Library Idea of the Week: Book making in the Library!
Cathy Belben
March 28, 2005

I’m in the middle of my annual craft collaboration with the creative writing teacher, and we’re having a great time making handmade books. As in the past, I introduced the unit with a brief “history of books” lesson, and then displayed four types of books I would be instructing students about. Each student voted on the type of books he/she wanted to make, and I then instructed small groups each day in their particular type of book.

This is the same lesson I presented at WLMA, but I’ve added more stuff this year—if you have access to PowerPoint, you can see the slide shows of the books students made in previous years, as well as a show of books that I added this year that were made by adult crafters. Feel free to use any of these on your own, or contact me about setting up a project together--I can make myself available to you for a small fee if you’re interested in a mini-workshop at any time.  The book-making stuff is here:

http://www.be.wednet.edu/OurSchools/Hs/library/books.htm

Book of the Week
Galloway, Gregory.
As Simple as Snow.
© 2005  (Fiction/Suspense)

Mysterious Anna Cayne appears in the unnamed narrator’s life and changes it irrevocably in this strange, unforgettable mystery.

We learn from the narrator that Anna “moved here in August and by February had killed everyone in town”—not literally of course, by Anna Cayne has the bizarre pastime of writing detailed obituaries of people who are still alive.

Anna Cayne doesn’t seem to be particularly preoccupied with death, however. As she and the narrator become more and more involved, he discovers that she is detail-oriented in many other ways, obsessed with codes, secrets messages, and dropping clues about her own (possibly mysterious) past.  

When Anna disappears just a week before Valentine’s Day, the narrator begins to suspect that everything she’s ever written or given him have been clues about where she is now...it’s just up to him—and us—to piece together the puzzle and discover what she’s hiding.

This is a perplexing story that begs for more than one reading—and even for a group of people to read and discuss it together. Highly addictive and highly recommended. Check out the website, too:  www.assimpleassnow.com