Here's my Bookspin list for February! I am both pleased by the number of books that didn't and and slightly dismayed by the number of books that did carry over from the last time I did this in August. Lets see if we can knock this list down some more!
pickFirst Audio book to kick off the year! As an outreach librarian myself, this was a super fun read! I had it recommended by one of my outreach patrons and was instantly drawn into the story and the parallels of life I shared with the main character. So fun! Also gut wrenching, tear jerking, gasp inducing and at many different times made me want to linger in the car listening just a second longer.
pickOverall, this was a pretty interesting and engaging story about the history of bourbon and some of the characters who helped shape it. I‘ve been going a bit overboard since having hit the bourbon trail in Kentucky last summer! 🥃 4/5
pickSo interesting and memorable. Blue-skinned people of Kentucky, Kentucky Pack horse library of the 1930s—not that long ago and yet another world. Loved it.
Excited to share my October‘s #TitlesAndTunes #Blues @barbarabb 🩵💙 This book has been on my TBR for ages- a story about the “blue people” of Eastern Kentucky - a place known for their bluegrass music 🎻
While researching songs I actually came across a song with the exact book title by the Ruby Friedman Orchestra plus I had to add a nice bluesy remake of Blue Kentucky Moon from LeAnn Rimes 🌚
pickReading Bobbie Ann Mason's older works is like visiting the world I grew up in. She's from Mayfield, KY, which is only about 70 miles from my hometown in TN. She mentions locations I know well, and her characters use words and phrases I'd all but forgotten. They would be great stories without this sense of familiarity, but it does make me enjoy them even more. #storyaday2023 #doublespin
pickI believe the author had two objectives: 1. To provide information both about the Pack Horse librarians(Roosevelt initiative to get books to poor remote areas)and the blue people from Kentucky; 2.To insist on the importance of literature to abstract us from reality and enrich our lives.The story is simple and predictable,and there's a critical part of me that thinks that it's horrible to praise the effort of using literature as palliative care ⬇️
panThe historical aspects—the Pack Horse Librarians & the blood-disordered blue people of Kentucky—are interesting. Too bad about the overwrought, cliched prose. Characters are either saintly or evil. Hill people value tattered reading material over all else—and meanwhile we are constantly reminded that these people are starving to death. It‘s not my kind of thing but I‘m curious what my feminist book club will make of it tonight.
I cradled my arm across them both, and wept, howled—a dry howl, an empty riverbed droughted from heartache, hurts, and hardships—till the sobs rent the hollows, the deep rock caverns of my soul, and brought forth rivers of agony.
🙄
pickI‘ve read about that pack horse librarians from Kentucky before and am awed but how much of a difference they made to the Appalachian community. Blue people was new to me and brings a whole new leaning to being colored. It‘s so awful how some people have to be so petty and small minded rather than accepting of their neighbors.
