Welcome back to Browsing Books! Let's explore some summer time reading. We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, a multitype system serving all types of libraries. This season we are suggesting books you might enjoy for our Goodreads group: Armchair Travel to Minnesota State Parks. We give you a prompt connected to each state park, and you find a book to fulfill the challenge. You can use one of our suggestions, and you should feel free to read any book! Split Rock Creek State Park is in the Pipestone area of the state. (Don't be confused with the very similarly named Split Rock park!) This is the largest body of water in Pipestone County, an area famous for indigenous peoples coming to this area to gather. Let's celebrate the history by reading a book about gatherings of people! Thanks for joining us! We'll be back next week with a look at the next park and the next book prompt!

Welcome to a summer of good reading – and good state parks! This season we are suggesting books you might enjoy for our Goodreads group: Armchair Travel to Minnesota State Parks. We give you a prompt connected to each state park, and you find a book to fulfill the challenge. You can use one of our suggestions, and you should feel free to read any book! Red River Valley State Recreation Area was established in 2000. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_par... Celebrate the frequent question at any library: "I'm looking for a book with a red cover; do you know it?" by reading a book with a red cover! You can find our show notes page here, with links to all six books we are sharing this week. Join us in reading some new books this week!

Welcome to a summer of good reading - and good state parks! We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, a multitype library system serving all types of libraries. This season we are suggesting books you might enjoy for our Goodreads group: Armchair Travel to Minnesota State Parks. We give you a prompt connected to each state park, and you find a book to fulfill the challenge. You can use one of our suggestions, and you should feel free to read any book! Moose Lake park was started in 1971. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_par... This park has a lovely Agate and Geological Interpretive Center. Dig into this by reading a book about geology, rocks, or jewels. You can find our show notes page here, with links to all the books we are sharing this week. Join us in reading some new books this week!

Welcome, everyone, to our final episode of Season Five of Reading With Libraries! It has been so great to read with you for these fifteen weeks – we just can't bear for our book fun to end. So while we are on hiatus you will get a Browsing Books quick episode each week. You can follow our Goodreads book challenge: Armchair Travel to Minnesota State Parks. We give you a book prompt for each state park, to highlight something neat at the park. Here is our full show notes page. This week we are discussing a favorite topic: Minnesota books! We will look at book set in Minnesota, and books by Minnesota authors. This is always our season finale topic, because we know there are 10,000 lakes here and at least as many good stories! Who is joining us today? We are welcoming back our frequent Alternate Host Ariel Kirst, from the Great River Public Library system!

You can find our full show notes page here. This week we're going to be discussing Middle Grade books. We've mentioned Middle Grade titles on our other podcasts, and if you're interested in children's literature, you should definitely listen to our episodes on Picture Books and YA! We're happy to welcome our CMLE Podcast Correspondent Ariel Kirst from the St. Cloud Public Library! We have beverages connected to our genre of Middle Graders, with links to the recipes. It's a book group, so you want to have a good beverage! The growth of this genre really shows how much attention we are now giving to this age range, and it is really interesting to see the range of books available to them!

Welcome back to the show. We are so glad you are here, joining us for the book group discussion! You can find our full show notes page here. This week we are talking about running! Last week we talked about books about pandemics and other scary things. This week we are going to look at another topic that focuses on health. If you want to do some running of your own - great! And if reading about running can help you work on some healthy behaviors, that's great too! Our Guest Host is Kate Wallace, from Marketing and Communications at the St Cloud Technical and Community College. She is also an avid runner, and has visited every state park in Minnesota! When you run, and when you are done, you need to think about rehydrating. This week our beverages will help us to be well hydrated, as well as giving us the energy and endurance to make it through this discussion.

Thank you for joining us on Reading With Libraries! We are so glad you are here to join our book group podcast! Our full show notes page is right here. So we pick a new genre each week to chat about and hopefully provide you with some insight into what may be an unfamiliar genre! This week we do want to give you a heads up that we're discussing a topic that might not be for everyone - books about or featuring pandemics. Based on current events, we thought people might be interested to learn more, but we also recognize this content may not be what you want to hear right now! This week's Additional Host is Ariel Kirst, from Great River Public Library! Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages. We have several options for beverages to enjoy during a pandemic. If you missed our episode on Dystopian fiction, it was episode 205. A quick listen to that, and reading some of those books, will help you to keep things in perspective as we all work though our current situation.

Welcome back to the show. We are so glad you are here, joining us for the book group discussion! You can find our full show notes page here. We recorded this episode while we were socially distancing! So, enjoy us recording all from our own homes. This week we are talking about hiking! Right now, we are all focused on our social distancing and not doing long-distance hiking trips. But as long as we are thoughtful of our fellow hikers, heading outside for some fresh air and exercise is good for us. Even if you can't make it out to hike, you can do some hiking with books! Our Guest Host is Kate Wallace, from Marketing and Communications at the St Cloud Technical and Community College. She is also an occasional hiker, and has visited every state park in Minnesota!

Thank you for joining us on Reading With Libraries! We are so glad you are here to join our book group podcast! This week we're excited to explore a very popular genre: High Fantasy! We are so pleased to welcome new Guest Host Eric from the St. Cloud Public Library! You can find our full show notes page here. Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages. Today we have drinks from the blog The Sword and Torch Inn. They warn: "The drinking feats mentioned in this list are not recommended in real life unless you happen to be an Orc barbarian or a half dragon." We are sipping slowly and taking our chances!

Welcome back to the show. We are so glad you are here, joining us for the book group discussion! Check out our show notes page right here. This week we are chatting about food books! Food is always important, and can cover so many different aspects of life, so it's a very full genre. If you like this, you should check out our episode 301 on Cookbooks. We are going to look at other areas of food this time, and that one was filled with all sorts of tasty books! This week our returning Guest Host is Ariel Kirst, from Great River Regional Public Library. Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages, and we each came prepared with our own drink to enjoy while we talk about our books. You are an important part of this book group, so if you don't have a beverage go ahead and get one now. Each of our beverages will have a recipe or a link on our episode page, so you can try them yourself! Food is such a huge topic, it's almost impossible to really get your hands around this topic. We aren't even going to try today! None of us are doctors or nutritionists, so we aren't here to tell you about the best food - or even the best food books. Instead, we have some books to share with you about the ideas of food, food prep and the lives of chefs, how food mixes with culture, or how food and the environment interact. This is a fun genre, with so many possibilities to explore new ideas - and so many possibilities to find a great new food you might enjoy!