In this issue
- Letter from CELA’s Executive Director
- Awards update!
- On our blog
- Reading for the Olympics
- Celebrating Pride Month
- Reading in the news
- Changes to the Holds feature in My account
- Summer reading clubs for kids
- Featured title for adults: James: A Novel
- Top five books
- Featured title for kids: Dear Mothman
- Top five for kids
- Top five teens
- New magazines in our collection
- Keep learning this summer!
- Service Tip: Keep your apps up to date!
- Holiday hours
- Stay connected!
Letter from CELA’s Executive Director
As we head into summer reading season, I am delighted to see the new titles available in our collection. Along with our usual additions, we’ve added more than 1100 French braille titles and have plans to add another 300 more in the coming weeks. We’ve also put together some reading lists of recently added titles for National Indigenous People’s Day, which is available on our blog, and for Pride Month, which you will find in our newsletter. You can also check out our Recommended and Awards pages for more great books to add to your summer reads list.
We often hear from our users how important it is to have choices in their reading. Check out one of our recent blog posts for an interview with Theresa Power, our Content and Access Librarian, about how our collection has grown over the last decade and all the things she considers as she selects titles for our users.
One of Theresa’s jobs is to ensure we have books in our collection to support Summer reading clubs, including the TD Summer Reading Club, the BC Summer Reading Club and the New Brunswick Summer Reading Club. If you have young readers in your life who need accessible books, check out our lists and encourage them to participate in their local library programs. Because summer is a great time for reading!
Open Book will be taking a break in July and will return with lots of news and reading suggestions in August.
Happy reading and have a fantastic summer.
Laurie Davidson, Executive Director
Awards update!
Canadian writer Naomi Klein and American author V. V. Ganeshananthan have won the 2024 Women's Prizes.
Klein won the inaugural nonfiction award for her book Doppelganger, while Ganeshananthan received the fiction award for her novel Brotherless Night, which also recently won the Carol Shields Prize.
Congratulations to Patrick DeWitt who won the 2024 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for his book The Librarianist.
Winners from the Indigenous Voices Awards include:
- And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott in audio and braille
- The All + Flesh by Brandi Bird
For more information about literary awards visit our Awards page.
On our blog
In June, we featured books to read to honour National Indigenous Heritage Month. Recommendations include new titles and some older favourites.
We've also announced our Accessible Commercial Audiobooks Project, funded by Accessibility Standards Canada, which is designed to help create accessibility guidelines and resources for publishers, audiobook producers and others in the audiobook industry.
Reading for the Olympics
The Olympics return to Paris for the third time in just a few weeks. The games come with all the excitement, heartbreak and glory of sport. But what we often remember best are the stories. We have chosen some books to get you into Olympic shape!
A sporting chance: how Ludwig Guttmann created the paralympic games by Lori Alexander.
Path lit by lightning by David Maraniss
Kid olympians: Summer: true tales of childhood from champions and game changers by Robin Stevenson
Find these and many other titles in our Olympic book list.
Celebrating Pride Month
Earlier this month, the winners of the Lambda Literary Prizes were announced. Winners included Family meal: A novel by Bryan Washington and Hi Honey, I’m Homo! by Matt Baume, among many others.
The Lambdas are an excellent place to start if you are looking for books by and about the 2SLGBTQ+ community.
We also have lots of other titles to check out.
Reading in the news
A recent Booknet study shows that audiobooks continue to grow in popularity and that the most popular fiction genres are mysteries or thrillers across all formats. Our CELA readers would agree with that! Audiobooks and mysteries are some of our readers' very favourite books to read.
Love audiobooks? Learn more about CELA's latest project to help make commercial audiobooks more accessible.
Changes to the Holds feature in My account
Do you ever wish you could change the order in which your CELA items on Holds are being sent to you? Good news! We have just launched some new features on our website that will help you do just that.
Here is a short description of this new functionality:
- Make sure you are logged in and go to your CELA My account page. From there, activate the Holds link.
- Each title is a heading at level two, followed by information, including the current priority queue number.
- Below each title in your Holds list is a link called “Prioritize this hold”. If you activate it, the corresponding item will be moved to the top of the priority queue and will be the first in line to be sent to you.
- You can also suspend a hold by activating its corresponding link, titled “Suspend this hold”. This will remove it from your priority queue, and it will not be sent out to you, unless you reactivate it.
- You can reactivate a suspended item by selecting its corresponding link titled “Return item to queue”. It will be placed back at the bottom of your Holds priority queue.
You can also select multiple holds and delete them completely from your Holds list, filter the list by various criteria, and search the list for a title or author. For more information, please visit the Holds tutorial on our website.
Summer reading clubs for kids
It’s officially summer and kids’ summer reading clubs have started at public libraries across the country. There’s sure to be lots of fun and games all summer long.
And, of course, lots of good books too!
CELA is pleased to support kids with print disabilities by creating reading lists of books in accessible formats for clubs across the country. For participants in the New Brunswick Summer Reading Club, kids can Travel Around the World in 8 Weeks with adventure and travel books. Kids in BC can explore a World of Curiosities with books about science and discovery, and kids joining the TD Summer Reading Club can Blast Off with titles about space and exploration.
The TDSRC also supports readers with print disabilities by providing notebooks in accessible formats which include games, reading suggestions, and pages for kids to record the books they’ve read. They are available online in electronic braille, large print, audio, and OpenDyslexic formats. Parents and guardians can download these notebooks and read about supporting their young readers on the club’s Accessibility page.
Contact your local library to get in on the summer reading fun and to learn about how they are making their program accessible for kids with disabilities.
Featured title for adults: James: A Novel
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
Read James: A Novel by Percival Everett.
Top five books
Most popular with our readers this month:
- The Whispers: A Novel by Ashley Audrain, Suspense and thrillers
- Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton, Biography
- Pageboy: A Memoir by Elliot Page, Biography
- Chasing Endless Summer by V. C. Andrews, Suspense and thrillers
- This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune, Romance
Featured title for kids: Dear Mothman
"A triumphant coming-of-age story about gender identity, strength, and friendship, as well as the different ways that people discover who they are," -School Library Journal, starred review.
A moving middle-grade novel in verse, about a young trans boy dealing with the loss of his friend by writing to his favorite cryptid, Mothman Halfway through sixth grade, Noah's best friend and the only other trans boy in his school, Lewis, passed away in a car accident.
Lewis was adventurous and curious, always bringing a new paranormal story to share with Noah. Together they daydreamed about cryptids and shared discovering their genders and names. After his death, lonely and yearning for someone who could understand him like Lewis once did, Noah starts writing letters to Mothman, wondering if he would understand how Noah feels and also looking for evidence of Mothman's existence in the vast woods surrounding his small Poconos town. Noah becomes determined to make his science fair project about Mothman, despite his teachers and parents urging him to make a project about something "real."
Meanwhile, as Noah tries to find Mothman, Noah also starts to make friends with a group of girls in his grade, Hanna, Molly, and Alice, with whom he'd been friendly, but never close to. Now, they welcome him, and he starts to open up to each of them, especially Hanna, who Noah has a crush on. But as strange things start to happen and Noah becomes sure of Mothman's existence, his parents and teachers don't believe him. Noah decides it's up to him to risk everything, trek into the woods, and find Mothman himself.
Read Dear Mothman by Robin Gow.
Top five for kids
Most popular with kids this month:
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, Fantasy
- The Complete Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, Fantasy
- Harry Potter: Cinematic Guide by Felicity Baker, General non-fiction
- Rescue Pup by Jean Little, Animal stories
- Kunoichi Bunny by Sara Cassidy, General fiction
Top five for teens
Most popular with teens this month:
- The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the first part of Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings #1) by J. R. R. Tolkien, Fantasy
- Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass #1) by Sarah J. Maas, Adventure stories
- Breakdown (The Reckoner Rises #1) by David A. Robertson, Disabilities fiction
- A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks, Bestsellers (fiction)
- 1984: A Novel by George Orwell, Classic fiction
New magazines in our collection
Last month we told you about some changes happening in the magazine publishing world. While we have had to say goodbye to some old favourites, we are delighted to let you know that we have added a dozen new magazines for you to read.
You can find links to these, and all our magazines, on our Magazines page.
- 60 Days of Prayer
- Apple Watch The Complete Manual
- Brain Train
- What on Earth! Magazine
- Chromebook The Complete Manual
- De-Stress Yourself
- ELLE Gourmet
- Fun For Kidz Magazine
- Simply Knitting
- Simply Sewing
- The Spruce
- Women Thrive Magazine
Keep learning this summer!
Our live webinars for our users are on hiatus for the summer. But please check back in the August edition of Open Book to find out what we will be offering this fall! Also, be sure to go to our Webinar recordings and resources page to check out our previously offered webinars.
Here are a few to get you started!
- CELA at your fingertips: All about CELA's braille collection
- Deliver students with dyslexia accessible reading experiences
- Navigating the CELA website with JAWS or NVDA
If you have missed recent webinars or just want to learn more about CELA services, our recordings on YouTube are a great place to start!
Service Tip: Keep your apps up to date!
If you use reading apps like EasyReader to read CELA titles, make sure you are keeping them current by installing updates as they are issued by the provider. This will help you get the best reading experience.
Holiday hours
CELA and its Contact Centre will be closed on Monday, July 1 for Canada Day. We will resume usual hours on Tuesday, July 2.
Enjoy your holiday!
Stay connected!
Visit CELA's social media, including X (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, YouTube and our blog, for more news about what's happening in the world of accessible literature.