It’s August, and that means librarians at the Orem Public Library are busily preparing for the fourth-annual Provo River Day celebration. Since 2018, the Orem Library has partnered with Central Utah Water Conservancy District and Provo River Watershed Council to bring the Orem community a special day full of fun, family-friendly events aimed at educating the community on the importance of the Provo River. We invite you to come to the Orem Library for a special water-themed storytime, birds of prey show, animal show, and much more. Click for a full line up of events. Come and learn why the Provo River should matter to you, and what you can do to protect it.
While you eagerly await Provo River Day, consider checking out one of these wonderful books from the Orem Library. These books are all as beautiful, awe-inspiring, and complex as the rivers featured within their pages. Start reading one today and you won’t be disappointed.
Books That Feature Rivers
Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River
By George B. Handley
Adult Nonfiction
“This book began as a nature journal over the course of one year,” essayist George B. Handley writes in the prologue, “as an experiment in building a relationship to the Provo River watershed.” This book explores the length of the Provo River, both its literal course from the high Uintas to Utah Lake, and its figurative course through history and civilizations. Mixing stories of Native Americans with the Mormon settlers who stole the land from them with his own introspection and descriptions of the river and its beauty, Handley creates a layered impression of a landscape impacted by time and humanity.
Once Upon a River
By Diane Setterfield
Adult Fiction
When the seemingly dead body of a child reanimates hours after arriving at an ancient inn on the Thames, three families try to claim her.
One Life at a Time, Please
By Edward Abbey
Adult Nonfiction
In his signature gruff voice, Abbey writes about many different topics in this collection of essays. Of special interest are four essays about American rivers: two about the Colorado, one about the Salmon, and one about the Rio Grande. Abbey’s work concerns itself with how environmental degradation by humans has impacted a landscape, with an aim to find what beauty remains, and these essays are no exception, illustrating both what has been damaged and what still runs true. “Like the marsh hawks overhead and the dark green wild ebony trees in the fencerows,” he writes, “life in its various forms goes on, continues despite our human efforts to overcomplicate civilization and oversimply nature.”
Three Rivers Rising
By Jame Richards
Teen Fiction
Sixteen-year-old Celestia is a wealthy member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, where she meets and falls in love with Peter, a hired hand who lives in the valley below. By the time of the torrential rains that lead to the disastrous Johnstown flood of 1889, she has been disowned by her family and is staying with Peter in Johnstown. This copy includes an author’s note and historical timeline.
A River Runs Through It
By Norman Maclean
Adult Fiction
Norman Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Included in this collection are two novellas and short story based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man who found that life was only a step away from art in its structure and beauty. Set in the small towns, trout streams, and mountains of western Montana, these stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.
I Know the River Loves Me/Yo Sé Que el Río Me Ama
By Maya Christina Gonzalez
Junior Spanish
A girl expresses her love of the river that she visits, plays in, and cares for throughout the year.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Mark Twain
Adult Fiction
Mark Twain’s tale of a boy’s picaresque journey down the Mississippi on a raft conveyed the voice and experience of the American frontier as no other work had done before. When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the “‘sivilizing” Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures that draw him to feuding families and the trickery of the unscrupulous Duke and Dauphin. Beneath the exploits, however, are more serious undercurrents—of slavery, of adult control and, above all, of Huck’s struggle between his instinctive goodness and the corrupt values of society, which threaten his deep and enduring friendship with Jim.
