This month Circulation Assistant Emmalyne is in our spotlight. After joining us a a page, she quickly took on new responsibilities in Circulation. Emmalyne is known for her kind and considerate nature, and we are pleased to introduce her to you.
Hello, my name is Emmalyne. I am one of the newest members of the O’Fallon Public Library team and I work in the circulation department.
I am still attending school and hope to work as an Occupational Therapist one day. There are many things that I enjoy about the OFPL. However one of the main reasons I wanted to work here was due to the many diverse programs and opportunities the library has to offer its patrons.
For example during my schools midterm and finals weeks I can often be found utilizing one of the study rooms attempting to cram a semester’s worth of knowledge into my brain.
When I am not working or studying, I like to take my younger brothers and explore the children’s department. My brothers and I can always count on finding a new activity, book, or movie in to keep us busy as if we are not busy enough already.
Outside of the school and the library I often find myself at home watching the Rangers or Blues play hockey, hanging out with my Great Dane Joey, or attempting to finish reading one of many books.
Although I am not originally from Illinois and the Rangers will always have my heart, I have grown to appreciate the Blues and enjoy watching them succeed.
I also enjoy reading very much and could not pick a single favorite book if my life depended on it. However, with the New Year I created a list of books I hope to read.
A few of the titles on the list are but not limited to, Educated by Tara Westover, How to Give Up Plastic: A Guide to Changing the World, One Plastic Bottle at a Time by Will McCallum, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells, and In Five Years: A Novel: by Rebecca Serle. If anyone has suggestions on titles that you have found worth passing on please let me know and I will definitely add them to my ever growing list.
More about Emmalyne’s To-Be-Read Picks:
An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University
Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.
An accessible guide to the changes we can all make–small and large–to rid our lives of disposable plastic and clean up the world’s oceans. It takes 450 years for a plastic bottle to fully biodegrade, and there are around 12.7 million tons of plastic entering the ocean each year. At our current pace, in the year 2050 there could be more plastic in the oceans than fish, by weight. These are alarming figures, but plastic pollution is an environmental crisis with a solution we can all contribute to. How to Give Up Plastic is a straightforward guide to eliminating plastic from your life.
It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.
An “epoch-defining book” (TheGuardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
When Type-A Manhattan lawyer Dannie Cohan is asked this question at the most important interview of her career, she has a meticulously crafted answer at the ready. Later, after nailing her interview and accepting her boyfriend’s marriage proposal, Dannie goes to sleep knowing she is right on track to achieve her five-year plan.
But when she wakes up, she’s suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. The television news is on in the background, and she can just make out the scrolling date. It’s the same night—December 15—but 2025, five years in the future.
After a very intense, shocking hour, Dannie wakes again, at the brink of midnight, back in 2020. She can’t shake what has happened. It certainly felt much more than merely a dream, but she isn’t the kind of person who believes in visions. That is, until four-and-a-half years later, when by chance Dannie meets the very same man from her long-ago vision.
Brimming with joy and heartbreak, In Five Years is an unforgettable love story that reminds us of the power of loyalty, friendship, and the unpredictable nature of destiny.
The O'Fallon Public Library News 