Library Blogs

If your only experience with A Tale of Two Cities was of being forced to read it in high school, it's definitely worth re-reading. It's a wonderful novel set during the French Revolution (unusual for Dickens), with unforgettable characters such as the good-natured rogue Sydney Carton and the bloodthirsty, villainous Madame Defarge.

Between March 20 and August 31, 2020, the University of Michigan Press made all the titles in the Library-hosted ebook collection, UMP EBC, free-to-read. During this period, U-M Press staff gathered use data in the hope of assessing the impact of free-to-read content while informing the future business strategy. Three different assessment efforts are described in this post.

Thanks to a generous Korea Foundation program, Asia Library is able to welcome a full-time intern from Korea to its staff every year. These bright, motivated young people learn many facets of library work while here, making this a win-win situation for both parties. This year's intern, Seohyun Kim, kindly joined me via Zoom to talk about her experience, which appears below. She was a trooper in every sense of the word because she had been in the US for just one month when the pandemic hit. Fortunately for us, the Korea Foundation decided to leave the interns in place, even though they had to experience the internship remotely. Seohyun made the best of a very disappointing situation, doing library work that we were able to teach her via Zoom and email. She participated in our meetings fully and always appeared cheerful and upbeat, even though she must have been quite lonely at times in an off-campus rooming house and knowing that her parents were sick with worry. We look forward to welcoming her back sometime in the future, when no pandemic restrictions apply.

Did you know the University of Michigan Library has access to popular titles through OverDrive? Enjoy some leisure reading over the break and check out our ebook and e-audiobook collections!

This historical novel tells the story of Napoleon's stepdaughter, Hortense de Beauharnais, her disastrous marriage to Napoleon's brother Louis, and her love for another man. It provides an unusual perspective on the major events of Napoleon's reign.

This is a biography of Charlotte Corday, the young woman who assassinated the French Revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat in 1793. The author, Joseph Shearing, was known for mystery novels based on true-life crimes. Even though this book is non-fiction, it reads like a political thriller or a novel of suspense.

Celebrate Indigenous heritage with memoirs and biographies in the University of Michigan Library collections.

The next Zoom film showing in the CHOP (China Ongoing Perspectives) series, Please Remember Me, will be held on Wednesday, December 2, at 7:45 PM.

The Long Call is an outstanding mystery by Ann Cleeves, best known for the Shetland and Vera series. This is the beginning of a new series, featuring Matthew Venn, a gay police officer in the seaside resort area of North Devon, England. Matthew lives with his husband, Jonathan, who runs the community center. He has left the strict evangelical Christian community in which he grew up. As he is standing outside the church during his father's funeral, Matthew receives a call about a dead body on the beach. It turns out the dead man was a cook at the community center, and Jonathan may be a suspect.

The University of Michigan is offering a rich variety of game-related courses during the Winter 2021 term, so we thought we'd highlight them here as well as on our research guide as you're choosing courses for the Winter term. If you're looking for ideas on how to play games online, we'd recommend taking a look at the Online Games page on our research guide.