Have you had a chance to stop by the Fairborn Library in the past few weeks? In addition to our children’s summer reading programs, we have also begun an adult summer reading program. Now grown-ups can join in the fun and model good reading habits for their children!

The wonderful thing about the adult summer reading program is that takes very little effort to join. You don’t even have to sign up. When you finish a book - and this could be any book, fiction, nonfiction or audiobook - you just fill out a ticket with the name of the book you read, the author, your name (phone number, too, so we can contact you if you win something) and a brief sentence about the book; then drop the ticket in the box. You will be entered into a weekly drawing for a bag full of goodies from the library. At the end of the program, all the entries (winners included!) will be combined, and there will be a drawing for a grand prize.

Tickets and the entry box are located on the front wall of the library next to the check-out desk. Along with a few good books you may want to read, there is also a contest you can enter for more chance to win prizes! The contest will change regularly, so keep checking back, you could win lots of stuff!

Hey y’all! It’s getting to be pretty hot and humid here in Fairborn, Ohio. You might say the weather resembles that experienced in the South. It makes me think of drowsy afternoons, lolling on a porch swing sipping iced tea. Or, if you prefer, sitting on the front lawn of Tara surrounded by beaux. Why don’t you check out one of these books, sit outside with a nice cool glass of lemonade, and transport yourself to a land more gracious.

Of course, we must start with the inimitable Scarlett O’Hara, queen of Tara. You can try the original, Gone with the Wind (in book or movie form) or try Alexandra Ripley’s 1991 sequel, Scarlett. Rhett Butler’s People came out last year. Both new novels are authorized by the estate of Margaret Mitchell to continue and enhance the beloved original.

After the Scarlett books, when thinking of the South, I always think of Rebecca Wells and her hit Divine Secrets of the Ya-ya Sisterhood. Some of you may not realize she wrote further about the Ya-yas, in Little Altars Everywhere and Ya-yas in Bloom.

For a funny look at what it means to be a Southern Belle, try any of Jill Conner Browne’s Sweet Potato Queens books. My favorite is the first, The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love, followed closely by The Sweet Potato Queens Wedding Planner/Divorce Guide (wedding planner on one side, divorce guide when you flip it over) and The Sweet Potato Queens Guide to Raising Children for Fun and Profit. The Queen is especially funny on audiobook; her fabulous Southern drawl just lends even more hilarity to the hijinks.

A couple more books on a Southern theme that the staff around here loves:

Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies’ Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral

A Southern Belle Primer, or, Why Princess Margaret Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa Gamma

Somebody Is Going to Die If Lily Beth Doesn’t Catch That Bouquet: The Official Southern Ladies’ Guide to Hosting the Perfect Wedding

The GRITS (Girls Raised in the South) Guide to Life

It’s hard, this year, to think of the Glorious Fourth as anything other than the start of a three-day weekend, with a parade and fireworks (weather permitting, of course!) thrown in for good measure. If the weather does force you inside for a couple of hours, I would recommend watching 1776, the musical based on the events leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Every American should see it at least once because a) it’s way more interesting than the history you remember from grade school, and b) it’s such fun to watch William Daniels (as John Adams) in full rant: “I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a congress.”

However, underneath all the humor and music, you get the very real sense of how, well, revolutionary, that time was. Now, of course, we think of it as inevitable—we studied it in school!—but, really, we shouldn’t have won that war; it’s some kind of miracle that we did.

We have several books telling the history of our Revolution from the point of view of the losing side, i.e. the British. The Long Fuse: How England Lost the American Colonies, 1760-1785, by Don Cook, describes how Britain, at the height of her power but suffering from internal political strife, made one mistake after another, culminating in the loss of her prized American colonies.

Christopher Hibbert’s Redcoats and Rebels: the American Revolution Through British Eyes portrays a frequently savage guerilla war which raged the length of the continent. It was a war in which the British had, in some areas, the support of the majority of the colonists, rarely lost a battle on land or sea, more well-trained, well-supplied soldiers—and still lost the war.

Those Damned Rebels: the American Revolution As Seen Through British Eyes, by Michael Pearson, uses contemporary letters, journals, and official British government correspondence to present a “realistic picture of a major power attempting to put down a revolt for the very understandable reason that its leaders believed that if they failed, the whole Empire would collapse.”

Stanley Weintraub’s thesis in Iron Tears: America’s Battle For Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire: 1775-1783 is that our War of Independence was Britain’s Vietnam.

“A Few Bloody Noses:” the Realities and Mythologies Of the American Revolution, by Robert Harvey, (a descendant both of George Grenville, whose Stamp Act is credited with starting the Revolution, and the Marquess of Rockingham, who ended it), was “always fascinated by how the war divided British opinion, for and against: as with the Vietnam War, it was lost as much in the mother country and globally as in the actual theatre of hostilities.”

Reading one of these books reminds us that America almost didn’t survive her birth, and that we shouldn’t take her continued health, on this, her 132^nd birthday, for granted.