New Year’s Resolutions  Count your blessings every day.  Be comfortable with silences caused by lapses in conversation, as in the Navajo culture.  Make do with less.   Be patient.  Be kind. 

The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it. - George Marshall, US Army Chief, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Nobel laureate (31 Dec 1880-1959) 

Candy Cane Caprese  Slices of fresh mozzarella are layered with slices of fresh tomato to form a candy cane shape on whatever rectangular display board or platter that you have available.  Serve with a garnish of fresh basil leaves, a dish of balsamic glaze, olive oil and toasted baguette slices.  A sprinkle of sea salt finishes things off.  It’s basically a caprese salad that has been whimsically shaped on a board.  Lori Lange  See picture at https://www.recipegirl.com/candy-cane-caprese-board/ 

“She’d prowl the night kitchen, taking a bite from a tomato here, a ripe peach there, a crumpet, a softening pear.”  Excerpt from Ghost Cat by Margaret Atwood  Read the entire poem at https://lithub.com/ghost-cat-a-poem-by-margaret-atwood/  See also https://lithub.com/in-which-a-cat-narrates-feline-history-in-the-age-of-european-conquest/ 

THE YEAR IN REVIEW:  Indie Booksellers Recommend Their Under-the-Radar Favorites of 2020 · Our 65 Favorite Books of the Year · The Ultimate Best Books of 2020 List · The 10 Best Literary Adaptations of the Year · The 89 Best Book Covers of 2020 · Unemployed Booksellers’ Favorite Books of the Year · The Top 10 Most Totally Metal Books of 2020 · The Award-Winning Novels of 2020 · The Best Reviewed Fiction of 2020 · The Best Reviewed Nonfiction of 2020 · The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2020 · Notable Literary Deaths in 2020 · The Biggest Literary Stories of the Year · The Best Books of 2020 You Might Have Missed 

THE NIGHT WATCHMAN by Louise Erdich  In this unhurried, kaleidoscopic story, the efforts of Native Americans to save their lands from being taken away by the U.S. government in the early 1950s come intimately, vividly to life.  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/louise-erdrich/the-night-watchman-erdrich/  Recommended by author and bookstore owner Ann Patchett http://www.annpatchett.com/ on PBS December 29, 2020 

The law of defamation varies from state to state, but there are some generally accepted rules.  If you believe you are have been "defamed," to prove it you usually have to show there's been a statement that is all of the following:  published, false, injurious, and unprivileged.  In the landmark 1964 case of New York Times v. Sullivan, the U.S. Supreme Court held that certain defamatory statements were protected by the First Amendment.  The case involved a newspaper article that said unflattering things about a public figure, a politician.  The Court pointed to "a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open."  The Court acknowledged that in public discussions--especially about public figures like politicians--mistakes can be made.  If those mistakes are "honestly made," the Court said, they should be protected from defamation actions.  The court made a rule that public officials could sue for statements made about their public conduct only if the statements were made with "actual malice."  https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/defamation-law-made-simple-29718.html 

Slander is a false spoken statement about someone, intended to damage the good opinion that people have of that person.  https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/slander

Libel and slander are both types of defamation.  Libel is an untrue defamatory statement that is made in writing.  Slander is an untrue defamatory statement that is spoken orally.  The difference between defamation and slander is that a defamatory statement can be made in any medium.  It could be in a blog comment or spoken in a speech or said on television.  Libelous acts only occur when a statement is made in writing (digital statements count as writing) and slanderous statements are only made orally.  https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/differences-between-defamation-slander-and-libel 

Eudora Welty:  How My Parents Built a Childhood of Books  "I live in gratitude."  I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to.  My mother read to me.  She’d read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when we were in her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story.  She’d read to me in the diningroom on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the story with “Cuckoo,” and at night when I’d got in my own bed.  I must have given her no peace.  Besides the bookcase in the living room, which was always called “the library,” there were the encyclopedia tables and dictionary stand under windows in our dining room.  Here to help us grow up arguing around the dining room table were the Unabridged Webster, the Columbia Encyclopedia, Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, the Lincoln Library of Information, and later the Book of Knowledge.  In “the library,” inside the mission-style bookcase with its three diamond-latticed glass doors, with my father’s Morris chair and the glass-shaded lamp on its table beside it, were books I could soon begin on—and I did, reading them all alike and as they came, straight down their rows, top shelf to bottom.  There was the set of Stoddard’s Lectures, in all its late nineteenth-century vocabulary and vignettes of peasant life and quaint beliefs and customs, with matching halftone illustrations:  Vesuvius erupting, Venice by moonlight, gypsies glimpsed by their campfires.  I didn’t know then the clue they were to my father’s longing to see the rest of the world.  I read straight through his other love-from-afar:  the Victrola Book of the Opera, with opera after opera in synopsis, with portraits in costume of Melba, Caruso, Galli-Curci, and Geraldine Farrar, some of whose voices we could listen to on our Red Seal records.  Read much more at https://lithub.com/eudora-welty-how-my-parents-built-a-childhood-of-books/  Excerpted from One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty. Copyright © 1983, 1984 by Eudora Welty. Copyright renewed 2020 by Eudora Welty LLC. Introduction copyright © 2020 by Natasha Trethewey.   

The Ultimate Best Books of 2020 List--Reading All the Lists So You Don't Have to Since 2017 by  Emily Temple  https://lithub.com/the-ultimate-best-books-of-2020-list/  

"2020:  The Musical"  Jimmy Fallon and Andrew Rannells Recap the Year with Broadway Songs  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjbLY46Vaq8  8:20 

30 New Year’s Eve Desserts to Celebrate in Style by Hazel Wheaton  https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/new-years-eve-desserts/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2307  December 31, 2020