News & Events

On November 21, 2009 from 7 AM to 9 PM, the library will be hosting a marathon game day. Drop in any time and try out 50 or more different board games. Scheduled demonstrations will include:

11:00 AM - Game of Go
Middlebury College Mathematics Professor Pete Schumer will give an introduction to the history and rules of this ancient Asian game of strategy.

1:30 PM - Carcassone
Vasily McCausland will introduce Carcassone, a new tile-laying game, which takes about 45 minutes and is suitable for 2-5 players. The southern French city of Carcassone is famous for its unique Roman and Medieval fortifications. The players develop the area around Carcassone and deploy their followers on the roads as thieves, in the cities as knights, and in the cloisters as monks, and in the fields as farmers.

Scheduled Games and Game Leaders:

• 10:00 AM - Apples to Apples (Jordan Bisson and Caleb Hastings)
• 11:00 AM - Go (Peter Schumer)
• 12:00 - 6:00 PM - Drop-in Chess (Monty Parker)
• 1:30 PM - Carcassone (Vasily McCausland)
• 5:00 PM - Stratego (Sean Higgins)
• 5:00 PM - Dungeons and Dragons (Mark Benton, Emmy Newkirk, Zach Young, Lou Lessing, Jack and Ben Brisson, Neil and Stuart Guertin)

Horses Like Lightning: The Story of Passage through the Himalayas
Wednesday, December 2 at 7:00 PM

Sienna Craig recounts her years spent living in the Himalayan kingdom of Mustang, Nepal, one of the world's more remote regions.

Craig was born in Santa Barbara, California, and educated at Brown University (BA 1995). She is the author of the children’s book Clear Sky, Red Earth: A Himalayan Story, A Sacred Geography: Sonnets of the Himalaya and Tibet, and Horses Like Lightning as well as numerous academic articles. For the past decade, Craig has been conducting research in Nepal and Tibetan areas of China, on topics ranging from Tibetan medicine and women’s health, to community development, labor migration and social change. She is the co-founder of DROKPA, a nonprofit organization dedicated to catalyzing grassroots development and social entrepreneurship in high Asia. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Cornell University (2006) and is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College. She lives in Vermont with her husband Ken and their daughter Aida. More at her web site.

Click here for a list of the 2009-2010 series.

The new fresh water aquarium in the Youth Department was a community gift from the National Bank of Middlebury. Judah Hamer, librarian, and Grover Usilton, National Bank VP, inspect the new tank.