Lire à la Plage

Since its founding in Normandy in 2005, Lire à la Plage has provided beach goers with free reading material all along the coast of France. With its signature red color, it is easy to spot. While books must remain on the beach, by depositing an ID you can borrow for the day a detective novel, a magazine, a documentary, a children's picture book, and more. No time to finish that captivating mystery? A bookmark is slipped in. Put aside, the book will find its reader the next day.

Join us for a summer discussion series of TED Talks. After watching a selected TED Talk ahead of time, we'll meet virtually through Zoom on Mondays from 1:00-2:00pm to discuss. Attend as your summer schedule and interest allow! The discussion group runs through September 19 (no meeting on Labor Day, Monday, September 5).

Registration here gives you access to the entire discussion series:

Our summer schedule of TED talks can be found here.
Next up on our schedule:

July 18: Amy Cuddy – Body Language

There has been a lot of research into how others perceive our body language, and the importance of sending the right message. However, Amy Cuddy delves into how we are influenced by our own body language — and how a few strategic power poses can make a world of difference in our self-confidence and stress levels.

Monday, July 18, 5:30 p.m.

Casey Carle, comic bubble artist, combines polished entertainment with high quality visual art and practical, age appropriate science. All ages learn how bubbles form, why they're spherical, how to make a cube bubble and the science of bubble bursting - each topic related to the physical laws of the natural world. In addition to the science aspects, the program is full of visual comedy, quick wit, swing music, and amazing soap bubble manipulations - from intricate and detailed Bubble Art (bubble chains, spaceships, fog filled bubbles, crystal balls and square bubbles) to placing a child inside a giant bubble! Please register your child by calling 860-542-5075 ext. 2. After hours, please leave a voice mail.

Gallery Talk: Babs Perkins
Tuesday, July 26, 6:00 p.m.

Babs Perkins will talk about her creative process and answer questions about her work and the techniques used to capture the images in her Moving Landscapes series, which is currently on display at the Library. Babs is a cultural documentary and landscape photographer from Norfolk. Her work, whether representative or abstract, examines and weaves together the ideas of memory, perception, and attention. She has spent the last 10 years traveling in former Yugoslavia, writing about and photographing traditional agriculture and foodways. At the same time, she has photographed landscapes around Western Europe while investigating how they are valued, how they are approached, how they are remembered, and how they shape their inhabitants. She has chosen Gaelic titles for the photographs in this series, and Conor McCarthy, a resident of Dublin, will be on hand so we can hear the melodic words of his national language. Please register for this program here.

Books & Boots
Read The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty
Hike the Old Carriage Trail
Sunday, July 30, 8:30 a.m.

Read The Hawk’s Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty by Sy Montgomery, then lace up your hiking boots as we hit the Old Carriage Trail in the Barbour Woods on Saturday, July 30, at 8:30 a.m. to discuss. Meet Kelly Kandra Hughes at the Barbour Woods Trailhead on Lovers Lane. Bring water and insect repellant. All hiking abilities welcome. Rain date will be August 13. This Norfolk Library program is in partnership with the Norfolk Land Trust. Please register here.

About the book:

A splendid and luminous celebration of one of nature’s most perfect and mysterious creatures—the hawk—from the New York Times bestselling author of the “astoundingly beautiful” (NPR) The Soul of an Octopus.

When Sy Montgomery went to spend a day at falconer Nancy Cowan’s farm, home to a dozen magnificent birds of prey, it was the start of a deep love affair. Nancy allowed her to work with Jazz, a feisty, four-year-old, female Harris’s hawk with a wingspan of more than four feet. Not a pet, Jazz was a fierce predator with talons that could pierce skin and bone and yet, she was willing to work with a human to hunt. From the first moment Jazz swept down from a tree and landed on Sy’s leather gloved fist, Sy fell under the hawk’s magnetic spell.

Over the next few years, Sy spent more time with these magnificent creatures, getting to know their extraordinary abilities and instincts. They are deeply emotional animals, quick to show anger and frustration, and can hold a grudge for years. But they are also loyal and intensely aware of their surroundings. In this mesmerizing account, featuring sixteen pages of gorgeous color photographs, Sy passionately and vividly reveals the wondrous world of hawks and what they can teach us about nature, life, and love.

Click Here to view the The Norfolk Library : Night Owl - July 15, 2022