Cambridge Idaho Community Library

10/28/2026

The night I finished "Angela's Ashes", I couldn't sleep. So I got up, walked downstairs, and opened my refrigerator. I just stood there in the cold light, looking at it. Milk. Eggs. Half a chicken. Leftovers I'd been meaning to throw away.

I'd opened that door ten thousand times in my life. I had never once seen it.

Frank McCourt did that to me.

He was a boy in Limerick in the 1930s, so hungry that when a man dropped the greasy newspaper his fish and chips had come in, Frank picked it up and licked it clean. I read that on my couch with a bag of chips in my lap. I put the bag down.

His family shared one bed, crawling with fleas. I have a mattress I paid too much for and still complain about.

His shoes were patched with strips of old bicycle tire, and the other boys laughed at him for it. I have a closet full of shoes, and I've stood in front of it and said, "I've got nothing to wear."

His family's downstairs room flooded every winter, so they lived upstairs and called it "Italy," because it was dry and warm, like a holiday somewhere far away. I've lived in Italy my whole life. I never once said thank you.

That's what this book does. It takes everything you've stopped noticing and hands it back to you, shining.

And here's the miracle: it isn't a sad book. It's one of the funniest, most tender books ever written. Frank tells it in the voice of the boy he was, mischievous and wide-eyed and hungry, and you'll laugh out loud on one page and have to put the book down on the next.

His First Communion will have you in tears of laughter. The Christmas his family drags a pig's head home through the streets will make you giggle and ache at once. And then a baby brother is gone, and the little boy telling you doesn't understand why, and neither do you.

There's his father, who drinks the wages that should have bought milk for the baby, and who also sits by the fire at dawn telling Frank old Irish legends in a voice full of wonder. You'll hate him. You'll love him. You'll understand exactly why Frank did both.

And there's Angela, his mother, the heart of it all. Tired, proud, unbreakable. Begging for scraps when she has to, so her children can eat.

When I closed the book that night, I didn't just feel sad. I felt rich. Ridiculously, undeservedly rich. A dry house. Warm socks. Clean water from the tap. My children asleep upstairs, fed and healthy, in beds of their own.

I stood in the glow of that refrigerator and said it out loud, finally. Thank you.

Frank McCourt won the Pulitzer for this book. But the real prize is what he gives you: new eyes for the life you already have.

Read it. Then go open your refrigerator, and really look.

10/28/2026

My copy of "Theo of Golde" barely has a white page left in it.

I highlighted my way through the whole thing. Yellow for the lines that made me smile. Pink for the ones that made me cry. Somewhere around the middle, I gave up on any system and just started underlining everything, the way you'd try to hold water in your hands. By the end, a friend picked it up, flipped through, and laughed: "Did you leave anything unmarked?"

Not much. But of all those glowing lines, this is the one I come back to.

"For anything to be good, truly good, there must be love in it."

I remember putting the book down on my lap and just sitting with it after reading that line. Because it's so simple. And because, if it's true, it rearranges everything.

Look at the list Allen Levi gives us. Sculpture. Farming. Teaching. Lawmaking. Medicine. Music. Raising a child. He doesn't separate the grand from the humble. The farmer and the lawmaker stand side by side. The sculptor and the mother. He's telling us that there is no small work, and no great work either. There is only work done with love, and work done without it.

I thought about the teachers I've forgotten and the ones I never will. The difference wasn't how much they knew. It was that some of them loved us. I thought about doctors who looked at their charts and doctors who looked at me. About the meals I've eaten in fancy restaurants and the meals my grandmother made in a tiny kitchen, and which ones I'd give anything to taste again.

Love is the ingredient you can't fake. You can follow every rule, check every box, do the job perfectly, and still something essential will be missing. People feel it. Children especially feel it. And when love is there, even imperfect work glows.

That's what Theo understood. An old stranger who wanders into a small Georgia town and simply pays attention to people, really pays attention, with patience and kindness and no agenda at all. He doesn't do anything flashy. He just puts love at the center of every small, ordinary thing he does. And slowly, a whole town is changed.

This quote has changed how I go about my days. When I'm folding laundry, writing an email, packing a lunch, sitting with a friend who's struggling, I find myself asking a new question. Not "Is this done?" or "Is this good enough?" but "Is there love in it?"

Most days, the honest answer is: not always. But I'm trying.

10/28/2026

"How are you?"

"Fine. You?"

"Good, good."

We say it a dozen times a day. To neighbors over the fence. To coworkers in the hallway. To the person we've been married to for thirty years, across the breakfast table. And almost every time, it's a small, polite lie.

Elizabeth Strout has built an entire novel around that lie, and it's one of the quietest, most devastating books I've read this year.

"The Things We Never Say" follows Artie Dam, a fifty-something high school history teacher in a small coastal town in Massachusetts. On paper, his life is fine. Better than fine. He has a wife of three decades, kids who've grown up, students who like him, friends and neighbors who wave hello. On weekends, he takes his little boat out on Massachusetts Bay and sails.

And yet Artie is lonely. Deeply, achingly lonely, in a way he's never told a single soul. He looks at the people closest to him and wonders how much any of us really know one another. What's going on behind the smiles. What's being left unsaid.

Then he discovers a secret. One that's been hiding in plain sight inside his own life. And everything he thought he understood about the people he loves begins to crack.

I won't tell you what it is. Strout reveals it with such patience and precision that it lands like a wave you didn't see coming. I'll only say I had to set the book down and go stand in the kitchen for a minute.

If you've read "Olive Kitteridge" or "My Name Is Lucy Barton", you know what Strout does better than almost anyone alive. She takes ordinary people, the kind you'd pass at the grocery store without a second glance, and opens them up so gently that you see everything: the hurt, the longing, the small kindnesses, the things they've carried quietly for years. No melodrama. No villains. Just the heartbreaking ways people fail to reach each other, and the miraculous moments when they finally do.

And somehow, for all its sadness, this book is full of hope. Strout believes in people. She believes that it's never too late to say the true thing, to ask the real question, to let someone see you.

It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it's short enough to read in a weekend. But I suspect it'll stay with you much longer than that.

When I finished it, I sat down across from my husband at dinner. He asked how my day was. I almost said "fine."

Instead, I told him the truth.

We talked until the dishes were cold.

Read this book. Then say one of the things you never say.

10/27/2026

I remember the sirens most. New York, a city that never stops honking, shouting, rushing, suddenly gone quiet, except for the ambulances wailing down the avenue day and night. I was alone in my one-bedroom apartment for weeks, washing my hands until they cracked, flinching every time my phone lit up, terrified it would be news about my mom, who'd started coughing on our last call back home in Ohio.

I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't really eating. I'd lie awake at three in the morning with my heart racing, convinced I was the only person in the world this frightened, and too ashamed to tell anyone. Then one night a friend texted me a picture, a scribbled ink drawing of a little boy and a horse walking through the rain, with a few handwritten words about the hard days. I read it in the dark and something in my chest just broke open. I cried until I fell asleep, and it was the first real sleep I'd had in a week.

The next morning I ordered the book it came from, Charlie Mackesy's "The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse", and I'm not exaggerating when I say it carried me through the rest of that year. I kept it on my pillow. I read it with my morning coffee and again before bed, a page or two at a time, the way you'd check in on a friend. It's the gentlest little book, a lonely boy, a cake-loving mole, a wary fox and a kind horse wandering through the wild, asking each other the questions I was too scared to ask anyone. And every time I opened it, it said exactly what I needed to hear.

1. Asking for help is not weakness
The horse tells the boy that asking for help is one of the bravest things you can do, and it landed on me like a hand on my shoulder. I'd spent weeks pretending I was fine. After reading that page, I finally called my sister and told her I wasn't coping. She stayed on the phone with me for two hours. I've never regretted a single call I made after that.

2. Be kind to yourself
The mole, wise in his small, cake-loving way, reminds the boy that we are often far harder on ourselves than we would ever be on anyone else. That year I was beating myself up for not being "productive," for not learning a new skill or baking banana bread like everyone online. This book gave me permission to just survive the day. Sometimes that's enough.

3. Home is people, not a place
The boy spends the whole book looking for home, and finds it was walking beside him all along: his friends. In a season when I couldn't hug a single person I loved, that truth hurt and healed at the same time. It showed me exactly who my home was, and I've held on to them tighter ever since.

4. Let others love you, even when you're wary
The fox has been hurt and trusts no one. When he's caught in a snare, he expects the mole to leave him. The mole frees him anyway. Slowly, the fox learns to belong. If you've ever pushed people away because you were afraid of being let down, as I had, that quiet thread through the book will find you.

5. The storm will pass
The four friends walk through rain and cold and darkness, and they keep going, together. They don't pretend the storm isn't real. They just trust it won't last forever. I needed someone to tell me that in 2020. Mackesy did, in ink, on a page I must have opened a hundred times. And he was right. My mom recovered. The storm passed.

That little book still sits on my nightstand, its corners soft from all the handling. When a hard day comes, I still reach for it.

Buy one for yourself. Then buy one for someone walking through a storm right now. It might be the kindest thing you do this year.

10/27/2026

Another great book. Come check it out!

My old dog, Murphy, used to sit by the front window every evening at 5:30, waiting for my car to turn onto our street. Rain or shine. Sick or well. Even at fourteen, when his hips gave out and he could barely stand, he'd drag himself to that window and lie there, nose against the glass, until he saw my headlights.

The week after we lost him, a friend brought over a copy of Garth Stein's "The Art of Racing in the Rain". "Don't read it yet," she said. "Wait until you're ready." I waited a month. Then I read it in one rainy weekend, curled up on the couch with Murphy's old blanket over my knees, and cried so hard I had to keep stopping to wipe the pages dry.

The story is told by a dog named Enzo. A wise, funny, deeply soulful dog who has spent his whole life watching television, especially car racing, and studying the humans around him with fierce devotion. Enzo believes in an old Mongolian legend: that a dog who has truly learned what it means to be human will be reborn, in his next life, as a man. And he is ready. He has been watching. He has been learning.

His person is Denny Swift, a young Seattle mechanic who dreams of becoming a professional race car driver. Denny is gifted, especially in the rain, when other drivers panic and he stays calm. Enzo worships him. And then Denny falls in love with Eve, and they have a little girl named Zoë, and Enzo watches his family grow with all the joy and worry of a loyal heart.

Then life turns, the way it so often does. Illness. Loss. A bitter, heartbreaking fight that threatens to tear Denny's family apart. And through all of it, there's Enzo, unable to speak, unable to explain, but never, ever leaving Denny's side.

You see here's what undid me. Enzo understands everything. He sees the danger coming. He knows who's lying. He feels Denny's despair when no one else can. And all he can do is lean his warm body against Denny's legs and stay. Isn't that what our dogs always did? They didn't fix anything. They just stayed. And somehow that was enough to get us through.

Stein weaves racing through the whole story as a kind of philosophy for living. The best drivers, Enzo learns, don't fight the rain. They don't panic when the car slides. They keep their eyes where they want to go, because "your car goes where your eyes go." I've repeated that line to myself in some of the hardest seasons of my life.

And then there's the movie.

I avoided it for a long time, terrified it would ruin the book as usual. It didn't. Kevin Costner gives Enzo a voice that is gravelly, gentle and wise, exactly how I'd heard him in my head. Milo Ventimiglia is heartbreakingly good as Denny, and Amanda Seyfried's Eve fills every scene with warmth. The racing scenes are thrilling. But it's the mundane moments that get you: Enzo resting his head on a hospital bed, Enzo waiting by the door, Enzo watching Denny fall apart and loving him anyway. I watched it with my husband, and by the end, neither of us could speak.

Read the book first. The movie is lovely, but the book lets you live inside Enzo's mind, and that's where the magic is. Then watch the movie together with someone you love, with a box of tissues and a dog curled up at your feet if you have one.

And the ending. I won't tell you anything, except that I closed the book, held Murphy's blanket to my face, and believed, for one long, tender moment, that somewhere in the world a little boy was looking out a window, waiting for someone to come home.

If you've ever loved a dog, this book will break your heart and then piece it back together, gentler than before.

10/27/2026

Great story. Available at the library.

Dear Sybil,

I hope you don't mind my writing. I know you'd likely correct my grammar in red ink and mail it back with a sharp little note about comma splices, but I've just spent a week with your letters, and it felt rude not to answer.

I have to confess, I didn't like you at first.

You're prickly. Opinionated. You'll write a perfectly courteous letter to a stranger and still manage to slip in a scolding. You fire off notes to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry as if they're old friends who owe you an explanation for their latest chapters. You keep a careful distance from almost everyone, including your own children, and you seem to think nobody notices.

I noticed. And somewhere around the middle of your story, I realized the prickliness was a fence. And I wanted, very badly, to know what you were keeping behind it.

You're in your seventies now, retired after years as a clerk to a judge, divorced, living mostly through the envelopes that come and go from your mailbox. Every morning, you sit down and write. To your brother. To your old colleagues. To a young boy you've somehow become pen pals with. To the people you love but can't quite say so to out loud. Letters are where you're bravest, Sybil. On paper, you say the things you'd never manage at a dinner table.

And then there are the other letters. The ones you write but never send. To someone from long ago. I won't tell anyone what's in them. But I read every one with my heart in my throat.

You lost a child, Sybil. A little one, just eight years old. You don't talk about it much, but it's there in every page, in the spaces between your sentences. I think that loss built a lot of your fences. I think you've been writing around it your whole life.

And now your eyes are failing. The thing you've used to hold the world at arm's length, these daily letters, is slipping away from you. Which means you're finally going to have to face the people and the past you've been writing around for decades.

I won't spoil how it goes. I'll only say that by the end, I wasn't irritated with you anymore. I was crying for you, and with you, and a little bit for myself.

Because you made me think about all the things I've never said to the people I love. The apologies I've meant to make. The thank-yous I've put off. The letters I've drafted in my head a hundred times and never written.

You also made me laugh out loud, more than I expected. Your wit is wicked, Sybil, and your opinions about other people's books are frankly a public service.

Virginia Evans, who wrote all this down, told your whole life in letters, and somehow it never once feels like a gimmick. It feels like opening a shoebox in an old relative's closet and discovering who she really was.

When I finished, I did something I haven't done in years. I took out a sheet of paper and a pen, and I wrote a letter to my sister. A real one. With a stamp. I told her things I should have said a long time ago.

She called the day it arrived. She was crying, too.

So thank you, Sybil. For being difficult, and brave, and human. For reminding me that it's never too late to say what matters.

With warm regards (and, I'm sure, at least one comma splice),

A reader who's grateful she met you.

10/25/2026

Libraries are wonderful places to find answers to your burning questions.

10/22/2026

Available at the library.

When my Aunt Ruth started losing her sight, she asked me to read to her on Sunday afternoons. She was seventy-nine, sharp as a tack, and absolutely furious that macular degeneration was taking away the one thing she loved most. I'd drive out to her little house in Asheville every week, she'd pour me iced tea she could no longer quite see to pour, and I'd open a book.

The book she chose was "All the Light We Cannot See".

I'll never forget the look on her face when I read the first pages about Marie-Laure. A little girl in Paris who goes blind at six. And a father, a locksmith at the great Museum of Natural History, who refuses to let her world grow small. He builds her a miniature wooden model of their entire neighborhood, every street, every lamppost, every doorway, so she can run her fingers over it and learn to walk the city on her own. Counting storm drains. Counting steps. Aunt Ruth reached over, found my hand, and said, "Read that part again."

Then the war comes.

Marie-Laure and her father flee Paris for the walled seaside town of Saint-Malo, where her strange, gentle great-uncle hasn't left his tall house in years. Her father carries something with him, something the museum has asked him to hide, a jewel so precious and so legendary that people will kill for it.

And far away, in a grim German mining town, an orphan boy named Werner grows up with his little sister, Jutta, fixing broken radios by candlelight. At night they huddle under the blankets and listen to a mysterious voice from France, a man talking to children about light and science and the wonders of the world, then playing music. Werner is brilliant. So brilliant the N***s notice him. And slowly, a kind, curious boy is pulled into a machine that wants to use his gift for something terrible.

Two children on opposite sides of a war. One who cannot see. One who is told not to look. Their paths moving, chapter by chapter, toward each other.

Doerr writes in short, luminous chapters, some only a page long, and every one of them feels like a small, polished stone you want to hold in your palm. Seashells. Snails. Bread loaves with secret messages baked inside. The salt smell of the sea. A girl reading Jules Verne aloud in the dark while bombs fall outside. I'd read a chapter, look up, and Aunt Ruth's eyes would be closed, not asleep, just listening, a small smile on her face.

It took us four months of Sundays to finish it.

When we reached the chapter in Saint-Malo where Werner and Marie-Laure's stories finally touch, I had to stop reading. My voice just went. Aunt Ruth waited. Then she said, quietly, "Take your time, honey. I'm not going anywhere."

I won't tell you what happens. I'll only tell you that by the last pages, both of us were crying, and neither of us was embarrassed about it.

It's a book about war, but it's really a book about goodness. About the small, stubborn kindnesses people choose even when the whole world has gone dark. A father building a model city out of love. A sister who won't stop believing in her brother. A boy who, at the moment it matters most, chooses to see.

Aunt Ruth passed away the following spring. Among her things, I found a tiny wooden house she'd had a local carpenter make for her, no bigger than a matchbox. She kept it on her windowsill. I keep it on mine now.

The title comes from the idea that there's light all around us we can't see with our eyes. I think Aunt Ruth understood that better than anyone. She lost her sight, but she never stopped seeing.

Read this book. Better yet, read it aloud, to someone you love. Take your time.

They're not going anywhere.

10/22/2026

Wonderful young adult novel, available at the library.

Every kid has threatened to run away at least once.

Most of us got as far as the end of the driveway with a backpack full of crackers and a flashlight, sat on the curb for twenty minutes, and came home in time for dinner.

Sam Gribley actually went.

He was a city kid from a cramped New York apartment, one of far too many children squeezed into far too little space, and he'd had enough. So one May morning he packed a penknife, a ball of string, an ax and some flint and steel, and took a train north to the Catskill Mountains, to the land where his great-grandfather once tried to farm. He had $40 in his pocket and almost no idea what he was doing.

His very first night, he couldn't light a fire and went to bed cold and hungry. That detail is the reason this book works. Sam isn't a survival expert. He's a kid figuring it out one mistake at a time, and you get to figure it out with him.

What happens next is every daydream you ever had in fourth grade, written down.

He finds an enormous old hemlock tree and hollows it out by burning and chopping until it becomes a little house, big enough for a bed made of deerskin and a fireplace with a chimney. He learns which plants you can eat and which will make you very sorry. He makes acorn pancakes. He catches fish with homemade hooks. He sews himself clothes out of deer hide. He spends his days with a raccoon named Jessie C**n James who steals everything, and a bold little weasel he calls The Baron who basically owns the place.

And then there's Frightful.

Sam climbs to a cliff and takes a baby peregrine falcon from her nest, and slowly, patiently, trains her to hunt. She rides on his fist. She sleeps by his tree. She brings him food. If you read this as a child, you wanted a Frightful more than you wanted anything in the world. If you read it as an adult, you'll want one just as badly.

But it isn't only an adventure. Somewhere around the first snowfall, the book turns quiet and thoughtful. Winter comes. The woods go silent. Sam is alone in his tree with the wind howling outside, and he discovers what it means to rely completely on yourself, and also how much you still need other people. A hiking English teacher he nicknames Bando stumbles into his camp and becomes a friend. A town librarian quietly helps him learn what he needs to know. And by spring, Sam realizes that even on his own mountain, he's never been as separate from the world as he thought.

It won a Newbery Honor in 1960, and more than sixty years later it still has the power to make kids want to put down their screens and go outside. It might do the same to you.

Read it to your kids. Read it again for yourself. Then go for a walk in the woods, look up at the tallest tree you can find, and admit it.

You're wondering if you could live in it.🤭

10/22/2026

Great read, available at the library.

I listened to "Braiding Sweetgrass" with dirt under my fingernails.

It was spring, and I'd finally decided to plant a vegetable garden. I put in my earbuds, knelt in the cold soil with a packet of bean seeds, and pressed play. Twenty minutes later, I'd stopped digging. I was just kneeling there, holding a handful of earth, listening to a woman tell me the land isn't a thing, it's a relative.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and this book braids those two ways of knowing together: science and Indigenous wisdom. She reads the audiobook herself, and her voice is everything. Warm, unhurried, a little wry. When she speaks Potawatomi words, she says them with such care you hold your breath. One of them, puhpowee, names the force that pushes mushrooms up overnight. English has no word for that. Hearing her say it felt like being handed a small, glowing gift.

Each essay is like a walk in the woods with a wise friend. Wild strawberries as presents from the earth. Corn, beans and squash, the Three Sisters, growing better together than apart. Tapping maple trees with her daughters. And the Honorable Harvest: never take the first one, never take more than you need, always give something back.

There's grief in these pages too, for land treated like a warehouse and a language nearly lost. But Kimmerer always comes back to gratitude, and to the idea that caring for the earth is how we heal ourselves.

This is one audiobook I'd choose over the print copy. Hearing it in her voice feels like learning from an elder.

My beans came up in June. I didn't pick the first ones. I left them for whoever else lives in my yard.

Listen outside if you can. You'll never look at a strawberry the same way again.