Welcome to April, and the fourth reading prompt for our 2024 Read With MLC reading challenge: read a celebrity memoir. Is there anything more delicious than escaping your own life to peer into the intricacies of someone else's? Affairs, addiction, divorce, abuse... seeing how others deal with adversity somehow makes our own more manageable. Add in the shiny gloss of reading a tell-all book about ..read more

Hear ye, hear ye! There is a total solar eclipse happening on April 8th, 2024, the last total eclipse for 20 years. According to timeanddate.com, Jackson, Mississippi, will experience approximately 90% totality at 1:52 p.m. In celebration of this momentous occasion, I wanted to share what MLC has done to help public libraries, and therefore all Mississippians, enjoy this event. First, there ..read more

Have you ever wanted to learn more about your town? Do you like gossip and facts about trees? You need to check out the WPA files! WPA stands for Works Progress Administration, which was organized as part of the New Deal to provide jobs for unemployed Americans during the Great Depression. One of the projects of the WPA was to gather local histories by going into each county, interviewing the ..read more

It's Women's History Month. Quick! Name your favorite female Mississippi author!There are a slew of wonderfully talented authoresses hailing from our great state and they have written (and continue to write!) in a number of genres: romance, mystery, biography, and more. Whatever your preferred reading style is, these women have covered it. Sometimes, though, it feels like they're overshadowed by ..read more

Welcome to March and the third reading prompt of our 2024 Read with MLC challenge: read a work of graphic nonfiction. Nonfiction comics have been around for longer than you might think. Thomas Nast, who created political cartoons, started drawing as a teen in 1856. The Republican elephant was one of the artistic brainchildren of his decades-long career. He brought other popular figures to&nbsp ..read more

We all know fiction genres: romance, science fiction, fantasy… all types of books that have their own shelves in bookstores everywhere. But what about nonfiction? Most people know what nonfiction is: books about real world concepts, people, or events. You might not know it, but there are different types of nonfiction. Much like fiction genres, there aren’t any hard and fast rules for nonfiction ..read more

February is Black History Month, which makes it a great time to visit the bookshelves and refocus your reading on some of the great Black authors out there. There are a ton of Black Mississippi authors--historical and modern--just waiting for you to discover them. Their perspectives on Mississippi life and culture are must-reads, but you might not know where to start if you're not familiar ..read more

Welcome to February and the second reading prompt of our 2024 Read with MLC challenge: reread a book you love. There's something incredibly special about a book you enjoy so much that you want to reread it. Setting aside a wedge of time to experience something again is a unique act, but especially when it's something as time consuming as reading a book. I don't do a lot of rereading--there are so ..read more

American copyright is a strange beast. The law can be a bit complex, but to sum it up, a creator (or the creator’s estate) can hold exclusive copyright to a work for 70 years after the author’s death or 95 years after publication. After that time, the works are released to the public domain. When a work is in the public domain, it can be rebroadcast, reworked, streamed, performed, and so on and ..read more

Braille: it's the bumpy bits that Blind people use to read, right? Invented by Frenchman Louis Braille (1809-1852) in 1824, this writing system is known worldwide as an aid for those without vision. It can be found nearly everywhere, from elevators to the tops of fast food drink lids, but that might be all you know about braille. There are some pretty cool facts about the little bumps that ..read more