Tag Archives: New Year

Something Old and Something New For 2025

Image-of-cartoon-bunny-sitting-on-top-of-a-pile-of-books-reaching-for-the-stars

Happy 2025 readers! I and our HOTS bloggers are hoping you’ve had a stellar start to the new year, perhaps with a new (or old) New Year’s resolution under your belt. We’re probably all familiar with the less than positive statistics that most resolutions aren’t built to last, but we’re optimistic that whatever it is you’ve made your thing of the year is something achievable and something you can work towards with conviction. Maybe whatever you’ve decided on lands somewhere in between trying to go to the gym more often or going on that wild adventure you’ve always been planning on, but mine and many of our library staff (like Sumayyah) revolve around reading. Surprise, surprise. Whether it’s pages, words, or titles, we’re challenging ourselves to finally tackle and conquer our forever towering mountain of books or our endlessly long to-read list, which is, of course, a good and very achievable goal for 2025 and will probably not also be our resolution coming into 2026.

In the spirit of our very ambitious reading resolution, and in case you were missing our year-round-up post, I’ve polled our staff across the system to gather their favorite reads of last year (though not exclusively published in 2024) and what they’re most looking forward to reading in 2025. In case your reading list isn’t a full city block long and you’re looking for something to pick up at your next library visit, see below for what my colleagues have to say about how they’re kicking off 2025 with a bang satisfying page turn!

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New Year, Improved Me!

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Photo by Single.Earth on Unsplash

I’ll be honest folks; I’m tired. I miss the sun and being warm and am very much in need of a vacation. So this is gonna be a relaxed post featuring, unsurprisingly, resolutions. This year, I’m taking it easy with my aspirations. I’m making my goals small, simple, and (hopefully) achievable. Also, crucially, my list of resolutions is short. I’m not looking to revamp my whole self within a measly 12 months, but I am looking to build further on who I already am and improve my habits.

Which, coincidentally, is quite similar to what we’ve done with our reading challenge! The broad strokes are the same—read a certain type of book a month—but the prompts are different and, most excitingly, we are now offering a prize!

That’s right, if you take on the challenge and submit the log by email or in-person, you’ll be entered into the Grand Prize Draw: your choice of a private cooking session at VMC in the VSES Teaching Kitchen, or a guided maker session with one of our Creation Specialists at Pierre Berton Resource Library or Civic Centre Resource Library!

And actually, that ties into resolution #1: to read 12 books this year.

The twist is, they have to be books I own. Why? Because my personal library is 90% books I’ve never gotten around to reading. (Disclaimer: I got most of them for free, so I don’t feel too guilty about it.) And I do want to read them, but because I own them, there’s no sense of urgency to actually do so. Nobody’s waiting to borrow them and there are no due dates. Therefore, I’ve put it off and put it off. So here are three books I own that I’d like to read in 2025!

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Make Small but Impactful Changes

Book Cover of Atomic Habits
Book Cover of Atomic Habits

Have you made any new year’s resolutions on January 1, promising yourself that you would turn in before midnight so you could get up earlier or you would eat healthier so you could have more energy, only to find yourself fall back to the old routines a few weeks later? Or, have you–just like the old me–already stopped making this kind of promises because you have given up the idea that we can change our habits?

Right, our old habits are very difficult to break, especially the bad ones! But only Ed Sheeran can make good use of his Bad Habits, and most of us don’t, lol. Over the past year, my view on habits has completely changed because my chronic pain condition had flared up uncontrollably and taken away my ability to work and live freely for an extended period of time. The western medicine and therapies that had helped before weren’t able to put my condition under control this time. I was desperate to find ways to cope. I began to look into things that I had been automatically doing for years and eventually realized some of them were so wrong – from the way I held my mouse and the way I breathed when I exercised to the food I ate and the medication I took … Had I not finally looked for changes, I would have still been stuck.

Because of this experience, I started reading about topics that I have been taking for granted, and one of them is the impact of tiny habits. For example, drinking coffee—do I really need the second cup after lunch? Does that contribute to my poor sleep quality? Perhaps you have heard of the bestselling title Atomic Habits? Its author James Clear states, “Your life today is essentially the sum of your habits … What you repeatedly do (i.e. what you spend time thinking about and doing each day) ultimately forms the person you are, the things you believe, and the personality that you portray.” This claim is not exaggerated at all. After my experience, I now realize good habits can help us with almost everything, from staying in shape to finding happiness.

But how? How can we recognize bad habits and break them? How do we cultivate good habits and make them stick?

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