Poetry Contest @ the Oregon City Library

Attention all budding poets! Students in kindergarten through grade 12 are invited to participate in Oregon City Public Library’s Poetry Contest honoring National Poetry Month (April) and National Arbor Day (April 26). This very special poetry contest will be judged by Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen! Poem submissions must be about trees or National Arbor Day.

POETRY CONTEST RULES (because all good things come with rules, right?)
1.  Participants must be K-12 students in school (public, private or home school) in the Oregon City Public Library Service Area. This includes any of the schools in the Oregon City School District or Oregon City;
2.  Participants can enter on their own or have a parent or teacher make their entry.
3.  All entries should be submitted through our online form. If this is not possible for some reason, please deliver/send your typed or legibly printed entry to: POETRY CONTEST, Oregon City Library, 606 John Adams, Oregon City 97045;
4.  All entries must be the original work of the participant;
5.  Maximum of three entries per participant;
6.  Entries can be submitted in any language but must be accompanied with an English translation;
7.  The topic of the poem must have something to do with trees or Arbor Day;
8.  Please, no profanity, violence, drugs, etc.;
9.  Poems should be limited to 40 lines of text (blank lines between stanzas are not counted);
10. Do not double space your entry.

Entries will be grouped by grade level, K-2, 3-5, 6-9, and 10-12, and prizes will be awarded for each of those groups. Winners will be invited to read their poems at the 100th Anniversary Celebration of the Carnegie Library on June 21st, 2013. In addition, winners will be invited to lunch with the Poet Laureate!

Entries will be accepted from April 1-30, 2013. 
For more information on National Arbor Day and National Poetry Month, please see the links below:
http://www.arborday.org/arborday/arborDayDates.cfm
http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/41


Good luck all your rhyming and versing prodigies!

Vote for Your Five Favorite Books of 2012

Teenreads.com is putting out the call to all you voracious readers out there to vote for your 5 fave books of 2012. The five titles with the most votes will serve as finalists for the Teen Choice Book of the Year for 2013. So let your voice be heard! Let your opinion be known! Shout about your favorite book from the rooftops!

Vote here. There are some decidedly stellar books on the list of nominees, including The Diviners by Libba Bray, which I want to give a special shout out to because I just finished it a few days ago and I loved, loved, loved it. Smart sassy girl in the 1920s moves to New York City to escape some "unpleasantness" back at home in Ohio and ends up involved in a very creepy murder investigation along with her uncle who is curator of The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult (or as the locals call it "The Museum of Creepy Crawlies"). Evie is the ultimate flapper girl, and I couldn't help but be charmed by her wit, her awesome 20s slang (and how!) and her uncanny ability to step in it more often than not. Sure, there's the requisite romance angle native to all teen lit in existence, but it was pretty secondary to the main plot, which is something I very much appreciated.

Anyone else? Favorite books from this year? I've heard nothing but amazing things about The Fault in Our Stars by John Green from both teens and adults, but I have yet to read it. It's there on my long, long list of Books2Read, though.

Cheers!

How do you stack up to your peers, reading-wise?

The fine folks over at the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project recently published the results of a survey they performed to study the reading habits of younger Americans. They define "young" as under 30, which makes me wonder if they have any ties to the Hippies back in the 60's. But that's probably not important right now.

What is important, as well as interesting, is what they found out about the reading habits of the elusive wild teenager. Fully 86% of Americans 16 or 17 years of age have read at least part of a book in the past year. That's a higher percentage than any other age group except for 18-24 year olds, who clock in at 88%. So y'all are doing just fine when it comes to reading, but there's still room for improvement. If you know any of the 14% that don't read at all, though, feel free to kidnap them, tie them up and drop them off at your friendly neighborhood library. We'll take it from there.

That 86% is for any type of book, in any format. When you break it down by format you learn that only 12% of 16-17 year olds have read an e-book in the last year, despite the fact that e-books are supposedly the wave of the future.. That puts them way behind the 21% of 18-24 year olds who've read an e-book in the last twelve months. In fact, the only age group that has a lower rate of e-book reading is people 65 and older. Only 8% of them have read an e-book in the past year. All of those percentages are only going to go up as time goes by. I'm very curious to see when e-book readership surpasses print readership. It'll be awhile, but it's most likely coming.

If you're interested in reading more about the study - and who wouldn't be? - you can find a good summary here:

http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/10/23/younger-americans-reading-and-library-habits/

The whole report is here:

http://libraries.pewinternet.org/files/legacy-pdf/PIP_YoungerLibraryPatrons.pdf

International Games Day at the OC Library Saturday 11/3

On Saturday November 3rd the Oregon City Public Library will join more than a thousand other libraries in celebrating International Games Day. Board gamers of all ages are invited to come to the library between 6:30 and 8 PM to play Pictionary, Scrabble, Boggle, Operation, Candy Land and many other games that will be provided. Do you think you have what it takes to destroy your fellow citizens in chess or checkers? Are you a past master of Connect Four looking to relive past glory? Did you stop playing Candy Land because of the Gumdrop Scandal of '06 but have always wanted to get back into the game? This is your chance! Come one, come all!

Wii Super Smash Brothers Thursday 11/1

It is time once again for the teens of Oregon City to congregate in the library basement and inflict simulated bodily harm upon each others' virtual counterparts. I speak, of course, of the awesomeness that is Super Smash Brothers Brawl! We'll be playing from 6:30 to 8 PM on Thursday November 1st. Everyone aged 12 to 18 is invited! Pizza will be served.

Teen Read Week is almost upon us

This year's Teen Read Week will be celebrated during the week of October 14th through the 20th. The theme is "It Came from the Library!" in celebration of all things spooky, scary and supernatural. Eeeeekkkk!!

Teen Read Week is a way to spotlight young adult literature and encourage teens to read for the fun of it. Why do you read for pleasure? Is it for escape? To seek answers to your most burning questions? To walk in someone else's shoes for awhile? To experience the unknown? Or, like me, for all of the above?

In celebration of this most momentous occasion, we will be hosting a book swap for teens (in grades 6 through 12) at the Oregon City Public Library. The book swap will take place on Sunday, October 14th from 5:30 to 6:30pm  in the upstairs main room of the library. We encourage you to bring in your gently used books, cds, dvds, and videogames to trade with others. For each item you bring in you will receive a coupon you can exchange for someone else's item you want to take home.What better way to participate in Teen Read Week than to set your well-loved books free to be discovered and loved by someone new? Recycling literature is good for the physical AND mental environment!

We hope to see you all there. Have a great Teen Read Week, everybody!

P.S:  the Teen Reads website is looking for young-adult-literature lovers to take a survey in order to get readers' feedback about what kinds of features you want to see on their site. If you take the survey you will be entered into a contest to win a free book (450 people will win: those are pretty good odds, I'd say). Read more about it and take the survey here.

Celebrate Banned Books Week!

Rabble-rousing readers unite!

It's that time of year again--school is back in session, the leaves are beginning to change, the air takes on a slight chill, and we here in Libraryland are gearing up to celebrate Banned Books Week, which runs from September 30th to October 6th. Banned Books Week, as you may or may not know, is an annual celebration of our freedom to read what we want without the threat of censorship. A worthy cause, no? Because we should all have the right to decide for ourselves what ideas we want to seek, explore, and express. You can learn more about Banned Books Week from this handy guide created just for tweens and teens here. And check out this cool timeline that explores how Banned Books Week has been "liberating literature" for 30 years.

The most interesting part of this celebration (in my opinion, anyway) is reviewing the past year's challenged or banned books and discovering the reasons why they were challenged in the first place. (Then, they go straight on my to-be-read list because I get a kick out of being a rebellious reader.) Below is the list of the top ten most challenged titles of 2011. Notice a theme here? Many of those that made the top ten are young adult/teen books. Why do you think that is the case? Have you read any of the books on this list? As a teen, what do you think about the issues of censorship and book challenges? What are some of the consequences of removing materials from libraries or schools? Please feel free to discuss any of these issues in the comments section. Discussion is a great way to process through the often complex emotions that tend to murkify (can I use "murky" as a verb?) this issue. We would love to hear what you think. And please join us at the Oregon City Library on Thursday, September 27th at 7:00 to hear Candace Morgan (a front-line crusader librarian for the freedom to read) discuss these issues and a whole lot more.

On to the list.... (source: http://bannedbooksweek.org/about)

1. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
   Reasons: offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
2. The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
   Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
3. The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
   Reasons: anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence
4. My Mom's Having A Baby! A Kid's Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
   Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
   Reasons: offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
6. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
   Reasons: nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint
7. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
   Reasons: insensitivity; nudity; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit
8. What My Mother Doesn't Know, by Sonya Sones
   Reasons: nudity; offensive language; sexually explicit
9. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
   Reasons: drugs; offensive language; sexually explicit
10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
    Reasons: offensive language; racism

My favorite from this list? The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. It's one of the greatest books of all time (in my ever-so-humble opinion). We have 3 copies sitting on our YA shelf right now in case you're in the mood for a rebellious read...

Keep a lookout for our Banned Books Week display (planned and designed by our very own Peter) where you can browse and check out an array of banned and challenged books.