An Orange Cat in a Green Garden

Here’s Luce, our long and lean, little orange kitten (now a teenager actually). His name, inspired by our Italian sojourn last May, means ‘light’.

I’d wanted him on my lap for the filming but he was nowhere to be found when we began (camera shy perhaps). He walked by just as we finished so I scooped him up and had Maia take these stills of him … one in same view as the cat on the cover, the other, as though staring at his lookalike.

So there we have it, Tasks 1 through 10 complete.

Thank you for the fun, creative and informative journey that the Training Team put together for us. And especially, for the glimpses into our colleagues’/friends’ lives and passions outside of the Library that it has provided along the way!

A green Thought in a green Shade

Podcasts and a Mild-mannered Iconoclast

For Task #7 we were to listen to a podcast. I chose to browse those offered by CBC and found myself listening to a delightful piece called "A Woman of No Consequence" from the program "And the Winner is ..." which is a show of award winning radio programs.
Sethu Ramaswamy was reading Dickens and Virginia Woolf before she was 10 years old but coming from a traditional Indian family, she was then married at 10 to a young man of 22 and gave birth to her first child at 15.
Her time consisted of bathing and raising children (6 girls) and "cutting vegetables, that is what I remember most, cutting vegetables in the corner of the kitchen". But she was an avid reader and because she and her husband were often apart due to his work, a devoted writer of letters. Finally, this mild-mannered, cultured woman broke from tradition and at 80 years of age wrote a memoir entitled The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian Woman.
This podcast is a delightful reflection on Sethu's life by her granddaughter and features much material in Sethu's own voice.
It makes me think of several great books with Indian characters in them, A Good Wife, by Anne Cherian, The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai, the books of Rohinton Mistry, Selvadurai Shyam, the films of Deepa Mehta etc.
I can see that these podcasts would be a good way for KFPL to showcase material in our collection. If we were to choose one item at a time to highlight like in the Book of the Week but then make tie-ins to several other things in different formats ... much like in the tradition of 'Next Reads' or 'If you liked ..."