The new year at the Lawrence Public Library will kick off not with a bang, but with a dare that encourages patrons to confront the post-holiday winter doldrums with a reading challenge.

Over the years, librarians in Information Services have noticed a consistent uptick in patrons checking out nonfiction in January. According to Gabby Boyle, community resource specialist at the library, readers are particularly drawn to self-help, health, cookbooks, crafting how-tos and travel guides at this time of the year.

Boyle’s department was thus inspired to start the Dewey Dare Challenge, which will ask patrons to read at least three nonfiction books from Jan 1. through Jan. 31. Each book should be from a different Dewey Decimal range. 

“The DDS assigns each book a call number ranging from 000 to 999.99, which indicates both where the book lives in the collection and its primary topic,” Boyle wrote in a library blog post. “This helps patrons find not only specific titles they’re looking for, but can also be used to browse related titles or topics of interest.”

The DDS is broken into 10 overarching categories, including generalities, philosophy and psychology, religion, social science, language, natural science and math, technology, the arts, literature and rhetoric, and geography and history.

Boyle said that, in their opinion, the information services team is full of nerds who adore learning. They want their passion to spill over and inspire patrons.

“That could look like reading a book about sea otters, or paging through an art book for the sake of looking at pictures, or checking out a new cookbook and learning that you’re awful at baking,” Boyle said via email.

“… Once we’re adults, the world stops encouraging us to explore and poke around and ask questions. But curiosity is part of what makes us human! Time spent learning is never wasted.”

The library acknowledged that the system created by Melvil Dewey, although largely ubiquitous in the library world, is not without its flaws.

“Melvil Dewey was notoriously misogynistic, racist, and anti-Semitic, and these bigoted beliefs informed the DDS,” Boyle wrote.

Information and cataloging professionals at the LPL have worked carefully over the years to make a “house-brewed” version of the DDS that reflects its patrons’ values.

For example, Boyle and Melissa Fisher Isaacs, information services supervisor, said that Dewey subjugated information on Judaism by splitting the 200s, or religion category, to focus heavily on Christianity with a sliver of “other.”

In some cases, Boyle said, books on religious customs and traditions would be bumped to the 390s, where titles on secular myths or Grimm Brothers fairy tales live.

“We implemented an alternative version of this arrangement that decentralizes Christianity by giving non-Christian religions a place of their own,” Boyle wrote via email. “That way, our patrons who were looking for books on Judaism or Buddhism could more easily find them in our collections.”

These days, books on Buddhism see higher circulation at LPL than books on Christianity.

That DDS change trickled even through the children’s department, as cataloging librarian Emily McDonald has taken great pains to diversify the way kids’ “celebration” books are tagged. You can read more about her work in this article.

Folks interested in participating in the Dewey Dare Challenge can pre-register on Beanstack. Alternatively, participants can use a paper reading log that will be available at the library’s Ask Desk throughout January.

Completed books need to be logged in Beanstack or paper logs must be returned in person by Monday, Feb. 9.

Those who complete the challenge will get a coupon for a free book from the Lawrence Public Library Friends and Foundation. They will also be entered into a raffle to win four different prize packages — read about all of the prizes in Boyle’s blog post.

LPL librarians have also curated a list of recommended titles to get challengers started, from titles on the history of books bound in human skin to Victorian-era dinosaur discoveries. See the whole list here.

The library, at 707 Vermont St., will close at 6 p.m. Wednesday and will be closed Thursday, Jan. 1, but the digital library is open 24/7. Normal hours resume Friday morning.

Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at wulfe@lawrencekstimes.com.

Read their complete bio here. Read their work for the Times here.

Latest Lawrence news:

MORE …