This coming Tuesday, February 25th from 6:00-7:30 pm, the Mechanics' Institute will be hosting a Game Night in the Library. Members and guests are invited to gather on the 2nd floor of our beautiful library. Game Night will kick off with a short talk about the featured game of the evening, followed by a friendly competition among attendees. This session we celebrate one of the oldest bo...
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As I prepare for my upcoming retirement, I recently applied for Social Security benefits. As a warning to fellow Mechanics’ Institute members in my age range, I then received an email after I applied for benefits that read simply that I needed to call a phone number 877-772-3794, to talk to someone about "reviewing your earnings record." I did a web search before calling and found a...
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Mechanics’ Institute Top Lists of 2024
Mechanics’ members are enthusiastic readers across all genres and subject areas. Below are the most popular print checkouts in various categories for all of 2024.
Top 10 fiction
1....
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FICTION
Samantha Harvey Orbital : a novel Fic Harvey
Haruki Murakami The city and its uncertain walls Fic Murakami
Karl Ove Knausgård The third realm Fic Knausgar
Tarjei Vesaas The ice palace Fic Vesaas
Rachel Kushner...
PRINT BOOKS
NON-FICTION
Arts, Architecture & Crafts
Jean Strouse Family romance : John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers 759.13 S925
Gayle Boss Everything but gray : the life of Audley Dean Nicols 758.1 N652
Ken Lum 779.092 L957
...
EBOOKS
J R R Tolkien The Silmarillion
Chris Santella Fifty places to travel solo : travel experts share the world's greatest solo destinations
Kerri K Greenidge Grimkes : the legacy of slavery in an american family.
Joy Harjo...
E-AUDIOBOOKS
Margaret Maron Christmas mourning
Peter Matthiessen Bone by bone
Peter Matthiessen Lost man's river
CJ Sansom Winter in madrid
Nassim Nicholas Taleb...
The Mechanics Institute already has numerous different English translations of Dante Alighieri's 3-part set of narrative poems -- The Divine Comedy. Although we already have the award-winning blank verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum, we recently acquired another edition of his translation, this one with an introduction by Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale as well as notes by Peter Armour, professor of Italian at...
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Did you know the Mechanics’ Institute Library offers a generous Purchase Suggestion program? This is a fantastic opportunity to directly influence our collection and ensure the library has materials that interest you and other members.
Our librarians are passionate about acquiring resources that reflect our membership’s interests and information needs, and they’re highly receptive to purchase requests. In general, the library prioritizes ordering recently published...
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Well, two places.
First, at the beginning of 2024, we moved the travel section on the 2nd floor to another location on the 2nd floor—to the aisle where we previously housed the Children's section. We now have all our new fiction books in the corner "nook" facing Post Street on the 2nd floor.
Second, while reviewing our travel collection, we found many changes in the travel book industry during the pandemic. Two publishers no longer pub...
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