Betty Martin
Host, Martin's Must-ReadsBetty Martin was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Lutheran pastor and his organist wife. Betty’s love of books was inspired by her father who read to all four children each night.
After graduating from the University of Connecticut with a B.A. in American History in 1975, she followed her mother’s advice and earned a Masters in Library Science from the Southern Connecticut State University. In her first professional library position she served as the children’s librarian for the Wallingford Public Library in Wallingford, Connecticut, for fifteen years.
In 1992 she moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she served as a Regional Youth Services Coordinator for the St. Louis Public Library. She moved to Cape Girardeau, Missouri in 1994 to marry Mark Martin and was hired by the Cape Girardeau Public Library to serve as the Adult Services Coordinator which she did for three years until being promoted to director. She served as director for twenty-one years and counts leading the organization through a building project as the highlight of her career.
She retired in July of 2018 and now has plenty of time to read. Her reading tastes lean towards historical fiction, any well-written novel with quirky characters and a few nonfiction titles. Her ultimate hope in recording book reviews is that, someday, someone will make an action figure of her just like Nancy Pearl has, or maybe a bobble-head.
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People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks is a novel based on the fact of an ancient copy of the Haggadah, a Jewish text that lays out the order of the Passover Seder. This is an extremely precious, illuminated manuscript originally from medieval Spain. -
If you’re a parent who has had similar work/family balancing issues, then you must read It. Goes. So. Fast. by NPR's Mary Louise Kelly. -
If you’ve ever wanted to become better friends with bees, then you must read Honey and Venom by Andrew Cote. -
“Later that day the cops would crawl over the intricacies of his life and discover he was into pirates because he had been born with only one eye." -
“Killing someone is easy. Hiding the body, now, that’s usually the hard part. That’s how you get caught." -
“Santa Monica, 1923. The plane rattled, as if with fever. The engine spit once, and then, like a ruptured heart, my Curtiss OX-5 engine burst, spewing hot oil from both sides of its chest." -
“Louise. August 1975. The bed is empty. Louise, the counselor— twenty-three, short-limbed, rasp-voiced, jolly—stands barefoot on the warm rough planks of the cabin." -
“To Emmett, all the houses in this part of the country looked like they’d been dropped from the sky. The Watson house just looked like it’d had a rougher landing. The roof line sagged on either side of the chimney and the window frames were slanted just enough that half the windows wouldn’t quite open and the other half wouldn’t quite shut. In another moment, they’d be able to see how the paint had been shaken right off the clapboard.” -
“The events of September 11 were historic for many reasons. One of them was that the airspace over the United States was shut down, and every plane in the sky was ordered to land immediately at the nearest available airport.” -
“1 August 2023 4:34 p.m. There were only five minutes left for Joy Moody and her twin daughters."
