Can We Be Busy Without Losing Our Minds?

Coming home from vacation, heading back to work, planning for the holidays ... for better or worse, everything seems to intensify come September. To-do lists, agendas and calendars fill up, and there is a lot of pressure to balance all of life’s commitments — plus hopefully find time for your own wellbeing. It’s important to be mindful of your mental health throughout the year, but if you’re interested in checking in before the busy season picks up, our Community Classroom is offering two classes that look at ways to cope with stress, pressure and anxiety. 

On September 12, Rick Thurmeier and the Anxiety Disorders Association of Manitoba (ADAM) will be teaching an afternoon session on the nature of anxiety that will explore strategies for improving control over significant anxieties and worries. The following week, Karen Toole will be starting a three session course examining the pressures we might feel to “be normal” or “measure up,” as well as looking at ways we can use that pressure to gain understanding and strength. 

Learn more:

• Managing Anxiety, Gaining Control
• How Not to Go Out of Your Mind

Our Natural, Edible World

The days might be getting shorter and even a bit cooler as we head towards autumn, but that doesn’t mean the fascination of the natural world is behind us for the season, even if we do start spending a bit more time indoors. Autumn is a great time to learn about the variety of useful, edible plants you can find in your own backyard. Did you know that stinging nettle is high in calcium? Or that different parts of the dandelion can be used as beverages, appetizers, side dishes and desserts? Would you like to learn how to harvest acorns and prepare them as food and/or medicine?

The Community Classroom is lucky enough to have Laura Reeves, botanist and wild food aficionado, teaching two classes this September: Your Wild, Edible Backyard and All About Acorns. Both of these classes will include samples of these wild plants and nuts - so make sure to bring a mug, plate and fork to class with you.

August's Author of the Month: YOKO OGAWA

Yoko Ogawa was born in Okayama, Japan and attended Waseda University in Tokyo before becoming a full-time writer. Since 1988, Ogawa has published more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction and has won every major Japanese literary award. All of her books are written in Japanese, but her most successful titles, such as The Housekeeper and the Professor, The Diving Pool, and Revenge, have now been translated into English and many other languages.

Ogawa is unusual in the fact that she has also published award-winning works of non-fiction. In 2006, she teamed up with mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara to write An Introduction to the World’s Most Elegant Mathematics, a book dedicated to the beauty and fascination of numbers.

Yoko Ogawa currently lives in Ashiya, Japan and continues to write both fictional and non-fictional literary works, although much of her later work has yet to be translated.

In her new book, The Memory Police (translated by Stephen Snyder), things are disappearing on an unnamed island off an unnamed coast. First, animals and flowers. Then objects — ribbons, bells, photographs. Then, body parts.

Most of the island's inhabitants fail to notice these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the mysterious "memory police," who are committed to ensuring that the disappeared remain forgotten. When a young novelist realizes that more than her career is in danger, she hides her editor beneath her floorboards, and together, as fear and loss close in around them, they cling to literature as the last way of preserving the past.

Book Club Reading Lists Posted!

What do By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Autopsy of a Boring Wife, and Where the Crawdads Sing all have in common? They’re the September picks for three of our Community Classroom book clubs.

Reading lists for Hidden Figures, Read Between the Wines and Wendy’s Afternoon Book Club are now online. Looking to expand your reading list this year? Try a book club! Looking for your next great read? Check out these lists from some of our exceptionally well-read book club leaders.