Make Time to Play: May

This year, we’re celebrating play at the library! Everyone knows how beneficial play is for kids, but did you know that it is equally important for adults? It can be a wonderful stress reliever, boosts creativity, alleviates boredom, and may even lower your blood pressure. To that end, every month in 2024, we’re highlighting a different form of play. Each month we’ll have a bingo-style fun card. If you complete all the activities for a blackout on your card, you’ll receive a special prize. The more of the 12 monthly fun cards you complete this year, the better chance you have to win the grand prize and be crowned our annual play champion!

For May, we’re celebrating all things play-acting. Beyond just being a lot of fun, acting can improve confidence, as well as public speaking, listening, memorization, and teamwork skills.

Make It A Summer of Adventure Sneak Peek

Be sure to keep an eye out for the Friends of the Berryville Library’s upcoming raffle. Starting in May, you’ll be able to buy tickets for the Friends’ Make It a Summer of Adventure fundraising raffle. A special thank you to our presenting sponsor, Tonya Williams at Shelter Insurance, and all of our other generous sponsors. The prize drawing will be held Saturday, June 8, at the Ice Cream Social.

Local Roots: April

Lots has changed in the years the Berryville Library has been in our current building. We expect lots will change in the years the library will be housed in the new building we are hoping to break ground on soon. That’s why we think it is so important as we move towards this bigger, better future to remember our roots. To that end, we have created the Berryville Library Legacy Project, which lets donors highlight a piece of local history of their choice by selecting photographs to be displayed on the end of a shelving unit at the new library. We also remain committed to helping create a sense of place through our collection, so we are going to highlight our Arkansas section this year.  Each month, we’ll look at some of the different books and resources in that collection that feature unique parts of the history and culture of Berryville, Carroll County, the Ozarks, and Arkansas. There’s lots to explore about this place we call home! For April, we’re looking at local plants.

Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made

In Malaysia in 1945, near the end of World War II, the Alcantara family is barely hanging on. Matriarch Cecily’s husband Gordon is a shell of his former self, while their beloved teen-aged son Abel has disappeared. Their daughter Jujube tries to maintain some semblance of normality as she works serving occupying Japanese soldiers in a teahouse, while the baby of the family, Jasmin, spends her days hiding in the basement. Cecily herself harbors a secret she desperately hopes her family never discovers–she helped usher in this invasion by working as a spy for Japanese General Fujiwara a decade earlier. Cecily had been lulled in by his pan-Asian message and the hope of overthrowing the colonizing British, but that’s not quite how things panned out.

Book Buzz: Literary Classics Reimagined, Historical Legal Wrangling, Collaborative Fiction, Space Operas, Van Living, and Audiobook Thrillers

Every month, we’re profiling new-ish releases that are getting critical and commercial buzz. For April, we’re looking at an acclaimed new take on the story of Huckleberry Finn, historical fiction about a famous 19th century British trial, a collaborative effort between some of today’s most famous writers, a new series that melds the genres of science fiction and espionage thriller, a guide to living the van life, and two very different thrillers on audiobook, one with a historical setting while the other is extremely contemporary.

Make Time to Play: April

This year, we’re celebrating play at the library! Everyone knows how beneficial play is for kids, but did you know that it is equally important for adults? It can be a wonderful stress reliever, boosts creativity, alleviates boredom, and may even lower your blood pressure. To that end, every month in 2024, we’re highlighting a different form of play. Each month we’ll have a bingo-style fun card. If you complete all the activities for a blackout on your card, you’ll receive a special prize. The more of the 12 monthly fun cards you complete this year, the better chance you have to win the grand prize and be crowned our annual play champion!

For April, we’re celebrating citizen science! It’s a way for everybody to encounter, interact with, and even participate in science. Basically, it just means that you can help conduct scientific research. Citizen science helps ensure everyone has more scientific knowledge, interest, and awareness, and it also helps professional scientists conduct much more extensive research.

Local Roots: March

Lots has changed in the years the Berryville Library has been in our current building. We expect lots will change in the years the library will be housed in the new building we are hoping to break ground on soon. That’s why we think it is so important as we move towards this bigger, better future to remember our roots. To that end, we have created the Berryville Library Legacy Project, which lets donors highlight a piece of local history of their choice by selecting photographs to be displayed on the end of a shelving unit at the new library. We also remain committed to helping create a sense of place through our collection, so we are going to highlight our Arkansas section this year.  Each month, we’ll look at some of the different books and resources in that collection that feature unique parts of the history and culture of Berryville, Carroll County, the Ozarks, and Arkansas. There’s lots to explore about this place we call home! For March, we’re looking at local wildlife.

Book Buzz: Literary Puzzles, Westerns, Espionage Thrillers, Morbid Memoirs, and Suspenseful Audiobooks

Every month, we’re profiling new-ish releases that are getting critical and commercial buzz. For March, we’re looking at a fiendishly difficult book puzzle, two Westerns based on real-life events, a spy novel, a memoir about being a death investigator for Manhattan’s Medical Examiner office, and a literary thriller audiobook.

Movie Review: The Thief Collector (2023)

When the owners of a New Mexico antique store agreed to appraise and buy an estate in rural Cliff, New Mexico, in August 2017, they found a lot of unusual possessions left behind by the deceased elderly married couple who’d previously owned it. The antique store guys were struck by a mid-century abstract painting curiously tucked away behind a door in the master bedroom, but their main focus was on how cheap and ugly its frame was. They planned to display it in a guesthouse after getting a better frame, but soon after placing it in their store, a customer told them he thought it was an authentic Willem de Kooning painting and offered $200,000 for it. Realizing they might be in over their heads, they started some basic online research and quickly started to suspect they had unwittingly acquired Woman-Ochre, one of the most infamous and valuable stolen paintings in the world.

Make Time to Play: March

This year, we’re celebrating play at the library! Everyone knows how beneficial play is for kids, but did you know that it is equally important for adults? It can be a wonderful stress reliever, boosts creativity, alleviates boredom, and may even lower your blood pressure. To that end, every month in 2024, we’re highlighting a different form of play. Each month we’ll have a bingo-style fun card. If you complete all the activities for a blackout on your card, you’ll receive a special prize. And if you complete all 12 fun cards, you’ll be eligible to win a grand prize and be crowned our annual play champion!

In honor of Pi Day, March is all about having fun with numbers! Playing numbers games can improve your math skills, of course, but specifically what they build are problem-solving and reasoning skills, as well as numeracy (literacy with numbers). Numeracy encompasses everything from recognizing numbers to basic counting to understanding numbers’ relationships to each other.