Issue link: https://imageup.uberflip.com/i/711534
20 | SUN LAKES LIFESTYLES | AUGUST 2016 | I know that many of you have seen Library Committee members in the Main Clubhouse lobby on Wednesday afternoons displaying our stock of audiobooks. I also know that there has been a lot of interest in this new library feature. Yeah! We have added some titles recently and we find that the inventory list is getting too long for us to print out easily. If you would like the most up-to-date summary of audiobooks, please contact Leeann McLaughlin who has been our champion for this project at casakel@msn.com. She will be happy to email you the list. Thank you to everyone who helped the committee by purchasing books at the 4th of July book sale. We have received many donations of DVDs, many unopened. We will have these for sale at the Fall Craft Fair book sale. For August I would like to give a shout out: the 9th is National Book Lovers Day! We feel so fortunate to have the four great libraries in Sun Lakes where you can find the book that will entertain or illuminate your life. Libraries offer us the opportunity to explore our world, portals to who knows where. Once you go through that looking glass (of entering the world of the author), you'll never look back. August 30th is Frankenstein Day and this is because this is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's (1797-1851) birthday. Mary's mother died shortly after her birth, her father remarried fairly quickly and the home relationships were not close. Due to friction between her and her stepmother, Mary was sent to Scotland at 15 to live with family friends, who were loving. Later, but still at that age, Mary first met Percy Bysshe Shelly, who had become a disciple of her father's philosophies. Shelley was already infamous at age 20 for heretical writings that got him booted from Oxford. They met again two years later and, during daily walks to her mother's grave, they professed their love for each other. They left the family home, defying her father. Nine months later, her first pregnancy ended in a stillbirth but the following year she gave birth to a healthy son. Later Mary and Shelley traveled around Europe with an extended "family" that included her step-sister Jane, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician Dr. Polidori. While in Switzerland the genesis of "Frankenstein" occurred. The group was telling ghost stories late at night and a challenge was made for each of the group to write an equally horrible story. Mary, thinking of the lost baby, yearning for a mother's love and alienated from her father, was having frequent nightmares. This anxiety brought on a "waking dream" with Mary falling into a trance and recalling discussions with their friends of animal experiments with electricity (new at the time and called "galvanism") then seeing a student standing beside a corpse that he had re-animated. Yikes! Enjoy your summer and your summer reading! Library Committee