. I think it was hilarious. So other themes to recognize in this book are poverty. There's a kind of a sad storyline with Eleanor's family that also includes domestic abuse. And then there are some body issue themes and also themes of bullying and just assimilation in a high school environment. So those are the takeaways and some discussion points if you choose to have this for your book group. Is there anything you want to add to that? We had a small staff discussion including Susan who wrote about this for her Friday Reads. And it is, for me, it's a really soulful book, but soul-crushing book. That's a good way to describe it. It's hard. It's tough and it's not your... She might be a modern Judy Bloom. She might be someone who I put in that camp perhaps. I'm not sure. She takes it in a more modern setting. And it's set in Omaha as well, isn't it? It is. Omaha plays largely into that and without naming specifically the exact neighborhood. She was very careful to not smerch the Omaha neighborhoods. Most people will recognize places and bands. You're not familiar with Omaha. To me, that makes the book more interesting. Also, they're one of our authors and then it's our setting as well. And sometimes that brings it home in a different way as well. I hadn't noticed this on the book, but you've got that link to Susan's review. That links to the blog posts that we're doing on Friday's night. Our staff once a week blog about a book. And when it overlaps our book club collection, I include their reviews. So every Friday on our website, there's a staff review for a book. Not just Nebraska books. Those are anything. Can't be anything. We're all over the board here. Susan read a lot of our staff member, Susan, who is our overdrive person among other things. She's read a lot of Rainbow Row books now. And most of, I will say most of Rainbow Row books have a pretty, well not most of them. A couple of them have a Nebraska theme. And I think that's something people from Nebraska really can attach to their environment. And I mean, most people can attach to her the character driven parts of her novels. But certainly if you're from Nebraska, you can also connect to the place, which makes the book more meaningful. So she does a good job with that. I think so. And again, I would recommend this for adults and young adults. Yes, certainly. Don't let the audience make you think as though Harry Potter were for kids. I'd put it in that camp. And especially, I grew up and went to school in the 1980s. And so the book, having taken place in 1986, 87, I think it really brings you back. I mean, the references to music and clothes, you know, everything is kind of period. So anyone who's been through the 80s will really appreciate it. Yeah. Well, this book is going to get more attention. I can tell you now that our eight copies are reserved through to the end of the year. They're very popular. If you want to reserve our eight copies, it'll be next year sometime. So that's how popular this is. And don't let that squelch your request, but know that this is going to have a lot of time in popularity, I think. Okay, this is another one of yours. This is the book that I referenced earlier, A Different Plane, which is edited by Liddette Randolph. It's actually a collection of short stories from Nebraska authors, contemporary Nebraska authors. And Liddette Randolph, I'll just tell you to save the date right now. Liddette Randolph is going to be at Lincoln Libraries for the John H. Ames Reading Series. That's a reading series that's been going on for the last 20 years, and it allows authors to share work and progress and read from books that they've published. And so Liddette Randolph will be talking with authors represented in this book, A Different Plane. And so the authors who will be there are Timothy Shaffert, who's also on the list, with his book, The Swan Gondola. Jonas Agee, who also has books on the list, Brent Spencer, Karen Shoemaker, whose book we'll talk about a little bit later, and Anna Menardo. So that'll be part of the Aims Reading Series on Sunday, October 23rd, at Bennett Martin Public Library. So thanks for letting me put that little plug in there. But I also want to just talk about this book as a perspective for Nebraska literature. Most of the people represented in this book are renowned authors. You would probably recognize names like Tom McNeil, Kent Harris, Ron Hansen, Dan Schoen, Mary Piper wrote the introduction. So these are all people who are known worldwide for their literature, and they really bring a sense of Nebraska, I feel like, to the world. And so this book is just a collection of short stories by the authors that I mentioned and other authors as well. And so to read this book you have a better context for understanding Nebraska authors in company with each other. So this might be a good first read if you don't quite know what direction to go. If your book club wants to have a small sample of all the Nebraska authors, you can read this and kind of figure out which author resonates most with your group and which next book to pursue. This is a great starting point for that. I'll share one little brief snippet from the Scott's Bluff Herald by Bart Shannon. This was just published last week when he was reviewing the Nebraska 150 book list and this is what he said about a different plane. I picked up a different plane contemporary Nebraska fiction writers from the Scott's Bluff library and have found it to be diverse and wide ranging about the entire body of Nebraska literature. The stories in the books fan the country by writers with voices that are as diverse as this nation built by immigrants. So that's an endorsement if I ever heard one. Do you have anything to add about this book or authors? I've given it as gifts. I love the cover. I really love the cover of this and I think that because I've written in that truck. You really have? I mean I know just know how that feels. I think my parents are from the Sandhills and I just think that really does evoke Nebraska. And I've read some of the authors from within but not their... There is a counterpart to this book. This is Nebraska fiction writers and then Lodette Randolph edited a book called The Big Empty which is on the long list of Nebraska, the Nebraska 150 long list. And The Big Empty is Contemporary Nebraska Nonfiction Writers. So that's also another good one to check out if you want to learn more about the nonfiction authors from Nebraska. Okay. I chose to review the Middle of Everywhere, Mary Piper's book The Middle of Everywhere. And some of you may recall that Mary attended NLA in Grand Island after she wrote this book. It is about Lincoln, Nebraska being a refugee relocation center. And I read it some time ago but have recommended it many, many times. And it is nonfiction and I think maybe a lot of book groups might read fiction. This would be a great opportunity to widen your horizon. Mary Piper lives in Lincoln with her husband and he is her booking agent. His name is Jim and I think she's done a lot of readings here in Lincoln. She's very available. I love having one of our own. I like knowing one of our own. He's written the book that we're going to discuss. But the element of refugees right now in our political climate I feel like is more at a pitched fever than it's ever been before. And it occurred to me as I was rereading and refamiliarizing myself with the book, that this might bring out real politics in your book group in a way that perhaps your group has not explored those avenues before. And that's come up in my book group and it can be difficult to navigate that. So I don't want you to not consider this for your book group, but I definitely want to give you a caveat that it could unearth some issues that perhaps you didn't know about the folks in your book group. But what Mary Piper does really well is describe the cultural brokering and that is her language for taking people from another country, introducing them to Lincoln, Nebraska, which is a 180 from where they've come from. I remember an example of junk mail coming to a refugee's home credit card applications and they took them seriously. So when you think of another culture, anything that you wouldn't consider being a roadblock might very well be. Something they're not familiar with. Exactly. So junk mail was something she had to teach them about as a cultural broker. Little things like that that we grow up knowing how to navigate. Another culture would not. Teaching them how to drive. Oh my goodness. She's quite a woman. I've read other books of hers, probably three or four other books of hers. And is this the only one of hers on the list? Yes, this is the only one on the list. People would probably be most familiar with reviving Ophelia, which was her breakout book. And it was on adolescent girls. Eating disorders. Yes, that all of those things wrapped into the development of girls. But this is the only one that was relevant to Nebraska specifically. So that's the one that is on the list, even though it's not the most popular, but certainly the most relevant. If you haven't familiarized yourself with Mary, this will be the time to do that. She's worth getting to know. And I couldn't recommend this book more highly. I still stand by it. I still think it's worthy for a book group to read and discuss. Certainly, I think from an awareness perspective too, she's very, I mean, the politics are part of it, but also just you will see people standing on a street corner not knowing what to do. And she's trying to evoke in people that sense of awareness that we live in a culture where there are non-native people or there are displaced people living among us and they don't always know what to do. They don't know food, for example, was one thing she talked about. They'll put their milk in the cupboard and their canned food in the refrigerator. They don't have that natural understanding that we've grown up with. And just to have an awareness of that and to have some compassion and patience and then also to try and go out of your way to really make this transition more comfortable for these people. From the latest census in the city of Lincoln, 258,000 people, 19,000 or 7.4% are foreign-born. That's a lot to remember. And that was in 2011. So things have changed in the last five years, I'm certain, but Omaha and Lincoln continue to be refugee relocation centers. When I looked at data on the internet, there was very pointed political discussion about Lincoln and Omaha being political. And the URLs would indicate whose political side they were announcing that with. And there was a lot of unpopular opinion about that on the internet. So as I say, this would certainly bring up timely topics even though it was written a while ago. It is, I will say, is our featured book for September. So every month, as I mentioned, we feature four different books. And this is our nonfiction feature this month partly because of its timeliness. Also, the governor's lecture on the humanities is later this month. And that's something you can find on the Humanities Nebraska website. But the governor's lecture on humanities this month is about immigration and displacement. And the crisis that we face in dealing with that and our inability to agree on the best practices for that. So we're focusing on this book. And then I'll talk more about the fiction choice for this month as well. But this is certainly something that's relevant. And I think even though this book is specific to Lincoln, the theme is going to be applied anywhere. I mean, this is not just a Lincoln, Nebraska issue. It can be applied to any situation. And as you can see, we do have 14 copies of this. It's been around for a while. It still continues to check out here, but also recommended by ALA as an outstanding book for the college bound. So they're giving it their blessing as well. Good night, Nebraska by Tom McNeil from which we have 10 copies of. You were going to talk about this one, but I've read this book also. So go ahead. I'll just start a little bit and say this is one of the authors for whom we made an exception for the Nebraska author. We do consider him a Nebraska author, but in fact, he really only spent boyhoods in Nebraska. He spent time on the farm where his mother was born and raised. And then later in his life, he taught school in rural Nebraska. He spends most of his time in California. And you'll notice there's a kind of a California theme in this book. One of the characters goes to California for a time. So he spent most of his time in California as a youth, but his summers were spent on his grandparents ranch in the Panhandle. So one thing that Tom McNeil has said about Nebraska, and Tom McNeil is a especially famous author right now. His book Far Far Away, a young adult book or youth book, was just published two years ago and was just a huge success. And So Good Night Nebraska is one of his earlier books. It was published in 1999, but he's really becoming relevant in a big way right now. And so I'll just quote him from a 2011 interview with The New York Times and their question about why he focuses so much on Nebraska. And Tom McNeil said, for me it represents a type of purity that is hard to come by. So to think that we live in for somebody from California who spends the summers in Nebraska and thinks of this as a type of place with a purity about it. It's really interesting. But the funny thing to me is that that statement does not come through in the book. I don't know if you thought in the book that there was any kind of purity that you thought in the Nebraska. So this book, it's really the classic anti-hero in the main character who is Randall Hunsicker. And it starts out when he's aged 17 and his father dies unexpectedly. And then he really messes up. He has kind of a crazy sister and a crazy mother. And he ends up, it's kind of a crazy book. He shoots his mother's boyfriend, steals a car and crashes and comes close to killing himself. And he is going to be sent to reform school. And he has this option to move to a town, a fictional town called Good Night Nebraska. And there are theories on which town that actually is. I won't say here because people do not agree on which town it actually is. But there are theories about which town this is based on. But this town, Good Night, is a fictional town in the book. And it's a place that Randall Hunsicker calls sludgeville. He is not happy there, but he later begins to think of it as his home. And he really becomes a part of the community. Although he doesn't, I don't feel like, ever become a really virtuous character. He seems to struggle throughout the book. And I mean, the discussion on that is probably a nature versus nurture. You know, there are all kinds of things to consider in what makes Randall the kind of person he is. And fortunate of a falsim, he has captured the heart of the town's sweetheart, Marcy. And they get married and they have all kinds of trials and ups and downs. And then an ultimate conflict, which causes her to move away and then move back and then how the relationship recovers from that. And so it's a book about, I feel like it is equally character-centered, plot-centered, and place-centered. I mean, I think this is one of those rare books that you really have a lot of everything. And Nebraska as a place really features prominently in this. And then also Randall as a person. And then there's just a lot of conflict in the book as well. So did you...? My takeaway from this, and I read it a long time ago, was that he really could write women. I agree. I remember thinking, I kept looking at the front thinking, this is a male author. And boy, do I take note of that because I've been preparing for a program on women authors and becoming more mindful of, well, what's the difference? What am I reading for? And he was one for whom the female characters I felt were intimately described. I agree, especially in the person of Marcy who has to deal with Randall in a way that she... the emotions that she goes through in dealing with him and then leaving him and then ultimately coming back to him. And the process, I mean, he really describes well the emotional process. For me, that list is small of male authors who really do justice to the female characters. I agree. I can think of three only. And he's one. So I love that you say it's character, setting, and story, really unequal combination. It makes a lot of lists when we're trying to work on notable books around here for the center for the book. So don't let the copyright take you away on this one. He's an author you all might want to become more familiar with. Local Wonders. What a great book. We read this from my book group. Was this one of yours or one of mine? I think this is one of yours, although this is one of the runaway favorite books. There wasn't a negative vote for this book on the list. It was really, really well received by everyone. I have traveled to Ireland a number of times and I have given my tour guides this book because it's from Southeast Nebraska. I feel this really is a little piece of my hometown when I'm traveling in Ireland. Some parts of our geography are familiar. How can anyone not love Ted, who's described himself, and I've heard him speak, he describes himself as a hobbit because he does look a little like a hobbit. But my book group read this and you can see all the accolades here. One Book, One Lincoln Final in 2005, One Book, One Nebraska in 2011. And then much to our great pride, Ted served as our U.S. poet laureate for two years and really put poetry front and center and continues to do so in our state. I feel like he's such an advocate for poetry. Now, let me just say this, I don't like poetry. My college professors really didn't work well for me in terms of my lit classes. But Ted brought me around. So if poetry sets you off and you think, why would we ever do that for our book group? I would consider his writing to just be lyrical, oozing with place. I would read this again and again and there's one of his lines for me that I used as a Christmas card. If you wake up in the familiar, oh shoot, and you know where you are, it's local wonders. Oh, it's beautiful. I'm not quoting that exactly right. But he touches my sense of Nebraska where I also didn't like living for the longest time, but now I have come around to it. And Ted really can bring that home in a wonderful way. These are little essays. Well, I wouldn't call them poems. I wouldn't call them essays. They are short selections. Yeah, I think that's a good way of saying it. They have a cohesive and they're all tied together somehow. It's more of a collective. It's not a doesn't have a linear. No. And if you were reading this for your book group, I would encourage your readers to pick their favorite lines, their favorite paragraphs, their favorite text. And that is what I would use for the impetus of the discussion because whatever moves someone will not move another one. And you cannot, I think you cannot live in Nebraska without bringing yourself to this book at some point. I think that's a good way of saying it. And I think that's a good approach to reading it as well. And if you do, if you need a companion to this book, if you're reading this one and you do want to read some of his poetry, his book Delights and Shadows is also on our short list of poetry. And that was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry book and would be a good way of kind of contextualizing what he's writing in verse and what he's writing in his little essays here. You can, I mean, they're both very place-centered and obviously he's very tied to his environment. I will also say for Ted Kuzer that he is a champion of Nebraska authors. He is really committed to the Nebraska literary tradition and he draws from the early poets and authors from Nebraska and he's really committed to preserving their legacy. And so Ted Kuzer was one of the early, probably the founder of the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association and he was really significant in developing the Nebraska author collection so that those books would be preserved and available for people to see and then ensuring its sustainability for long-term with the fundraisers that just support our endowment. So he's been a big influence in the heritage group and also is surprisingly accessible. He was the first time I met him. I've met him several times now and it's just intimidating to be in the presence of somebody who's books. You're really inspired by. I feel I'm still a little bit starstruck by authors having read their work and being so inspired by them to meet them in person is really kind of an out-of-body experience and for meeting Ted Kuzer and just realizing that he's a normal person and he really is as down-to-earth as his book is. And so I think that you really see the soul and heart of a man in this book and that he's a person. And from a book club perspective, let's say your book group has just struggled through a pretty deep or a dense topic. That's maybe taken a little emotional life out of you and I've heard from a number of you, you really won't want to conquer a big book. This would be a great segue, a breath. Yes, a breath, exactly. And it doesn't take long to read. The book itself is quite small and we have many copies and I think this might be a segue from one tough book to another because while this is quite stunning, it will challenge your time in other ways, I think, in a good way. All right, the meaning of names we have discussed a little bit already and you have read this and I have not. Okay, well this is the book to read this year. I'll say that. This is Nebraska's one book, one Nebraska book for 2016 and I think the celebration of Nebraska Books is in about a month. So we'll have a new book, a new one book, one Nebraska book. So this is very relevant right now and Karen Shoemaker appears in libraries all over the state. You can go to the Library Commission website to see when those things are happening or Book Search is the beginning is another place to go or one book on Nebraska website or even the Nebraska 150 Books website has a lot of her appearances scheduled. So if you want to hear from the author herself about her book, there are all kinds of opportunities in the next month. This book is also a featured book alongside Mary Pifers, The Middle of Everywhere. It's a featured book for September on the theme of immigration and I'll do my best to talk about that here so the book takes place during World War I and it's north-central Nebraska and the towns and places are all real. There are no fictionalized towns and places here. You'll recognize O'Neill and you'll recognize the names of towns and the locations and so anyone who is familiar with that area of Nebraska will be able to attach some meaningful significance to the places that she references. So the book takes place World War I and it opens up with a scene from a train in which a German is riding on the train and meets with an unfortunate end. There are some local people who have strong feelings against Germans and the German immigration and the Germans were living in Nebraska at the time and he ultimately is thrown from the train and if you listen to Karen Shoemaker talk about this she'll tell you a little bit about how she found that story. She spent a lot of time in the microfiche rooms looking up old newspaper articles and she was kind of fascinated by the story of a man who was on a train, a German man who had gone on a train and disappeared and she doesn't know what happened but she drew from that story to create this little vignette in the book about what it was like for a German immigrant at the time with the attitudes and the local aversions to immigrants at that time and so that's how it opens. It's set in 1918 in a farm community and it's the story really of an ordinary woman who's just trying to raise her family during a really tumultuous time with the war going on and then also with disease which is where the book turns the primary focus is on the flu epidemic that is going through and so she has her own kind of problems she is estranged from her parents she's married a man who they did not approve of Fritz who is probably the second most significant person in the book and she's confronted with a lot of blowback from her family and so it's a love versus family and relationships and commitments and those are all each one of those things are big discussion points on their own the relationship between Gerda and her family the relationship between Gerda and her husband Fritz and those family dynamics and then the second thing that is significant to talk about is the flu epidemic that's going through and there's a lot to be said about the flu epidemic and why certain people got it and why certain people didn't get it strangely enough that people who got the flu and died from the flu were strong people with really good immune systems and I don't know how to retell the science of that but it affected different people differently and there were a lot of soldiers dying it ultimately ended the war because so many soldiers were dying from the flu and there were very few babies born I mean babies were not surviving the flu epidemic and so Gerda, the main character is pregnant and she's one of the survivors and so is her baby and this is a true story from the author's life Karen Shoemaker's mother was the baby that's in the book her grandmother had a baby during the flu epidemic in which no other baby, hardly any baby survived and so the personal influence in this book is really evident and that's something that Karen is really adept at describing and talking about so some really great discussion points here on immigration again and relationships and war and just human compassion and human relationships so there are some really good discussion questions I've basically just given you a rundown of the book but I know the Library Commission has some great discussion questions with this kit and then there are also discussion questions on the One Book One Nebraska website and then on Karen Shoemaker's website as well so some great places to find really good really good issues for talking about and considering Okay, because I'm looking at the clock it's just 10 till we're going to finish up the titles that we have left at 11 o'clock our new Library of Congress is being sworn in in Washington and it will be on the Library of Congress YouTube channel and Aaron and I are both eager to watch that so if you do have questions please put them in now because we'd like to wrap up at 11 so we can watch our new Library of Congress being sworn in first time in a woman and if you guys want to watch it too, yeah and we don't want to cut into your time Yeah, first time a woman, first time a librarian so we're very excited first time in African American we'll be leading that organization so I'm going to switch to... We did have one comment from the beginning that I just wanted to pass on to you was that when you were showing about our book club kits and everything someone had to say thank you very much for adding the browse feature of the 150 books I remember when you were here before someone had to ask about that and I said I know there's some way to do it and I didn't scroll down and see that it had been created as a separate click here to automatically look up limit it to all of those in our book club kit so nice addition to that I wanted to say even though we have 100 copies they are busy, busy, busy If you can't... Well circulated Yeah, if your book group can't read it this year please don't be discouraged they are really popular because this is the year people are trying to read it don't think that just because you don't read it this year it doesn't count Those of you who grew up with public television in Nebraska and I remember visiting my grandma in Bassett she had two channels, ETV and 1011 and I had a weird relationship with ETV for a long time because I just thought it was the rural station for the longest time but Ron Hull born in 1930 my goodness he's quite a storyteller and he's got a story to tell he was born in a house of ill repute in South Dakota but adopted by a really stand up family and his story of adoption is part of his recollection and his lifelong struggle am I good enough, why did they get rid of me I've talked to many adopted people and his story resonates with other stories that I've heard I was part of the group that helped give this the nonfiction award and so it's readable and creative nonfiction I would call it just a delight to get to know some people are burdened with telling their life story Ron's is worth getting to know he's worked in Vietnam helping to set up their television stations he's on the board at PBS in fact I ask of my neighbor he still has an office at ETV and an age 86 is not stopping anytime soon I would just point this out as a biography that is worth spending some time with for a person that you may or may not know Ron's got great stories to tell he was great friends with Mari Sandos and John Nyhart and brought those two I think to attention they may not have had in terms of being champions of literature so I'm not going to go on anymore about this we only have three copies of this but I helped give this a nonfiction autobiography award he's a great writer and I think his stories are worth encountering so all right I'll try to be brief on this one even though Ron Hansen is my very favorite author of all time Ron Hansen this is probably his least famous book it's one of the earlier books he wrote 1988 books that you would probably you would know by him are Atticus that was a nominee for the National Book Award the one that most people recognize is the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford because of the movie that was made from that book so those are two of his familiar titles this is a book of short stories early short stories and the reason this one is relevant to our list you can talk to the title it's called Nebraska Stories and actually it's only it's there are 11 stories in the book only six of them take place in Nebraska but the six that take place in Nebraska are really a really significant to our history and our landscape the one that is most popular and really might be the best short story ever written I'll just say you know if you think of this book for no other reason just check it out and read the read the book or I mean read the first short story and it's called Wickedness and this is about the Blizzard of 1888 it's a really famous Blizzard January 1888 it's been all read just a little bit since the weather was pure wickedness and the story is a collage of small stories it opens on a train where a young teacher on her way to Nebraska shares a ride with a poor carpenter who lost his limbs and ears to frostbite it continues with a variety of happy and sad stories my favorite one was about a pony that's in charge of delivering messages to parents who didn't know where their children were I mean in this Blizzard if you know a little bit about the story it was not a day that started out like it was going to be a Blizzard kids went to school and kids were on their way home from school and it was blinding Blizzard and then just feet and feet of snow and their children were lost in the Blizzard and there was a a pony in charge of delivering messages so it's kind of a how did you describe it before soul crushing it's like uplifting and soul crushing and there's a little bit of humor but also just it's a tragic comedy a little bit but just a really good good one and then there are I'll talk about the last one too just to keep it brief the last one is called Nebraska and I think there's a really good juxtaposition of the first one which is Wickedness and then the last story in the book which is called Nebraska because the first one is about people needing to think and act quickly and to address the Blizzard and to to deal with it and the last one is about technology and the progression time marching on and and people wanting to kind of stand still amidst that and so you start out needing to think and act quickly and kind of end with really wanting things wanting to be so and not progress and so it's kind of a good book ends for the book and then and then the pieces in the middle kind of fill it out and it has really mixed reviews not everyone loves this book I do but not everyone does and the general consensus seems to be these stories need to be read and talked about because the implications and the and the themes of the stories are not automatically evident so book of short stories and minds itself well to discussion so that's when to check out dating dead men is a mystery written by an actress you might recognize from when Harry met Sally Harley Jane Kozak who went to Lincoln high school and graduated in 1975 she won an Anthony award for this book which is a mystery award and she's been in other movies parenthood arachnophobia she was in my television so far for Santa Barbara you know I think actors who write like Steve Martin for me Steve Martin one of my favorite authors are kind of worth investigating this is the first in her Wally Shelly series she's a greeting card writer she's doing a dating project for a psychologist named Dr. Cookie on a book on how to avoid getting dumped all the time Janet Ivanovich might be I like Janet better but I would put this in this camp and genre books sometimes are not selected for book clubs but you've got a Nebraska connection here it is set in California but she's one of our own and there would be again this might be a breath for your book group to take it's goofy it's silly it's slapstick you can imagine it as a movie so here's a quick this is a mystery example of a mystery in three minutes okay I'm going to just combine my last two I'm talking about Sing Them Home and then that's by Stephanie Callows and then the last book I'm going to talk about is Night of the Twisters and I'll combine them because they're both books about tornadoes Sing Them Home is an adult book it has magical realism some of it's told from the perspective of a woman who died in a tornado it takes place in the fictional town Emlyn Springs but it's also a fictional basket town that people can relate to and it has that kind of that different approach to the literary narrative which is the magical realism and then Night of the Twisters by Ivy Ruckman most of you will probably recognize this book it's told from the perspective of a 12 year old boy who survived the tornadoes and it is a runaway favorite for the youth and so those are really really good relevant books for the summer as the summer is wrapping up and also books that are real fan favorites just easy to read and enjoyable with easy things to talk about mostly place and weather which we all love to talk about so that's where I'm going to wrap it up for my books oh yes we have one more okay very good thank you all please consider reading these books with your book group if we've given you themes to talk about I hope we've inspired you not limited to but including some of these and so we're going to go watch our new Librarian of Congress thank you and bye bye thank you very much everyone for attending get switched over to there we go that will wrap it up for this week's edition of Encompass Live it has been recorded it is being recorded still you can find us online Encompass Live all of our recordings are here on our website underneath our archive sessions underneath our upcoming shows and the previous one that Erin was on as I mentioned right here in Nebraska a few books celebrating Nebraska's sesquicentennial through literature you can go there and watch that recording and then later this afternoon today's recording will be here as well along with the slides that will wrap it up I'll be joining us next week you guys can go if you want to they're trying to get out of here I'll wrap up this what our topic is one book for Nebraska kids and one book for Nebraska teens you've heard of one book programs here in Nebraska our children's and youth young adult coordinator Sally Snyder has come up with a program she's been doing it for a few years where she picks a book for kids and for teens she's going to be on the show with us next week we'll talk about that and joining her will also be Tom Watson who is the author of Stick Dog who is the one book for Nebraska kids book this year so definitely join us for that next week sign up for that show and any of our other ones also we are on Facebook so if you are a big Facebook user please do pop over to somebody's still logged in here Facebook and give us a like and you will get notifications of when our shows are starting when recordings are available all that good stuff on the Facebook page other than that that wraps up this morning thank you very much for attending we'll see you next time at Encubus Live and go and watch Carla Hayden be sworn in thanks a lot bye bye