JEN: Toronto Public Library is situated on Indigenous land and Dish with One Spoon territory. This is the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Toronto Public Library gratefully acknowledges these Indigenous nations for their guardianship of this land. Tonight's program is being presented with live captioning. You can click the link in the chat or click the green button at the bottom of the page. Please use the gear icon in the upper right corner to change the size of the text. You can change other settings there as well. Today is going to be focusing on the 2021 Reading Challenge Categories: “a book by an author with a disability”, “a debut book”, and “a book about someone you would like to meet”. Please join me in welcoming my cohost, Ames. Thank you for being here. How are you doing? AMES: I am seeing in the chat that there are some sound problems. Can everybody who is commenting in the chat hear me alright? Just checking in if it is a problem with Jen specifically, or if it is all of us? I am clear, so it may just be Jen. We apologize for that. It is something that happens. Jen, I do not know if you want to try giving your browser a refresh and seeing if that will help the situation? I just want to reiterate some things that she shared. This event has live captions. We are happy to share that this will be happening for all of our future events. There is a green button to press if you want to open those captions for yourself. We also have a guest speaker with us today, Winona, who is on the screen. Hello everybody, I am Ames from the library’s Communication Department. My pronouns are they/them. Unfortunately, Nalini is not able to join us tonight, so I'm filling in for her. Also joining us today is Winona, who specializes in accessibility at the library, so we asked her to share some fantastic recommendations. First, I would like to ask Winona to introduce herself and tell us what she does here at TPL. WINONA: Thank you, Ames. I’m excited to be here. Can everybody hear me OK? If you cannot, say something in the chat, please. My name is Winona. My pronouns are she/her, and I'm also a librarian. I work in accessibility services, as Ames said. Accessibility Services provides and promotes accessible library collections, services, and equipment for people who are D/deaf and people with disabilities. I see we have a link in the chat already for the libraries webpages about Accessibility if you want to check this out. Working in Accessibility at the library is very interesting for me. As somebody who does not have a disability, it has given me a chance to grow and learn so much. Before working in libraries, I was a bookseller for many, many years. I worked in some of Toronto's great and lamentably late independent bookstores. It is very cool to be here today to have a chance to talk about books and about accessibility, two things I'm thinking a lot about these days. Thank you for having me. AMES: Thank you for introducing yourself, Winona. As I mentioned, we have live captions today. We are going to ask if you can talk a little bit more about that. Captioning is one of the features that the library can offer for our online events when it is required. Like I said, we are doing it for all of our reading challenge events ahead as well. WINONA: Yes, thank you. Many folks are familiar with captions from watching TV or videos where you have the text at the bottom of your screen that spells out what is being spoken. Captions generally also include background sounds, music, or other nonverbal content like laughter or applause. Captions are a really important feature because they make TV, video, and movies accessible to people who are D/deaf or hard of hearing, plus anybody who has auditory processing difficulties. They can be hopeful for lots of people! They may also help somebody learning a new language. They can help somebody focus and remember information or better understand new terminology if the captions are of good quality. They are handy if you want to watch something and do not have headphones, the environment is too noisy, or if you are somewhere where playing audio would be disruptive, like the library in the before times. Or, your living room if you are living with something working from home in the now times. Live captioning is very useful and you can use it in meetings and events, like library programs both in person and online. There are a couple types of live captioning. There is automatic captioning, provided by machine learning. There is live captioning provided by humans. They listen to the audio – my captioner is listening to me speaking and delivering what I'm saying in a text format using speech to text software. Some captioners use a stenographer machine, like a court reporter. Sometimes, you will see live captions at the bottom of your screen. It may be streamed to a web link, which is what we are doing today. If something requires live captioning for a library program as an accessibility accommodation, for example a person who is D/deaf or hard of hearing, has an issue with audio processing, or another type of accessibility that is required like signing language interpretation. The library can arrange that. All you need to do is contact Accessibility Services. We just ask for as much notice as possible, and we will do what we can. I'm very excited that live captioning will be part of future Reading Challenge programs from now on. There you go! Everything you wanted to know about live captioning and more. JEN: Thank you, that was super informative. Before I talk anymore, can you hear me? Sort of? OK... AMES: You are a little bit underwater, but I can hear you. JEN: Maybe if I'm closer? OK... I am going to persevere. I sound like I'm underwater? Well, I am the only one in branch today and we are having lots of technical difficulties overall. I'm echoing? WINONA: This would be a good chance to check out the captioning! Maybe they will capture what you are saying. JEN: Is this better? AMES: Wendy says it is about the same. JEN: It has been a day, so we will persevere. I really just want to get us rolling with the discussion. I want to make sure that everybody watching this is connecting through CrowdCast. If you are over on the Facebook group, follow the link to join us. AMES: Alright! I agree with some of the comments in the chat. The microphone near your mouth is slightly better, Jen. In our tech test, it was fine. These things just happen. Throughout the event, we're going to have a variety of polls. The first one is open already. There is also a "Ask a Question" feature. You can also put questions into the chat. We will try to get to any questions there. We apologize if we cannot get all of them. We have some fantastic Toronto Public Library staff in the background helping us with that function. We will do our best to keep up with that. I see that Jen has rejoined us. Back to you, Jen. JEN: Is it better? No? I can see from your faces that it is not. (Laughs). We are going to get started with our first question. I want to know what you are reading for the category "a true story by an author with a disability"? Please note that disability is understood as any physical, mental, developmental, cognitive, learning, communication, sight, hearing, or functional limitation that, in interaction with a barrier, hinders a person’s full and equal participation in society. I see that Pauline has thankfully put the definition up as well as a link to the city of Toronto's Disability Awareness and Inclusion website. We're going to start with Winona. Winona, what do you recommend for this category? WINONA: Yes, so I had such a hard time narrowing down my choices for this category because there is a lot of great writing out there by people with disabilities, including true stories by people with disabilities! I went with a few newer titles. The first choice I have is called 'About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times'. I have that right here in hardcover. It is kind of a big book. It is a collection of short, first-person essays from the New York Times, which has actually been running a series on disabilities since 2016. The title is from the slogan of the disability rights movement, which is "nothing about us without us." What is great about this collection is that there is a really wide selection of topics from authors with various disabilities, so you get a great diversity along that whole spectrum that you were just alluding to in that definition. There are about 60 different writers, and each has their own unique experience and voice, and they talk about everyday life experiences. I really like that range, right? We were talking a little bit before we started the program about how disabilities not just one thing. Each person's experience is unique to them, and we are all individuals. A couple that stick out for me: there is one by the late Oliver Sacks, who is a neurologist and writer. The first book I read of his was 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat'. His is about his hearing loss. Another one is by Jonathan Mooney, who is a personal public speaker. He writes about being labelled as the special education kid in school and later realizing it is not that he has a disability, as the phrase goes, but that he experiences disability or is disabled by environments that are not made for anyone who is different or "normal". His essay is called 'You Are Special. Now Stop Being Different.' Anyway, short essays and very high quality writing from the New York Times. I have a couple of other recommendations. My next recommendation is a totally different one. It is called 'Golem Girl'. It is a memoir. The author is an artist and storyteller. She was born with spina bifida in 1958 at a time when it was basically a death sentence. Most children with spina bifida died before they turned the age of two. Early in the book, she explains that spina bifida means "split spine", and it is when a fetus is in utero and the spinal bones do not completely fuse. Instead, they leave an open fissure somewhere along the spine, a hole through which bacteria can reach the brain. I tell you this because there is a passage early in the book where she explains this, and she writes that spina bifida babies are “born open to the world.” When I read that, it really took my breath away. I thought it was a very intimate statement from her, and the book is very intimate. It is a memoir about her life growing up in Cincinnati, thriving, in fact, with a mother who fought for her and made sure she had an education - something children with disabilities in the early fifties and sixties were pretty much denied. She becomes a university director, gets involved in the queer community, and with disability culture. She finds and builds a new identity for herself. There is a memoir aspect and a social history aspect. It is a very brainy and very funny and very moving and a very big book. It is 400 pages, but each chapter is really short, just a couple of pages, and they are kind of like vignettes, which I really liked. Her writings are really visual. She is a visual artist. The book includes lots of family photos and productions of her portraits, which are paintings. They are amazing. Very intimately detailed and complex. There is a whole section at the back. Let me see if I can find something... I am showing 'A Portrait of a Person'. It is a portrait from 2001. They are beautiful. There is a section in the back where she has a little information about the person in the portrait. So, it is a great book. The writing is beautiful. It won the first Barbellion Prize, which is a new prize for disabled voices. It was a best book of the year from Kirkus. So, highly recommended. It would also work for challenge category “a book about growing older”. My third recommendation is for a book called 'Dancing after TEN' written by Vivian Chong and Georgia Webber. Vivian Chong is a local Toronto artist and Georgia Webber is a cartoonist. So, Vivian is on vacation in the Caribbean with her boyfriend and he turns out to be a huge jerk, in my humble opinion if you do not mind me saying. So, one day she has a headache. She takes an ibuprofen and it triggers an extreme medical reaction. She develops an extreme skin disorder, called TEN (Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis). She goes into a coma. When she regains consciousness months later, her body is covered in scar tissue. It causes vision and hearing loss. The main story here is about her journey after this terrifying experience. To remake her life, which she does with incredible courage and determination, she learns how to cook and how to swim. She trains a guide dog and she finds all kinds of creative outlets to express yourself, including stand-up comedy. So, it is a great book. It is also a real collaboration between Vivian Chong and Georgia Webber the cartoonist. Vivian Chong describes the scenes she wanted verbally to Webber. Webber would create or finish the art. Then, a third collaborator, Kathleen Reid, would describe the art back to Chong and they would do the revision. This book came out last year and was shortlisted for the 2020 Toronto Book Award. It is a debut book. Those are my picks. JEN: That is awesome, I love 'Dancing after TEN'. It was one of my favourite books last year. Ames, what are you reading for this category? AMES: Because it was a little bit last minute, me joining this event tonight, I do not have any props with me. But, I do have two books I would like to recommend. The first one I want to recommend is called 'Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and a Pressure to Seem Just Fine’. It began as a journalism piece. The author was prompted to do this by their own experience of a sudden onset of debilitating illness. They talked to other young women who were being told that they were too young to suffer from any particular chronic condition or illness they may have. Or who had an invisible chronic disability or illness, and were told that they are "too pretty to be disabled". It is both a case study of all these individual women's experiences, and it is also a very interesting way to take a look at microaggressions, which is saying things to someone like, "you do not look sick." When you tell someone that you suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, and there are limitations to how much time they can spend standing on their feet, for example, or there are limitations to the amount of exercise they can do. It is a fascinating collection of short stories – or case studies, you could describe it as. They are not really essays because, although Michelle is the one who does the writing, there is a lot that is from the person's point of view. It's a bit of an interview thing as well. It is this whole intersectional analysis between disability and ability and illness and sexism. There are also people who also experience racism, too, for example. So people who are people of colour in this particular book experience even harsher judgement from people who cannot see what is going on within them. It is about how people require supports and advocacy when you cannot visibly see anything wrong with them. When somebody seems to be too young to be suffering from, say, arthritis, for example, or anything else that is going on in their life. And how that breeds additional barriers, and it can also make their situations even harder to deal with than they should otherwise be. There is this assumption that past a certain age, it is understandable if you are experiencing hearing loss. But, if you are below a certain age "why can't you hear?" So, I found this an absolutely fascinating read. I would not suggest it “a book that made you feel comforted or hopeful”. Because it was very thought provoking and it made me quite mad. I also thought that it was a very useful book. I highly recommend this one. The other book that I want to recommend is ‘The Cancer Journals'. Part of the reason I want to bring it up again for “a true story by a person with a disability”, is because Audre herself does not see herself as being disabled. She sees society as being disabled. So, there is this really interesting element to it again, on how we explore, and how we adjust disability in other people. To make a long story short, and it is not a great spoiler, but she has breast cancer and she winds up having one of her breasts removed. She does not have any reconstructive surgery. She is treated horribly by society because of this, because it apparently makes other people uncomfortable that her chest is now lopsided. Or, it is going to make other people who are battling cancer feel terrible about themselves because they feel their life is going to be ruined because they're going to be deformed like she is. Again, I think it was in incredibly thought-provoking book. It is about 60 pages. It is a mix of essays, and journal entries. I will use it not for “a true story for a person with a disability” for myself this year, I will actually use it for “a book about a person who is unlike myself”. Because Audre Lorde is a woman, a lesbian, and Black. I am none of those things. That is the category I used it for. But, seeing this other perspective was very eye-opening. It has been around for 60 years now. It won tons and tons of awards. It is available in many formats, so it is readily available through our catalogue. That is my second recommendation. Jen, how about you? JEN: Great recommendations both of you. I am seeing in the chat multiple people saying so many great recommendations. This one was recommended to me by Winona last year. It is called 'Disability Visibility'. It is an absolute terrific collection. Pieces by disabled writers, thinkers, organizers, and activists. Alice Wong serves as editor and writes a stellar introduction. She is the founder and director of the Disability is Visibility project with its base in the U.S. dedicated to creating and sharing…oh! Hello, cat! (Laughs) If you have Twitter, I highly recommend you follow her. She is constantly tweeting about accessibility and disability issues. The Oscars had some... For the very first time, they had a ramp for the ceremony this year. She was very involved in talking about accessibility around that. So, she is a wonderful person. I have learned so much from her. There is a lot more to say about this on, but I will not. My second choice is... this cat is amazing (Laughs). It is, this one here. It is called 'The Pretty One'. I loved it. It is a debut collection from Keah Brown. The writing is fun, fresh, and super cute. Speaking of cute, Brown is the creator of the viral hashtag #disabledandcute on Twitter, Instagram, all of these things. If you type in #disabledandcute, you're going to find a whole bunch of cute pictures of people with disabilities. She talks about that in the introduction. She is also a great follow. She is a young writer, and she's going to have a really great journey. Definitely check out her stuff. That is me. We are going to scroll up to see what you recommend for “a true story by an author with a disability”. We are also going to talk about the first poll. AMES: Let us start with the chat. Patricia recommends Michael J Fox’s, 'No Time Like the Future'. Did you want to chime in Winona? WINONA: I wanted to chime in because I'm wearing my "The Future is Accessible" t-shirt today. AMES: I’m seeing…the autobiography of the Guelph children's writer who is visually impaired. Also Helen Keller, 'Story of My Life'. I am envious. I would've loved to meet Jean Little. Morgan says, I also read 'Little by Little' I read it years ago. It might be time for another read. JEN: I'm going to finish this first poll, and introduce the second one. We can do two things at once. So, we are going to close the first one down, thanks for voting. We are going to pop up with the second one in a moment. I would like to take it back to some more of your recommendations. AMES: Emily recommends 'Awakening'. Oliver Sacks had prosopagnosia, which is face blindness. Patricia says, "I had a cousin that died of spina bifida," and James says thank you for the recommendations. Allison says, "’The Cancer Journals’ reflects my best friend's post-surgery." That's great. Thanks for sharing. Thank you so much. It's a personal choice, but it's definitely something sixty years later, women are still experiencing prejudice. JEN: What other recommendations? WINONA: ‘Hello, I Want to Die Please Fix Me’. I started it. And I can't remember. I started it yeah. I put it aside for a time when I was in a better emotional place. JEN: It’s great it is mentioned here today. Okay and maybe Pauline can find it in the catalogue if you are not doing too much already. AMES: I just want to say Patricia says, "can everyone see the comments?" Yes, you can see the comments in the live event. Because this is recorded, they wouldn't show in the replay. That's the reason we are reading them out loud. Thank you for asking about that. WINONA: To read the comments out loud from my perspective is that if someone is joining with low vision or toggled the chat they wouldn't see the chat. That's great to read them aloud. AMES: Thank you. That slipped by mind. We also have Emily saying, ‘Notes Make Lunch Meaningful, Life Will Follow’ by Garth Callaghan. And John asked about the young man who had spina bifida and Pauline put in the catalogue entry for finding his books. That's amazing. JEN: Thanks, Pauline. And I think last but not least Elizabeth said 'I Never Promised You a Rose Garden'. Not one I'm familiar with. Thank you. Thank you for moderating the chat. So please go ahead and…there are so many ways to enjoy books these days. So, umm, that takes us to, umm… AMES: Our next question? JEN: Yeah. [Laughter] AMES: We do have an outline for ourselves for these particular events. Otherwise, we will talk about one book forever and not move on. So what books would you recommend for “a debut book”? We will start with the recommendations and ask you to chime on the book. What other books? WINONA: I have two recommendations. The first one is a novel called 'Good Kings Bad Kings'. It's an older book from 2012. I read this one last year, and I used it for last year's reading challenge. It's a great book. It's a look inside a fictional with teenagers with disabilities. The chapters change from different voices. So there are seven characters and each chapter is from different perspectives. They are funny and serious. And quote, “if this is what it means to be a ward of the state, you can have your award they don't want it.” As the story unfolds, truths come to light. When I was reading this it was when conditions in seniors’ long term care facilities. It echoed more in this book. These are critical issues today. So, you know, questions of "what is care?" and "what are we talking about?" Are we talking about long term care? Who gets to talk about care? Whose voices are heard? What happens when care is for profit? And what happens when a caregiver, even with the best intentions, makes a mistake? It's a great read. It's funny and it's sad, and I would recommend it. And it did win an award in 2012 for socially engaged fiction, The Bell Prize. The second recommendation is called ‘Leaving Isn't the Harder Thing’. It's by Lauren Hough. I've been looking at this one. It just came in Saturday. I'm just a few chapters in. I'm loving it. This book is a collection of personal essays about her life. It's dead funny and sharp and touchy and very swear-y. If that is something you don't appreciate, do not read this book. However, if you do, you may enjoy it. She talks about surviving some pretty heavy things: Assault. Abuse. Some warning for readers of this book. She grew up what is a cult of the Children of God. She became an airman and describes herself as a disabled vet and a cable guy and a bouncer at a gay night club. So there is a twitter feed in the community. And they been giving her book one-star ratings. There is bad behavior. I don't know all the details. I'm not interested in that as I am in her book. It's amazing. And I would recommend it. Also, if you enjoy audio books you may like to know this is read by Cate Blanchett. It's a get, I would think. This would work in “a debut book” and “a book published this year”. Those are my two books. JEN: All right. Those are great. Many copies if you are interested. So if you saw President Biden’s inauguration, you will know Amanda Gorman. If you want to be amazed all over again, you will find the whole text of her poem plus an introduction by Mama Oprah in ‘The Hill We Climb’. I am stretching the rules on this one. In 2015, at the age of 17, Gorman self-published ‘For One That is Not Enough’. That book disappeared from her website, so if you find a copy somewhere, it's your lucky day. Poems from that book will be republished along with new work coming up in 2022. And listen to this audiobook. It's nine minutes of brilliance. My second book is 'Hench'. [Laughter] So you are maybe familiar with 'Hench'? I love this book. It is fiction and it is fun and I think you will like it a lot. Anna is on the job and injured in an incident involving the world most popular superhero. She fired and looks into the data and figures there are a lot of people like her. She figures she could do something about it. So, we have superheroes and this work place comedy, and resilience and revenge. Good stuff. I recommend it. What else do you pick for this category? AMES: I have two recommendations. I will go through quickly. I want to cover everything. ‘What Can a Body Do: How We Meet the Built World’. Now this book is about accessibility. And it's about customizing and tailoring and all things we would not think about in this world anymore. Once an upon time, people's clothing was made for them individually. What they are exploring in this book is accessible ability and what the world is for. It's about a professor who is coming to the engineering students. She wants something made for her to use for her lectures. We want to modify the person so they fit the world as it exists. To give the professor something to stand on to be the height. She wants something made for her size and wants the world to adapt where she is. That's brilliant. This book was an aha book for me about the world. We talk about disability about the intersection of a barrier in our world. This is a great way to see the barriers in the world that we don't necessarily think of if we are typical. If we never had a serious illness. It's a great way to understand the world can be better and so much more. And it's not that big a deal to ask for these things and make these things happen. There should be more flexibility in the builds and in our tools of what exist right now. When I read this book. I had a moment. A few years ago I travelled to Japan. I'm sure you cannot see that I'm a short person. If I sit on any chair my feet will hang. It's bothering and my legs are numb. When I went to Japan every chair was the correct height and my feet touched the floor because the average height is shorter than here. It's weird, I say weird but it's interesting. And the book really facilitated that for me and changed how I look at things in my world. Not just for my personal perspective but really opened me up to look at other perspectives. So I recommend this book for anyone, anyone who cares about empathy. And another one I want to talk about is ‘The Black Flamingo.’ Dean Atta is a UK writer. April is poetry month. It's about a queer Black teenager finding out who he is through the art of drag. It's a beautiful book. For me this is another aha moment. Peter says he loves it. Amazing. Check it out. It's different than everything else. It's nominated for a ton of awards. I wish we can have them at a library event. Let's look at the comments. And then we will get to discussions. I did happen to see partway Liz said she is out on the swearing. But that's fair. JEN: That is fair. Let's see she recommends ‘Such a Fun Age’ as a debut book. Loved that one. We have two recommendations from John. ‘The Short Day Dying’ by Peter Hobbs. It's subject is faith. I bought six copies for friends. I'm all for buying people books to convince them to read them. And ‘On the Black Hill’ by Bruce Chatwin. It's in a border country and they get the feel of the settings and a prize winner. AMES: So Chrissy says they read ‘Good Morning Destroyer of Men’s Souls’ about addiction and it sounds like a heavy book. I would had picked that book last year. Because ‘Good Morning Destroyer of Men’s Souls’ is a fantastic title as far as I'm concerned. We also have a nonfiction book, ‘Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape Our World by Ziya Tong. That's amazing everyone. JEN: Great choice. Okay. We are getting carried away and running out of time. We will do rapid fire on the last question. Are you both ready? AMES: Let's take a look at the poll. I see hardcover is winning by a landslide by your preferred format for reading a book. I see something about the physicality of this. JEN: We were going to take a moment to talk about CELA and some accessible formats. But if Pauline could put links in the chat, that would be amazing. There are lots of ways to read. And the library is great at helping you find those ways. OK last question: what is your pick of “a book by someone you would like to meet”? WINONA: Okay. I will try to be fast. I got two picks here. They are both by woman with disabilities who refuse to be limited by the barriers they experience. And the wrong idea that those barriers are the individual’s problems. Instead they show in these books that accessibility is a civil right issue. The first book is called ‘Being Heumann’ by Judith Heumann. She was born in 1947 and was born with polio and was in a wheelchair. She had to fight for education. They wouldn't let her attend and called her a fire hazard. When she was 13 she went to a camp with kids with other disabilities and got a sense of shared community. Some folks may have heard of ‘Crip Camp’. It was nominated for an Oscar. She was speaking from the documentary. For me the story where she organized a sit-in in1977 in San Francisco to sign the first Federal Protection for People with Disabilities. The sit-in was 28 days and hundreds of people with disabilities were there for 28 days. Some on hunger strikes. And my second pick. I have her book here. It's called “Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law”. She is an activist and her story is different. She is blind and Deaf and had to really fight in her life. This book was cool to me and I would love to meet her. There are so many misconceptions about people with disabilities. Specifically, deafblind people. She goes to Mali to do volunteer work and goes to Harvard and graduates. I enjoyed it. It was like reading about a different world than I know. It also works in the category, “a book about someone unlike myself”. Those are my two recommendations. AMES: So I'm going to recommend the book ‘Funny You Don't Look Autistic’ by Michael McCreary. This is a young adult book. There is swearing in this. There is a combination of his childhood and tips for living with autism. It's fascinating to me. If you ever felt like you are the weird person in the room just know you can find someone out there. Michael is someone I would love to go and see his shows when safe. We wanted him to come to the library to do a program. But we will try it again for the future. This is a debut book and was published before the writer turned 21. JEN: Amazing. Okay. So we are so close to 6 o'clock. So, we’re talking about the category “a book by someone you’d like to meet”. For our third poll, we thought we would switch it up and put fictional characters in who you’d like to meet. And if you do not see your character there put it into the chat. So, my first pick is ‘We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays’ by Samantha Irby. And…she doesn't want to meet me! But yeah, she is brilliant. And I think if you know me, you know she is one of my favourite writers and super funny. [Laughter] My second choice is ‘Broken Horses’ by Brandi Carlile. This one surprised a lot of people by debuting at number one on the New York Times Bestseller List. But if you’ve heard this woman sing, you know she is a legend. I really like her music and her sweet little chosen family. This one has a zillion holds [Laughter] so I look forward to it in the future. Let's see. Since it's 5:59, we will go over a bit. Are you okay with that? If people have to leave that's fine. But I want to recognize what you are all reading. AMES: While we take a look at your recommendations, please ask questions in the chat. If you need recommendations for other categories, let us know and we will try to give you some before we finish today. JEN: The book about someone you can meet they can be fictional or dead? Good question. Yes, and yes. AMES: Okay. They want to meet the Tin Man. Cool. JEN: Yes! I would love to meet Eric Walters. AMES: I’ve met him. [Laughter] He is a fantastic speaker and great with kids’ classes. I recommend him for class visits and events. We want him to get back to the library when it’s safe. JEN: John asks, can you talk more about “a book about fame”? I would say a historical figure if they are a royalty or infamous. I would say they would count. Yes. Cool. Does anyone have questions for us before we go? AMES: And of course you can always ask for recommends on the Facebook group. You can go to TPL Reading Challenge. There are recommendations for the categories. You can post a comment there and say hey, what else do you recommend and we can get back to you that way as well. JEN: It looks like people see the panic in my eye! [Laughter] I appreciate you all being here. Let's do a wrap up. AMES: It's about time. Yup. JEN: So thank you everybody for coming tonight. And want to give you a special thank you to Winona for joining us today. It's been great talking to you. I have a good to-read pile for sure. We want to thank Pauline and thank you to Nalini who organized the event and also the Reading Challenge team. And also all of you! AMES: May the 27th is the next event at 5 p.m. It's Reading with Pride. We will kick off Pride Month with the Reading Challenge. I will be back with three new guests you’ve never met. They will discuss the “a children's book by an LGBTQ2S+ author” and “a book that made you feel comforted or hopeful”. I look forward to it. I hope that you register and join in for that event as well. JEN: It will be great and I’m looking forward to it. Thank you for everyone for understanding the technical issues and supporting us and writing in the chat. I just want to say thank you and take care. ALL: Bye.