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| Happy New Year In 45 B.C., New Year's Day is celebrated on January 1 for the first time in history as the Julian calendar takes effect. Soon after becoming Roman dictator, Julius Caesar decided that the traditional Roman calendar was in dire need of reform. In designing his new calendar, Caesar enlisted the aid of Sosigenes, an Alexandrian astronomer, who advised him to do away with the lunar cycle entirely and follow the solar year. The year was calculated to be 365 and 1/4 days, and Caesar added 67 days to 46 B.C., making 45 B.C. begin on January 1. Celebration of New Year's Day in January fell out of practice during the Middle Ages, and even those who strictly adhered to the Julian calendar did not observe the New Year exactly on January 1. The reason for the latter was that Caesar and Sosigenes failed to calculate the correct value for the solar year as 365.242199 days, not 365.25 days. Thus, an 11-minute-a-year error added seven days by the year 1000, and 10 days by the mid-15th century. The Church became aware of this problem, and in the 1570s Pope Gregory XIII commissioned Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius to come up with a new calendar. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar was implemented, omitting 10 days for that year and establishing the new rule that only one of every four centennial years should be a leap year. Since then, people around the world have gathered en masse on January 1 to celebrate the precise arrival of the New Year. Pop the champaigne and check out these titles |
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| Books on the Air Books on the Air will return next week |
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| In Memoriam-Barry Lopez Barry Lopez, a Pacific Northwest nature writer who explored the connections between the human and natural worlds in novels and nonfiction, died December 25 at age 75. Originally from New York, Lopez lived many years in the woods along the McKenzie River east of Eugene, Ore., before the September 2020 Holiday Farm fire destroyed his "25 acres of mature, temperate-zone rain forest," as he wrote. He is best known for Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986), which chronicled five years of biology work in the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, an Oregon Book Award for literary nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Lopez was also a contributor to National Geographic, the Paris Review and Outside, as well as a contributing editor for Harper's magazine. His final book, Horizon (2019), is an autobiography charting a lifetime of travel to more than 70 countries, in which Lopez also explores humanity's incessant desire to explore and often exploit their surroundings. Check out his books here. Photo Credit: David Liittschwager/AP |
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| Library Reads Library Reads-The top ten books published this month that library staff across the country love, with additional hall of fame authors. Check them out here |
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| And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been-Rainer Maria Rilke
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