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Celebrate #EmpathyDay with a good book. Last year, a prosecutor in the US state of Virginia asked a judge to hand down an unusual sentence. Five teens had defaced a historic structure -- a Jim Crow-era schoolhouse for African-American children -- with swastikas and other racist graffiti. The judge agreed with the prosecutor -- and she sentenced the teens to reading . The teens were to choose books from a list of books that illuminate bigotry and hatred, among them Elie Wiesel's Night , Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , and Arthur Miller's The Crucible . Sentenced to read With at least one of those teens, it worked. This person (not identified), who is 16 or 17 years old, agreed to share his reading list and his thoughts with a reporter for The New York Times . The list included The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The books he found most affecting w

With apologies to my man C. Dickens, it was the worst of customers, it was the best of customers. Our Children's Department is short-staffed right now, and although that is stressful in many ways, there is a silver lining for me: I am needed more on the information desk, and that's my favourite place to be in the library. One day this week, I experienced a real study in contrasts. From the desk, I looked over at the "activity centre" -- an educational-play area for parents and children -- and saw something sail through the air! It was a plastic play-thing of some sort and its arc was unmistakably thrown . As I started walking over, a parent intercepted me. He was holding the base of a small puzzle -- a square piece of wood -- and said, "This child is throwing things. He hit my child with this. I spoke to the father, and he said, 'They are children. That's what children do!'". I thanked him for letting me know and said I would take care of it. I c