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Notes from Our Librarians
From Remy Timbrook, Acting Manager, Piedmont Avenue Branch
Summer is the busy season at the library. Last month we answered approximately 1,500 reference questions!
Foot traffic has increased this summer as well - we've enjoyed a high turnout each week at the summer evening programs.
Oakland Public Library offers summer reading programs for kids, teens, and adults.
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Don't forget to turn in your reading log or book reviews before the August 6th deadline. At a smaller branch like this one, the odds are "ever in your favor" when raffle time comes.
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From Shani Boyd, Children's Librarian I
We had a wonderful time with our programs in the last month. Our five programs in June had great attendance with 58 people at Drag Queen Storytime, 28 people who danced with Cunamecue, and 77 people at Zany Zoe.
Turn out for Toddler Storytime has been strong with as many as 50 people in attendance. Children are starting to get more comfortable singing and interacting with one another. Toddler Storytime is every Tuesday at 10:15am.
We still have coloring sheets available inside the branch and we now trace stencils on the kids' table for them to color in because this helps control what gets drawn on the table.
In the next month:
Toddler Storytime every Tuesday 10:15am Songs, active rhymes and stories especially for ages 18 months to 3 years.
7/15 Teens: Let's make Tiny Art! 1:30 to 2:30pm Come in and make a mini masterpiece for our tiny art show, featuring tiny paintings by teens all around Oakland!
7/20 Dance With Genoa Sperske 6 to 7pm Genoa Sperske, teaching artist at San Francisco Ballet and Luna Dance, will inspire you and your little ones to use your imagination and get moving.
7/21 Build. Make. Play. 1:30 to 2:30pm Come and join us for an afternoon of activities! Who knows what we will be doing? It could be making ice cream or tie dying our shoelaces.
8/6 End of Summer Kids Party at Liberation Park 12:00 – 3:00pm 7101 Foothill Blvd. at the corner of 73rd Ave. and Foothill Blvd. There will be performers, storytime, games, and more!
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Petting zoo at the library |
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Cunamacue (Afro-Peruvian Dancers) |
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In today’s Oakland public schools, students spend many hours learning the mechanics of reading. The goal of the Piedmont Avenue Elementary School Reading Partners is more broad than that: it is to teach the delight of reading. For more than twenty years, this group of dedicated volunteers has been reading to students with the aim of instilling a love for books.
Acting as mentors, not tutors, Reading Partners work one-on-one with the same child each week, building a relationship that is focused on the joy of books. In the school library, we read with students for half an hour at a stretch and then walk them back to their classroom. So simple - yet the consistent, caring attention of a book-loving adult can be a transformational experience for a child.
The Piedmont Avenue Branch Library and the librarians there are an important part of this program. Even though PAES has a school library, it does not have a librarian. And, from the school library, the students have limited ability to check out books. Our branch library is key to the Reading Partners program: with the help of the children’s librarian, the volunteer Reading Partners find books to check out and take to read together with the student.
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Notes from the Friends of the Piedmont Avenue Library (PAL)
How can we support OPL efforts to lease the CDC?
The Friends of PAL June meeting discussed possible challenges ahead for the Library department's proposal to lease the Child Development Center from the Oakland Unified School District for a bigger library branch (described in last April's HOOT). These will include the city's budget prioritization process for funding Capital Improvement Projects and finding additional sources of funds for building renovation and remodeling. Our July meeting will feature Jenera Burton, Supervising Librarian for our branch, who will update and advise us on steps we can take to improve support for the proposal.
The next meeting of the Friends of Piedmont Avenue Library is Tuesday, July 19 at 6:30 pm at the library. To learn more about the Friends check out our website https://www.friendsofpal.org/
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Book Me
A service for readers from Oakland Public Library.
Get personal reading recommendations!
Oakland Public Library book lovers are ready to send you customized recommendations based on your own reading tastes and interests.
Select the Surprise Me option and they will put some books on hold for you instead of sending you a reading list. Pick them up at any library you choose. This is a great option if you want a response faster than the two weeks
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The Avid Reader by Louis Segal |
I’ve been an avid reader since I could read. In high school I used to cut school to read in the Berkeley Public Library. I’m writing this column to share some of the books I love. I hope, perhaps, you might grow to love a few of them. |
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Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler [1993]
Octavia Butler is an extraordinary writer. Born on the wrong side of the tracks in Pasadena, she was a quiet and bookish child. She would become one of the first African-Americans to enter into, and be acclaimed in, the science fiction world. She received multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, and after writing this book received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.
Parable was published in 1993 and the novel’s events takes place in the mid-2020s. The narrator is Lauren Oya Olamina, a quiet, thoughtful 15 year-old African-American. She is afflicted with “hyperempathy,” what doctors pathologize as “organic delusional syndrome.” For Lauren it is a disease that is “a weakness…[and] a shameful secret.” The symptoms are acute sensitivity, even paralysis and commensurate pain for any pain inflicted upon other sentient beings. In fact, not pathologized, her syndrome is acute compassion. Lauren’s father is a Baptist minister who trains his family in survivalist skills. Lauren’s stepmother is Mexican and a teacher and both parents are pillars of the community in the modest and racially diverse community of Robledo, a suburb just north of Los Angeles. Robledo struggles in the increasingly disordered world. Rumors of war. Drought. Fires. Earthquakes. Rising sea levels. Extreme fuel shortages. Roving gangs. Misogyny. Extreme corporate greed. Coercion. Degraded labor. Slavery. Incendiary drugs. Soon desperate waves of refugees, poor and hungry, along with a vanguard of drug addled pyromaniacs, tear down the town’s gates and loot and kill all who remain.
Lauren now becomes an orphaned refugee and embarks on a remarkable journey. She heads by foot north from Robledo to Cape Mendocino where there are rumored to be jobs and remote and arable lands. She is joined by fellow pilgrims, some with the syndrome, others lost and desperate, all seekers for a better world. Lauren begins to create and articulate a new roadmap to salvation and assumes leadership among her fellow travelers as she begins to articulate the links between the “shameful secret” and a nascent theology.
“All that you touch
You change.
All that you change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God is Change…
As wind, as water, as fire, as life, God is change.”
On the journey north, the pilgrims build a community of trust and hope.
Parable is a portrait of dystopia. Like George Stewart’s Earth Abides, it is full of adventures, epiphanies, and, in the end, a slender thread of hope. Cormac McCarthy wrote a similar tale, The Road, but his tale is misanthropic and without any possibility of redemption. Parable defies genres; it incorporates the virtues of many genres. It is, by turns, an on-the-road adventure, science fiction, a literary page-turning tour de force, and a prescient view of the near future, a romance, a philosophical treatise interlarded with both dystopic and utopic visions.
I certainly intend to read this book’s sequel, Parable of the Talents. This is an excellent read and stuns us with its remarkable prescience.
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By Louis Segal. Louis was born in Oakland, raised his family in Oakland, dropped out of school in 1968, worked many jobs over the decades, dropped back into school in the 80s, got a Ph.D. in history, taught as an adjunct professor from 1993 to 2015. Retired but not withdrawn. |
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What's Happening at the Library |
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National Night Out 2022 at our library - Tuesday August 2nd, 6 - 8pm
National Night Out is a time for neighbors to get together to build neighborhood spirit and unity. There will be ice cream and cookies to enjoy as you meet other patrons and staff at the library. If your neighborhood is having a block party that night it would be a wonderful time to tell them about our library and encourage them to visit.
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Our library is open six days per week!
Sunday Closed
Monday: 10am. – 5:30pm.
Tuesday: 10am. – 8pm.
Wednesday: 10am. – 8pm. Thursday: 10am. – 5:30pm.
Friday: 12pm. – 5:30pm.
Saturday: 10am. – 5:30pm.
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The Friends of the Piedmont Avenue Library is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Our tax ID is 84-4203055.
All contributions are tax deductible.
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