February 2025 | Maria Firkaly
What’s not to love? I may be a bit biased, but our little library in Andover, Ohio is a great place. Our staff are friendly and helpful. We have cool programming for all ages. (Take a peek at what’s coming up here) If you can’t find the book or movie you want, we can pretty much get almost any title through out collaboration with the Clevnet system. And ebooks and audiobooks? Our Libby and Hoopla apps rock!
I was recently taken aback by a comment made in the library recently. The person said, “Libraries are becoming obsolete, you know.” No, I hadn’t noticed that at all, actually. I laughed because the person was in the library using services offered by the library. We are a busy place. Here are some things people do at your Andover Public Library:
- Make copies (for any number of reasons)
- Scan documents
- Fax
- Use our space to:
- Study
- Meet up with real estate agents, community services, hold meetings, enjoy our air conditioning or heat, hang out, take kids on a supervised visit, work on projects, and more
- Use our computers
- Use our WIFI to:
- work on projects
- install new software on gaming systems
- sit in the parking lot and watch a movie
- Get technology help
- Print out labels to return items
- Come and play cards
- Make crafts together
- Research local history
- Enjoy speakers on a wide variety of subjects
- Work on earning a GED
- Find a new book to read
- Pick up movies
- Borrow a hotspot or laptop
February is “Library Lovers Month”. I hope you stop in and that when you leave, you feel the library love!
Here is a fun list of reading suggestions that feature libraries and books as an integral part of the story. I hope you find a book or two to “love”!
The Library of Lost and Found by Phaedra Patrick
A shy librarian whose kind heart is often exploited receives a mysterious book of fairy tales from the beloved grandmother she believed dead and embarks on a perspective-changing journey of astonishing family secrets.
The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd
When her estranged father is found dead with a seemingly worthless map hidden in his desk, cartographer Nell Young soon discovers the map is extremely valuable—and that a mysterious collector will stop at nothing to destroy it and anyone who gets in the way.
What You Wish For by Katherine Center
When the new principal turns out to be the former, unrequited crush of her teen years, elementary school librarian Samantha Casey discovers that he is a changed man, determined to destroy everything she loves about the school, which forces her to take action.
The Lost Book of Bonn by Brianna Labuskes
In 1946 Germany, librarian Emmy Clarke, while cataloging literature plundered by the Nazis, finds a poetry collection which leads her to two sisters, a horrific betrayal and an extraordinary protest of hundreds of brave women who did what so few others dared to do under the Third Reich—they said no.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Zachary Ezra Rawlins is enrolled in graduate school in Vermont. At the library one day, he finds a book full of fantastical stories, but he is astounded to read a story from his own childhood. He sets off to discover how his story made it into this strange book, which leads him through a series of encounters that bring him to the door of a mysterious underground library. There, he discovers a realm of protectors who sacrifice much to preserve the stories, and in investigating their stories, learns what really matters.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Barcelona, 1945–just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence.
The Borrower by Rebecca Makai
Lucy Hull, a young children’s librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, ten-year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading but needs Lucy’s help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly antigay classes with celebrity Pastor Bob. Lucy stumbles into a moral dilemma when she finds Ian camped out in the library after hours with a knapsack and an escape plan.
The Library of Fates by Aditi Khorana
After losing everything when her father’s kingdom is brutally and suddenly taken over, sixteen-year-old Princess Amrita flees the royal palace with her companion, the seer and former slave Thala, and together they hope to find the legendary Library of All Things, where they can access the stories of their lives and their loved ones, change their future, and save the kingdom.
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Carolyn’s not so different from the other human beings around her. She’s sure of it. She likes guacamole and cigarettes and steak. She knows how to use a phone. She even remembers what clothes are for. After all, she was a normal American herself, once. That was a long time ago, of course–before the time she calls “adoption day,” when she and a dozen other children found themselves being raised by a man they learned to call Father.
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective.
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
One thing any Librarian will tell you: the truth is much stranger than fiction… Irene is a professional spy for the mysterious Library, a shadowy organization that collects important works of fiction from all of the different realities. Most recently, she and her enigmatic assistant Kai have been sent to an alternative London. Their mission: retrieve a particularly dangerous book. The problem: by the time they arrive, it’s already been stolen. London’s underground factions are prepared to fight to the death to find the tome before Irene and Kai do, a problem compounded by the fact that this world is chaos-infested — the laws of nature bent to allow supernatural creatures and unpredictable magic to run rampant. To make matters worse, Kai is hiding something — secrets that could be just as volatile as the chaos-filled world itself. Now Irene is caught in a puzzling web of deadly danger, conflicting clues, and sinister secret societies. And failure is not an option — because it isn’t.
The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith
Assigned to watch the restless characters of books left unfinished by their authors, a head librarian of Hell’s neutral Unwritten Wing tracks an escaped Hero before an angel attack reveals the existence of a powerful literary weapon.
Buried in the Stacks: A Haunted Library Mystery by Allison Brook
(This is part of a series, so if you like it there are more!)
Librarian Carrie Singleton is building a haven, but one of her neighbors is misbehavin’. Can resident spirit Evelyn help Carrie catch the culprit who made her a ghost?
Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles
From the clay-tablet collections of ancient Mesopotamia to the storied Alexandria libraries in Egypt, from the burned scrolls of China’s Qing Dynasty to the book pyres of the Hitler Youth, from the great medieval library in Baghdad to the priceless volumes destroyed in the multi-cultural Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo, the library has been a battleground of competing notions of what books mean to us. Battles explores how, throughout its many changes, the library has served two contradictory impulses: on the one hand, the urge to exalt canons of literature, to secure and worship the best and most beautiful words; on the other, the desire to contain and control all forms of human knowledge.
The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCraken
The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt- the ‘over-tall’ eleven-year-old boy who’s the talk of the town-walks into her library and changes her life forever. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless, they soon find their lives entwined in ways that neither one could have predicted. In James, Peggy discovers the one person who’s ever really understood her, and as he grows- six foot five at age twelve, then seven feet, then eight-so does her heart and their most singular romance.
Running the Books by Avi Steinberg
In this captivating memoir, Steinberg, a Harvard grad and struggling obituary writer, spends two years as a librarian and writing instructor at a Boston prison, attracting con men, minor prophets, ghosts, and an assortment of quirky regulars searching for the perfect book and a connection to the outside world.
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
Scholar Diana Bishop mistakenly requests a bewitched manuscript for her research. She belongs to a family of witches–but because she’s avoiding using her powers in favor of scientific pursuits, she sends the manuscript back into storage. What she doesn’t realize is, she’s already started down a path toward a life she wants to avoid.
Evil Librarian by Michelle Knudson
When Cynthia Rothschild’s best friend, Annie, falls head over heels for the new high-school librarian, Cyn can totally see why. He’s really young and super cute and thinks Annie would make an excellent library monitor. But after meeting Mr. Gabriel, Cyn realizes something isn’t quite right. Maybe it’s the creepy look in the librarian’s eyes, or the weird feeling Cyn gets whenever she’s around him. Before long Cyn realizes that Mr. Gabriel is, in fact… a demon. Now, in addition to saving the school musical from technical disaster and trying not to make a fool of herself with her own hopeless crush, Cyn has to save her best friend from the clutches of the evil librarian, who also seems to be slowly sucking the life force out of the entire student body!
The Broken Spine by Dorothy St. James
Trudell Becket finds herself in a bind when her library is turned into a state-of-the-art bookless ‘technological center’. A library with no books breaks Trudell’s book-loving heart and she decides to rescue hundreds of beloved tomes slated for the recycle center. Under the cover of darkness, Trudell sets up a secret book room in the library’s basement and opens it to her loyal patrons.
When the town councilman, who was a vocal supporter of the library’s transformation is crushed by an overturned shelf of DVDs, Trudell becomes the prime suspect. She was the only person in the library at the time of his murder, or so the police believe. But the visitors to Trudell’s secret bookroom were actually all there too.
If she tells the police about the backdoor patrons who were in the library at the time of the murder, she’d have to explain about the secret book room and risk losing the books. To keep herself out of jail, Trudell–with the help of a group of dedicated readers–decides to investigate. She quickly finds herself on the same page with a killer who would love to write her final chapter.