If you enjoy cozy mystery novels, have you noticed how many use a librarian as the amateur sleuth protagonist?  Nora Cage’s tales of mayhem are narrated by a bookmobile librarian in Georgia.  Allison Brooks writes about a Connecticut library with a resident ghost librarian. Mary Lou Kirwin’s librarian Karen Nash is not at home working in Minnesota when she discovers bodies; she’s traveling to or living in England; but the plots do involve books — she finds romance with a handsome bookseller — and one murder weapon is a bookcase full of rare editions.  Search the catalog for “library mysteries” for these and similar page-turners.  A number of fun-sounding children’s books come up, too.

We’ll be right back after the following commercial: Free Books!  How does this sound?  Two Free Books per hour for work you’ll enjoy?  Free Books!  The Friends need Your help with the Book Sales which raise so much money every month for your library.  Free Books!   We especially need volunteers to help set up and take down Book Sales like the one coming up November 14 through 17.  Free Books!  Click here for the link.  Now back to your blog in-progress.

Here’s one you might find interesting——Reading Behind Bars: a Memoir of Literature, Law, and Life as a Prison Librarian (027.665092).  The author, Jill Grunenwald, spent two years as the librarian at a men’s minimum-security prison in northern Ohio.  She was in her twenties, and this was her first job out of college.  In this poignant and funny account, she details the daily routine and not-so-routine workings of the facility, where one of the few pleasures is “free” time in the library, and the only “escape” is reading.

According to website BookBrowse, 88 per cent of private book clubs are all-women groups. Nearly half of library and other public groups include men.  The main criteria for choosing which book to read is “one that will provoke good conversation.”  My club’s criteria is “one the library has enough copies of!”

Give thanks for books. . . .