Library digital services … to the rescue!
It’s been quite the week for all of us as the COVID19 pandemic continues. Our beloved library systems are closed — temporarily! — at a difficult time.
But here’s the good news: online resources are available.
So, if you haven’t checked out ebooks, audiobooks, or even films from your library, now is a good time to give doing so a try.
Here is a rundown of digital services at four Dayton-area systems.
Dayton Metro Libraries
No library card? No problem.
Get an eCard, which can be used to, per the website, “download or stream ebooks, audiobooks, movies, music, and magazines; access newspaper archives, genealogy resources, and scholarly journals; get ahead with online learning tools.”
The eCard cannot be used to check out physical materials, but you can upgrade your eCard to a physical card at a later time when the system reopens.
To register for an eCard go to: www.daytonmetrolibrary.org/register.
Of course, if you already have a library card, you just need your card number to log in.
Available digital resources:
■ Overdrive — for ebooks and audiobooks.
■ Hoopla — for television shows, movies, ebooks, audiobooks and e-comics.
■ RBdigital — for digital versions of magazines.
■ Kanopy — classic, indie and world cinema.
■ Mango Language or Transparent Langue — to start learning a new language.
■ Lynda.com (a LinkedIn Learning service) — for courses and tutorials in the areas of technology, business and creative skills.
If you need additional help such as homework tools, news (such as the New York Times, and more), or information on web-based meeting solutions such as Zoom, visit www.daytonmetrolibrary. org/collection.
Greene County Public Library
Visit greenelibrary. info for lots of great ways to stay entertained with books, movies, or learning a new skill. Resources include OverDrive, Hoopla, and RBDigital (for eAudiobooks).
Additionally, the library offers free six-week online, instructor-led courses via Gale Courses. New courses start monthly — everything from learning a new language, to accounting and finance, to the arts, and much more.
Libby is an additional ebook and audiobook platform, while Flipster provides current and back issues of digital magazines to enjoy on your computer, tablet or phone.
WashingtonCenterville Public Library
Visit www.wclibrary. info/ecollection. Access ebooks from OverDrive, Libby, Gale eBooks and Hoopla. The TumbleBook Library offers eBooks just for kids.
eAudiobooks, eMusic, eZines and eVideo (television, such as Acorn TV, which offers British TV and f ilm, and movies), as well as eMagazines are also available for borrowing.
There are also digital courses — everything from the Great Courses collection, to hobbies and crafts, to languages — available. Visit wclibrary. info/education/#online.
Wright Memorial Public Library
The library now offers online eCards for patrons to access digital collections and are intended for patrons who don’t have a card to this library. These are free, virtual only, and only access the library’s digital collection. To get an eCard to the Wright Memorial Public Library, visit www.wrightlibrary. org/getacard/ecard.
Then take advantage of ebooks, eAudiobooks, streaming movies, TV shows, music, educational courses, online research databases and more through services such as Hoopla, CloudLibrary and more. Get a complete list of Wright Memorial Public Library’s digital offerings here: www.wrightlibrary. org/content/your-librarywherever-you-are.
Other library systems
If you’re a patron of another area library system, visit your library’s website and explore the digital world at your fingertips. Just checking sources to write this column has given me a to-do list/to-explore list that’s going to take more than the next eight weeks!
Upcoming literary events
This is where I usually list all sorts of events to attend.
Books & Co. at The Greene is a go-to source for author events in our area. All events through the end of April are cancelled or postponed. Per the store’s website (www. booksandco.com), the store hopes to remain open but with reduced hours. If you order books from booksamillion.com for home delivery or store pick-up, the store will bring your book(s) to your car when you notify them that you’re at their entrance.
A great go-to source for writer education and community is Word’s Worth Writing Connection (wordsworthdayton.com/), and you’ll often see the organization’s classes listed here. For the time being, several classes are now going online — so you can still attend the planned writing workshops, just via Zoom. Click on the “schedule” tab for more details. For example, on Monday, March 23, 6:30-8:30, a “writing workout” will be led online by writer and writing instructor Christina Consolino. She will also lead a five-week online writer’s workshop, Mondays, March 30-April 27, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Please note these were classes already on the schedule; class goals and so forth remain the same.
Email me!
I’d love to hear about any online/digital library services you try that are new to you. A class in something you’ve always wanted to try? Downloading ebooks via the library for the first time? Downloading and watching a film? Email me at sharonshort1983@gmail.com and let me know about your experience.
Finally, here is a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring: “’I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”
Sharon Short writes historical mysteries under the pen name Jess Montgomery (www. jessmontgomeryauthor. com). Send her column ideas, book club news, or literary events at sharonshort1983@ gmail.com.
By Sarah Lyall
We all know what it’s like to worry that something terrible has happened to a person we care about, as the hours pass, and there is still no word, and even implausible explanations (flat tire, broken phone) become increasingly unlikely. Plunging his main character into that excruciating situation — subjecting her to that “great, black maw of fear” — is the first diabolical thing that Chris Bohjalian does in his terrific new thriller, “The Red Lotus.”
The second is to force us to think about rats. The rats in this story seem a background curiosity at first, something we can ignore just as people in cities ignore the rats covertly overrunning the subways and parks. In an intermittent, parallel tale narrated by someone whose identity is concealed until the end of the book, the rats’ qualities are described: their adaptability, their ubiquity, their usefulness in lab studies, their skill at building immunity to virulent pathogens.
The significance of these apparent asides becomes increasingly obvious, until it is clear that rats are vitally important to the elegant noose of a plot being tied around our necks. As Bohjalian points out, rats are “the most effective delivery vehicle for mass death ever to exist on earth.”
The human part of this novel begins on a bicycle tour in Vietnam, when a young man named Austin Harper, who works in the development office of a New York City hospital, inexplicably fails to return at the end of a day of riding. His girlfriend of less than a year, Alexis Remnick, an emergency room doctor in the same hospital who is also on the tour, senses that something is wrong. She is correct.
But the eventual discovery of Austin’s battered body by the side of the road after a terrible accident is only the start of a series of increasingly weird, creepy and unexpected developments. Alexis has very little time to adjust to the quick succession of new realities. Luckily, she is smart, perceptive and levelheaded, not one to waste her time ignoring the truth.
Reality No. 1: Her cute, loving, funny boyfriend is dead. Reality No. 2: He had told several seemingly small but puzzling lies about his reasons for wanting to come to Vietnam. Reality No. 3: He has been struck by a car, but the nasty puncture wound and broken bone Alexis spots on his hand suggest to her that he may have been tortured first.
The overriding new reality: Nothing is as it had seemed, and Alexis, an anxious person who in her youth alleviated stress with self-harm, has fallen into a new world of uncertainty and danger.
What to withhold, what to reveal, when to dole out information and in what manner — these are among the hardest decisions for an author to make in any thriller, particularly one with this many moving parts. Bohjalian strikes a fine balance between disclosure and secrecy. We soon learn more than Alexis does — including what led to Austin’s death and (after a while) what is going on with the rats — but there are many intriguing questions that Bohjalian takes his time answering.
“The Red Lotus”
By Chris Bohjalian 383 pages. Doubleday. $27.95
What really happened to Austin at the bar the night he met Alexis? What is the significance of those little packets of energy gel he had with him in Vietnam? If the marks on his fingers were not cat bites, as he claimed, then what exactly were they?
And, perhaps worst of all: Why did the backpack he carried with him the day of his fatal bike ride contain, among other things, a dress for a woman who was size zero, when there is no way Alexis could fit into something that small?
Alexis becomes an amateur detective of sorts, but she is also a fully realized character. Haunted by the sudden death of her father when she was little and at odds with her high-achieving, overly critical mother, she is well suited to her job in the ER, which constantly reminds her of life’s fragility, of how close we live to the abyss.
“She felt no need to tend to herself,” Bohjalian writes, “when she was tending to people who, at least that moment, were dramatically worse off than she was.”
There’s an array of pleasantly unsettling characters here. A special shoutout to Douglas Webber, champion darts player and rat enthusiast; and to Oscar Bolton, his nervous, younger sidekick; and to a couple of people determined to help Alexis discover the truth. Ken Sarafian — a private investigator and ex-cop who has grim memories of his time serving in Vietnam and who recently lost a daughter to cancer — proves to be a particularly satisfying ally, with his psychological acuity, his sixth sense for deception, his dogged research skills and his Glock semi-automatic pistol.
Bohjalian is a pleasure to read. He writes muscular, clear, propulsive sentences. Even his unlikely scenes ring true, as in a tourde-force climactic episode set inside a rat-research lab in which three of the four characters present are suddenly incapacitated in different ways. (The reasons feel a little close to home, in Alexis’ case. “She was feeling fuzzy, lightheaded and febrile. Weak. Was it the flu? Maybe.”)
As suspenseful as it is, “The Red Lotus” is also unexpectedly moving — about friendship, about the connections between people and, most of all, about the love of parents for children and of children for parents. Bohjalian is a writer with a big heart and deep compassion for his characters. Just try not to think about the rats. They’re everywhere.