The One Read reading panel of community members from Boone and Callaway Counties narrowed the list of more than 230 book suggestions for the 2021 One Read title to two top contenders. From April 5-24, you can cast your vote for either “Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee” by Casey Cep or “The Resisters” by Gish Jen.

Vote online at oneread.org.

Kate Markie and her husband Peter moved to Columbia in the fall of 1976 when she was working on her dissertation in philosophy from the University of Rochester.

Kate went to law school at the University of Missouri, worked at the Missouri Supreme Court clerking for judge Robert T. Donnelly and for the state Public Defender System. She is now retired after 27 years serving as an attorney for the University of Missouri.

During the pandemic, reading may play a more important role in a student’s learning process than ever before.

Reading or being read to can really help a student during this time of education disruption. Just like your body, your brain benefits from regular exercise to keep it strong, stimulated and focused. Reading is brain exercise.

Welcome to 2021, friends! While we are all looking forward to the good things to come, I would like to reflect on how the library has continued to provide services during the pandemic, and what we have learned.

More and more of us get our latest news from social media, but when your feed is a mix of personal comments, opinion, news, satire and misinformation, how can you decide what is true and what isn’t? We all need to be careful. What you choose to share may be helpful or it could cause harm.

Here’s a list of tips to help you figure out whether what you’re seeing is truth or misinformation.

Beginning January 4, the open hours at the Holts Summit Public Library will be expanded from 20 to 51 hours a week. The library will be open Monday-Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The Callaway County Library District Board of Trustees assured voters that the hours at the Holts Summit library would be expanded if Callaway County voters approved Proposition L, which they did last June.

Some educators are becoming concerned that students may experience a “COVID slide,” meaning they may fall behind academically due to school closures and altered teaching methods during the pandemic. You may be concerned, too. To overcome these obstacles, the Daniel Boone Regional Library is introducing a new free online learning resource called Brainfuse that makes tutoring available to all students.

Inspired by this year’s One Read book “A Gentleman in Moscow” we invite Mid-Missouri artists ages 16 and older to contribute works that explore the experiences of isolation and confinement.

The exhibit will take place September 1-26 and will be viewed virtually at www.orrstreetstudios.com.