school with friends and stop in to watch The Mortal. Instruments: City of Bones,
based on the bestselling book series by Cassandra Clare. .... by Nora Roberts.
Spencer Public Library Catalog App now available for Android! Spencer Public Library users who have Android mobile devices can now download our new catalog app. Search for “Spencer Public Library Catalog” in the Google Play Store to access your account to renew books, place reserves, search the catalog, and more! Apple iOS users can add the catalog to the home screen using Safari by accessing the library website, and clicking on “Search the library catalog” or going directly to the catalog at spencer.biblionix.com.
Other mobile users can still access our mobile catalog via the library’s website at www.spencerlibrary.com or directly at spencer.biblionix.com. Spencer Public Library would like to thank Aimee Clark for our new Android app!
We will be closed on Tuesday, December 24th and remain closed on Wednesday, December 25th. We will reopen as normal at 9:00 am on Thursday, December 26th. We will be closed on Tuesday, December 31st and remain closed on Wednesday, January 1st. We will reopen as normal on Thursday, January 2nd.
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Regular Hours Monday through Thursday - 9:00 am to 9:00 pm Friday and Saturday - 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Sundays - Closed
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The library has taken part in Spencer’s annual Grand Meander for several years now. This year, however, we are adding something a little extra special. As we’ve done in the past, we will be decorating Christmas cookies and making some holiday crafts. More specifically, we will be painting holiday suncatcher ornaments that the kids can take home with them. We will also have a cocoa bar. At the cocoa bar, you may fix up your hot cocoa with extra tasty tidbits such as marshmallows, peppermints, or cinnamon. What a delicious way to warm up a bit before returning to the festivities downtown! The last thing we will be adding to make the holidays extra-special for everyone, is a Holiday-Card Creating Station. We will have paper, stickers, markers, glitter and other fun craft supplies out for the kids to make holiday cards for our home-bound patrons. Our librarian, Rita, goes out every couple of
Storytime! Tuesdays at 10:30 am Toys! December 3rd
Families! December 10th
Christmas! December 17th
Parties! December 31st
Come & Go Lego Club Saturday, December 14th 2:00 to 4:00 pm
Baby Storytime Mondays at 6:30 pm
December is a such a busy month, but while you’re enjoying all the festivities and your holiday break, don’t forget about the fun teen programs we’re having at the library this month! Stop into our monthly Teen Board and Teen Gaming programs on December 7th. Help the library create the programs that YOU want, and then stay to play fun games on our Xbox and Wii! Teen Board begins at 1:30, with Gaming following at 2:00 PM. Decorate ninjabread men. Transform boring old gingerbread men into crimefighting black belt warriors! December 17th 4:30 PM. Come and go. Teen Movie: Enjoy your day off from school with friends and stop in to watch The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, based on the bestselling book series by Cassandra Clare. Snacks and drinks provided!
Teen Board Saturday, December 7th at 1:30 pm Teen Gaming Saturday, December 7th at 2:00 pm Dungeons & Dragons Sunday, December 8th at 1:00 pm
Take a break from the holidays and stop by the library for some wonderful programs and hot cocoa! That’s right; we will be offering a hot cocoa bar during the Grand Meander. So stop by and fix yourself something warm and sweet to drink. Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) is over and we are having a Thank Goodness It’s Over party for all who participated. It doesn’t matter if you finished or reached your goal this year, the party is for aspiring or published authors to get together and talk about what they wrote or would like to write in the future, and of course have fun. We have been having a great time with the new Book To Movie program. The next book/play we will be reading is “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” by Tennessee Williams. This is one of Mr. Williams’s most popular plays and one of his personal favorites. So, register in December, pick up and read the play in January, and watch the movie, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” starring (one of my personal favorites) Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor, in February. DIY Club is back and we have a great project planned – Pinecone Trees. The staff at the library has scoured the ground looking for pinecones for this project. Just add a litter glitter and some sparkly bobbles and you have an awesome tree for your table top. Join us for Family Game Night. We will be taking out our board games, dusting them off, and providing valuable time for you to spend with your family. Have a safe and happy Holiday Season! Robin
DIY CLUB The DIY Club meets on December 12th at 6:30 pm. This month, the DIY Club will be making
PINECONE TREES Please register to save your spot! More details on the project and the club itself can be found by asking at the front desk or calling the library at 580-7290.
Tis the season to…drive around and look at lights! One of my favorite activities in December is loading up the car with cookies and my spicy hot chocolate (a little cinnamon and a dash of cayenne!) and drive around looking at all the pretty Christmas lights. No matter what you’re celebrating, from Christmas to Chanukkah, birthdays to baby showers, SPL has something to help make your seasons bright. We’ve got crafts and cookbooks, stories to read by the fire, magazines to help you find that perfect winter wedding dress, or whittle toys for the grandkids. Most of all, it’s a time to celebrate you, our patrons! We’re rolling out a very special gift for you this month, a new way to use our
The AJCC is an open club for any and all fans of anime and manga, as well as any other facet of Japanese culture. Currently featuring an ever growing schedule of anime viewing, manga discussion, mini-manga drawing workshops, food festivities, cosplay, anime movie marathons, and celebrations of Japanese culture, the club encourages fans both new and old to enjoy themselves alongside fellow fans. Our next meeting takes place at 10:00 am on Saturday, December 7th. For more details on the club, email
[email protected], or ask at the front desk.
Saturday, December 7th Let’s Watch: Fruits Basket Let’s Play: Final Fantasy IX
Let’s Fold: Origami Trees Origami Stars 10:00 am
Stay warm this winter! Curl up with one of our great new books! Please note: Some of these titles may have a wait list.
The First Phone Call from Heaven by Mitch Albom
The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan
Stella Bain by Anita Shreve
Dark Witch by Nora Roberts
An epic story, set against the backdrop of World War I, from bestselling author Anita Shreve. When an American woman, Stella Bain, is found suffering from severe shell shock in an exclusive garden in London, surgeon August Bridge and his wife selflessly agree to take her in. A gesture of goodwill turns into something more as Bridge quickly develops a clinical interest in his houseguest. Stella had been working as a nurse's aide near the front, but she can't remember anything prior to four months earlier when she was found wounded on a French battlefield. In a narrative that takes us from London to America and back again, Shreve has created an engrossing and wrenching tale about love and the meaning of memory, set against the haunting backdrop of a war that destroyed an entire generation.
Iona Sheehan travels to County Mayo intent on finding out more about her family’s history and legacy of magic. Not only do her cousins Branna and Connor O’Dwyer welcome Iona into the family fold, they also don’t think she’s crazy when she tells them that she’s had dreams about an evil sorcerer named Cabhan. More than 800 years earlier their ancestress, Sorcha, the original Dark Witch, thwarted Cabhan’s plan to steal her powers, and he has been plotting his revenge ever since. After moving in with Branna and Connor and taking a job working for cranky but incredibly sexy stable owner, Boyle McGrath, Iona begins putting down roots in Ireland. But her newfound happiness may be short-lived unless she and her cousins can find a way to harness their powers and defeat Cabhan.
Violet Minturn, a half-Chinese/halfThe First Phone Call from Heaven tells American courtesan who deals in the story of a small town on Lake seduction and illusion in Shanghai, Michigan that gets worldwide struggles to find her place in the attention when its citizens start world, while her mother, Lucia, tries receiving phone calls from the to make sense of the choices she has made and the men who have shaped afterlife. Is it the greatest miracle her. Spanning more than forty years ever or a massive hoax? Sully and two continents, Amy Tan’s The Harding, a grief-stricken single Valley of Amazement is a sweeping, father, is determined to find out. evocative epic of two women’s An allegory about the power of intertwined fates and their search for belief—and a page-turner that will identity, that moves from the lavish touch your soul—Albom's masterful storytelling has never parlors of Shanghai courtesans to the fog-shrouded been so moving and unexpected. mountains of a remote Chinese village.
The Book of Ages by Jill Lepore
The Abominable by Dan Simmons
Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man; his sister spent her life caring for her children. They left very different traces behind. Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one woman but an entire world—a world usually lost to history. Lepore’s life of Jane Franklin, with its strikingly original vantage on her remarkable brother, is at once a wholly different account of the founding of the United States and one of the great untold stories of American history and letters: a life unknown.
It's 1924 and the race to summit the world's highest mountain has been brought to a terrified pause by the shocking disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine high on the shoulder of Mt. Everest. By the following year, three climbers find a way to take their shot at the top. They arrange funding from the grieving woman whose son also disappeared on Mt. Everest in 1924. Her son must be dead, but his mother refuses to believe it and pays the trio to bring him home. Deep in Tibet and high on Everest, the three climbers -- joined by the missing boy's female cousin -- find themselves being pursued through the night by someone . . . or something. This nightmare becomes a matter of life and death at 28,000 feet - but what is pursuing them? And what is the truth behind the 1924 disappearances on Everest?
Someone Else’s Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson
The Heart Broke In by James Meek
At twenty-one, Shandi Pierce is juggling finishing college, raising her delightful three-year-old genius son Natty, and keeping the peace between her eternally warring, long-divorced Catholic mother and Jewish father. She's got enough complications without getting caught in the middle of a stick-up in a gas station mini-mart and falling in love with a great wall of a man named William Ashe, who willingly steps between the armed robber and her son. Shandi doesn't know that her blond god Thor has his own complications. When he looked down the barrel of that gun he believed it was destiny: It's been one year to the day since a tragic act of physics shattered his universe. But William doesn't define destiny the way other people do. A brilliant geneticist who believes in science and numbers, destiny to him is about choice. Now, he and Shandi are about to meet their so-called destinies head on, in a funny, charming, and poignant novel about science and miracles, secrets and truths, faith and forgiveness; about a virgin birth, a sacrifice, and a resurrection; about falling in love, and learning that things aren't always what they seem-- or what we hope they will be. It's a novel about discovering what we want and ultimately finding what we need.
Ritchie Shepherd, aging former pop star and wildly successful producer of a reality teen talent show, is starting to trip over the intricacy of his own lies. Gallingly, his sister, Bec, a scientist developing a crucial vaccine, is as addicted to truth-telling as Ritchie is to falsehood. Ritchie relies on her certitude even as he seethes with resentment. A devastating chain of events is set into motion when Bec tells her fiancé, Val, a powerful tabloid editor, that she can’t bring herself to marry him after all. Furious, he sets into motion an elaborate revenge plot intended to destroy Bec by exposing the people who are close to her. A bighearted epic in the manner of Tolstoy, James Meek's The Heart Broke In is also as shrewd, starkly funny, and of-the-moment as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom or Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot.
Adult Movie Night Join us for our free monthly movie night for grownups! NOTE: PLEASE PRE-REGISTER TO RESERVE YOUR SEAT.]
Grown Ups 2
December 2nd, at 7:00 pm
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21 East 3rd Street Spencer, Iowa 51301 Phone: (712)580-7290 Fax: (712)580-7468
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