Stop worrying about MPG! Fill up at the Library and visit places you’ve only dreamed of.

READ a book

LISTEN to a book

WATCH a movie

EXPLORE the world of the Internet

The newly painted and decorated exterior of the Blanco Library welcomes you to the resuming of open, Sunday afternoons from 2PM to 6PM beginning Sunday, September 7th. This is the perfect place to spend a Sunday afternoon whether the weather outside is fair or frightful.

Don’t forget to browse our on-going Book Sale where paperbacks sell for $.25, hardcovers $.50, videos, DVDs and books on tape $.25 and a select group of bestsellers $1.00-$5.00. This is by far one of the best deals in town. We also accept donations with the stipulation that articles not put in circulation will be sold and the profits used to buy new books.

We are bursting at the seams in our present facility and are in need of a portable, utility shed to store tools, garden hoses, extra shelving etc. and would be grateful of a donation of anyone’s unused shed to place on our back patio. If you can help, please call the Library 830-833-4280.

The Friends of the Library have launched a “Reach Out and Read” program in cooperation with Drs. Weaver and Black. At pediatric exams, parents are given a verbal prescription to read to their children as a vital part of their growth and development and given a new children’s book to keep. The Friends have also placed children’s books in the waiting room of the clinic.

Becky Macaluso, one of our loyal volunteers, has reviewed two books which are examples of “the power of one”.

When I found Teach With Your Heart, a book by Erin Gruwell, I did not realize how much I would be impressed by this young, idealistic and inexperienced teacher. Gruwell worked with students from Long Beach, California who had few people who believed in them. I challenge anyone interested in education to read this memoir of a teacher who never gave up on her students, who found ways to connect literature to their lives, and found ways to finance field trips that opened her students’ eyes to other cultures and sufferings. Can you imagine giving students the chance to meet Miep Gies, a once young woman who helped the Otto Frank family? Or managed to take students to Auschwitz to Anne Frank’s attic and to Bosnia? Somehow, Erin Gruwell accomplished these in her first years of teaching.

Three Cups Of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relio begins with the story of Mortenson’s climbing adventures and his failure to climb summit K2. Through the kindness of the families of a remote Pakistani village, Mortenson survives. He makes a pledge to come back and build a school. (He is still building schools.) Not only is this a story of a person taking on a monumental task, but the story has a backdrop of the rise of the Taliban, of 9/11 and of the war on terror. Mortenson’s dealings with tribal elders, government officials and drug warlords gives a view of the other side of the world, showing there is good and evil in other countries and cultures.

Both of these books showed great accomplishments and personal forbearance. Almost all of Three Cups Of Tea reads like an action novel rather than a book of non-fiction. Teach With Your Heart has already been made into a movie and it would not surprise me if the same thing happened with Three Cups Of Tea. Read one or both of these books from the Blanco Library.