Guerilla Librarian

Techie Tuesday: GeoGuessr

2013-05-21T11:40:00.000-04:00

If you haven't been living under a rock for the last twenty years, you know that we are in the middle of a tech boom. Things change so quickly and so frequently that it can be difficult to keep up. This is especially true in both the library and education worlds, where technology has become absolutely essential. Seeing as I have a foot in each of these worlds, it's understandable that I spend most of my day steeped in technology. Part of my job as a high school librarian is to act as a technology liaison to my staff, introducing them to new tools and strategies to engage their classes in modern learning.

We throw around a lot of buzzwords and catch phrases like "21st century learning" and "technology integration" and "flipping the classroom" but what all of this essentially boils down to is figuring out a way to use new tools to do new things. If you're using new technologies to do the same old things you've been doing for the last hundred years, you aren't using the technology effectively.

So, with no further ado, I introduce to you Techie Tuesdays (don't you like the fancy schmancy logo?). Every Tuesday (or as often as I can remember) I'll be posting a new tool or site I've introduced my teachers to along with some suggestions for how to apply it to education. This week we have...

GeoGuessr:

Screenshot of geoguessr.com

If you're a twenty-something like me making minimal money and suffering from severe wanderlust, GeoGuessr is an easy way to see other places and quash those pre-summer travel daydreams. But be warned, it's very easy to waste long stretches of time here. I've fallen prey to the "just one more game" curse more times than I care to admit.

GeoGuessr is an extremely simple (and addictive) game. When you go to the website, you are given a picture from Google Earth from anywhere in the world. You can look around and sometimes move a few places forward or back. Then you have to guess where in the world you are. The game gives you a score based on how close your guess is from your actual location and you get five rounds per game. Then you can share your score with friends or classmates to compete for Best GeoGuessr (or some similarly arbitrary but exciting honorary title).

Applications for Education:

Most obviously, it would be great with a world Geography Class. Students can look at all sorts of things to infer their location. What does the landscape look like? What style are the buildings? What language (or alphabet) are the signs written in? What side of the road are the cars driving on? What do the people look like and wear? Are distances marked in miles or kilometers? A sample lesson might start with a discussion of these questions and continue on to the game itself.

This is also a game that could be used with English or Creative Writing classes. English classes could talk about context clues and discuss the way that different details help to create a realistic setting. And Creative Writing classes might try to set different writing exercises in places they've never visited, infer things like the sounds and smells of a place from looking at a picture.

That's al for today, folks. I hope you enjoy GeoGuessr as much as I have. On second thought, if you enjoy it as much as I do, we might have a problem. I hope you find GeoGuessr an educational tool worthy of being passed along to your friends and colleagues. Be sure to tune in next week for another exciting episode of Techie Tuesday!

Creepy Reading

2012-10-31T10:38:00.000-04:00

If you get this reference, you get
bonus coolpoints.
Image property of BBC

I am a wimp. I've been known to cover my eyes during cartoon violence so it probably coes without saying that I absolutely cannot handle horror movies. Even worse than scary movies, though, are scary books. To me, books have always been more real than movies because the action happens inside your own head so you can't just walk away from it. (There are many who would make the opposite argument but I'm a bibliophile, not a cineophile and this is my blog so I'm going to just go ahead and say those people are wrong.)

Still, I like to be mildly spooked to get into the spirit of Halloween. I may not be The Shining material but there are plenty of creepy, weird books that won't keep me awake at night staring at the ceiling and listening for the creak that means my impending doom has finally come. I prefer "weird and other," though, to "downright terrifying." It's been a while since we had a good old fashioned list and that's as good a segue as any.

Image from Goodreads

--We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson: There's no real horror here. There was a murder years before the story starts but wasn't it gruesome and the characters in the story aren't afraid the killer will return to finish his (or her--we don't discriminate here) grisly task. This is more the story of a family of outsiders in a small, close-knit community. It's strange and uncomfortable but not outright "scary." The best description I've heard came from novelist Jonathan Lethem, who characterizes Jackson's work as one that displays "a vast intimacy with everyday evil." Add a dash of sociopathy, a healthy dollop of family loyalty, and sprinkle with agoraphobia and you've got a deliciously eerie concoction best served with hot tea (but no sugar).

--Blindness by José Saramago: A mysterious epidemic causes city-wide blindness and in the aftermath, society dissolves. The sightless inhabitants of the unfortunate city are confined to an abandoned mental institution, where living conditions and morale quickly degrade to pretty horrific levels. Food disappears, women are assaulted, and soldiers shoot the hapless sick. Blindness was originally written in Portugese and there's something about the starkness of the translation that lends to the haunting air of the story.

Image from Goodreads

--The Road by Cormac McCarthy: Reader beware, this one contains cannibalism. While the main characters of the story, a man and his son trying to survive in a bleak post-apocalyptic world, don't much come into direct contact with it, there is a persistent fear of being caught and eaten. McCarthy's writing is somehow poetic and dense despite his subject matter. The Road was pretty much as far as far down the rabbit hole as I can go. I actually had to set the book down and go for a walk a few times while I was reading it to get some distance but I loved it as much as one can love a story about apocalyptic cannibals.

--The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield: When a young biographer is summoned to write the story of a famously reclusive writer, she has no idea what to expect but it soon becomes clear that there is something--something important--that her subject is not telling her about the past. And it's something that may not be satisfied to stay in the past. I had to read this one twice to funny understand the story but it was worth the effort. The story is tangled and confusing at times but it always walks the line between strange and beautiful.

--Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Forget zombies. A world where women are considered old maids by twenty-four, where the phrase "old maid" still has legitimacy, and were a woman's worth is determined by her marriage prospects? That sounds plenty horrifying to me. I re-read P&P every year around this time, fall always puts me in the mood for the classics. If you want something a little more conventionally scary, you could try Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (especially this version), some good old Poe, or Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. There's plenty of spook to go around.

I hope you've all got a fun Halloween planned. The best plans, in my opinion, involve both a book and candy so I'll be plenty happy tonight. Now if you'll al excuse me, Mr. Darcy is waiting.

Mean, Mean Girls (and Boys, Too)

2012-10-26T10:59:00.000-04:00

Thank you, Tina Fey, for making
a movie about my life.
Image from IMDB

When I was in middle school, my friends and I played a game we called the Truth Circle. We would sit around in a circle in someone's basement or bedroom with a bowl and a notebook and a handful of pens and pick someone to be "it." Then everyone else in the circle would write down five things we liked about whoever was "it" and five things we didn't like. Each girl took her turn being "it" so it was fair because no one got off easy. If it wasn't so awful, it would be almost funny to remember. The lengths we went to to disguise our handwriting, dotting our i's with circles or hearts instead of precise points or making our d's with two deliberate strokes instead of one sloppy line and loop, the way we hunched over our papers with our hands carefully guarding what we wrote so no one would know what we had written, the crisp folds, once horizontal and once vertical, so the papers would be indistinguishable when they were drawn from the bowl. We were like spies, except that instead of bring down dictators using futuristic gadgets we were destroying each other using a game as an excuse.

When I think back on playing Truth Circle, I do remember some of the things that were said about me. The worst turns were those when two papers said the same thing. Oh no, you'd think, is that in there twice because someone wrote it twice because they couldn't think of enough bad stuff or have multiple people noticed that my hair looks kind of stringy sometimes? But the thing that still bothers me about the game is not that someone thought my perfume smelled like an old woman or that I have a tendency to pretend I know things when I don't--both of those things are true (although I have since switched perfumes and I now smell my age). The thing that bothers me is that I played it. I wrote things about people I loved, horrible things, because it was anonymous and everyone was doing it. I won't say that I never think negative things about the people around me, of course I do, but for most of my adult life, I have tried always to be kind. That is why it is so hard for me to admit that, at least in the context of the game, I was a bully.

I don't know why we played the game or who came up with it. I do know we weren't the only group of girls playing it. These were not after-school-special girls, they were good girls. They came from good homes and got above average grades. They all went to college and became mostly functional members of society. Some of these girls are my friends today and I harbor no grudges towards them. I know that the things we said and did to each other were horrid and I was not blameless. It's a hard memory to have because I felt victimized but I also made victims of my friends.

My inner child is a mean,
creepy little bugger.
Image from Warner Bros.

Playing Truth Circle has not damaged me irreparably. I am a confident, successful young woman now and I would not change the way my life has unfolded thus far, despite the bumps I've hit along the way, but the fact remains that ten years after the last game of Truth Circle, I have niggling insecurities. The sad, weird kid in me has hoarded those little paper insults (because of course the compliments were forgotten long ago--isn't that always the way?) and whispers them to me in moments of weakness and I'm sure I'm not the only member of the Truth Circle who has held tight to those little hurts.

Here's what I wish I had done: instead of calling someone else a slut, I wish I had written, "I think this is an awful game and we shouldn't play it anymore." There would have been no risk, the game was anonymous. But the truth of the matter is that I'm sure some dark, secret part of me enjoyed seeing the girls around me laid low because that dark, secret part of me got to feel superior for just a moment. It was an agonizing, broken time and I would like to say that I am not ashamed that I did what I needed to do to survive but I would be lying. I am ashamed. I was a bully and a coward and I am sorry.

October is National Anti-Bullying Month or National Bullying Prevention Month, depending on who you ask and what website you look at. Either way, we can all pretty much agree that bullying is bad and it's worse today than ever it was when I was a kid. Today, my students are on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Pinterest and who all knows what else. They never get to disconnect from their peers so if one of those peers is giving them a hard time, they get to see it at school and at home. They get it on their phones. They literally never get away from it and the internet has given kids the same anonymous license to say whatever they want that Truth Circle did. We say things online that we would never say in person because it's so easy to type it out and hit send.

I don't have an easy answer for you here. I don't know how to fix this. I know that I don't want to live in a society where it's even remotely acceptable to sit in a circle and tear your friends to pieces and I don't want to live in one where it's acceptable to do it online. I want to live in a society of compassion and tolerance and perhaps the best way to do that is to begin by noticing all of the ways--even small, seemingly insignificant ways--that I am uncompassionate and intolerant.

This month--and every month--I ask you to do the same. I always joke that my mission at the high school library is to make life suck just a little less for at least one person each day but I'm not speaking entirely in jest. I do believe in the power that small acts of kindness have on the lives of my kids. To be a total cliché, I'd like to leave you with a quote from Mother Theresa, who said, "We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop." Little by little, drop by drop, we make a difference.

Grandmother Willow: As wise as Mother Theresa but feistier.

Clip property of Disney

In Defense of the Cranky Librarian

2012-10-18T11:03:00.002-04:00

Image from WebStockPro

You know exactly who I'm talking about. She has her hair pulled back in a bun so tight, it looks like she got a facelift. She wears her cat eye glasses with the jeweled chain around her neck un-ironically. Her cardigan is a little too big and her skirts are that awkward length between knee and ankle. Worse still, she's wearing a look on her face like she just smelled something awful and her perpetual scowl makes you anxious and jumpy. She might have one eyebrow raised as she watches you browse the stacks. Other than the scritch of pens on paper, the click of keyboard keys, and the gentle whisper of pages turning, her library is completely silent. She is the Cranky Librarian.

I always vowed never to turn into the Cranky Librarian. I play music in the library and joke around with my kids. I haven't worn a bun in years (although that's partly because my hair is about an inch and a half long). I love my students and I love to let them be themselves in the library because I firmly believe that libraries are no longer simply storehouses of information, they are centers of collaboration and community. But. In my second year as a high school librarian, I'm beginning to understand the Cranky Librarian. I'm developing a newfound respect and sympathy with the crochety old cliche.

There are forty-five thousand books in my library. By library standards, that's tiny but by I'm-the-only-librarian-here-so-I-have-to-do-all-the-organization standards it's gargantuan. I don't have the time to shelf-read every day to look for titles out of their proper places. That means that when a student asks me for a book, there's a pretty good chance that even if the computer says it's in, it's not on the shelf where it's supposed to be. That is extremely frustrating. It makes me feel like I am losing my mind and it also makes me look like I have no idea what I'm doing. "It's supposed to be right here," I'll say to a student while rubbing my temples, "the computer says it's here but it's... you know... not."

Here's the thing. There are six freshman English classes here and I had them all come down for a little library orientation. I explained the library to them, how it's organized. It's all just alphabetical and numerical order. If you can count to ten and you know your ABC's, you can put a book back in the right place. And if you don't feel like putting it away, there are three--count 'em, three!--reshelving carts all around the library where you can leave your books and I'll do it for you! They all nodded and laughed at my lame one-liners and I thought, "Oh good, they get it. Maybe this year I won't have to spend 65% of my time looking for misplaced books." Oh, dear readers, don't shake your head at my silly naiveté. I'm not unintelligent, just hopeful, but sometimes it feels like the two are closer than I'd like.

Yes, the library system looks complicated but all fiction books are organized alphabetically by author and all non-fiction books are organized by Dewey number. Both of these are printed on the spine label of every single book in this library. Every single one. And I repeat, there is no need to put the books away. You can put them on the reshelving cart or in the return slot or simply hand them to me and I'll do it. It's what I went to school for, it's the reason I have a job. The one thing I tell students they must not must not must not do is put a book somewhere it doesn't belong because then it might as well not be in the library at all. But the fact that I'm writing this at all shows you all exactly how well that ~~rule~~ plea was followed.

But you, my dear, lovely, organized readers, would never do such a thing. I simply know that you always put your books back in exactly the right places, be those places on the shelves or on the reshelving carts, and you do all of the things I've asked of you. And I know you are always respectful and kind to your librarian and treat him or her with the reverence that his or her incredible knowledge and skills demand. You bow at the feet of librarians and you are incensed at my predicament. Today, my lovely readers, we are all Cranky Librarians.

It's Going to Be a Bookish Halloween

2012-10-16T09:42:00.000-04:00

Image from NerdApproved

Halloween is just around the proverbial corner and I'm feeling the crunch. I love to dress up in costumes and mine have ranged from the unoriginal (I was a referee in college) to the extravagant (my David Bowie costume included a wig and some serious makeup) to the disastrous (when I was Lucille Balle, my hair turned out fire engine red instead of auburn). But whoever I am, I always have fun. Given the originality and intricacy of my more recent costumes, I feel like I really need to be on top of my game this year but I can't quite decide who to be. My natural inclination, of course, is to look to my favorite book characters and literary figures. For example...

Sylvia Plath: How does one dress like Sylvia Plath? First of all, plenty of period-appropriate pearls, a proper sheath dress, and general mid-century glamour. Here's where it gets dark, though. To dress as Sylvia, one should also paint tear tracks down one's face and sport oven mits (or, alternatively, make a small cardboard oven and wear it on one's head). I saw this once on the interwebs and wanted very much to be offended but somehow couldn't muster the proper indignation. It's funny the same way Helen Keller jokes are funny. You don't want to laugh, you really don't, and you know it's awful but a tiny, soulless part of you chuckles. Sometimes audibly. It's so wrong, guys. So very very wrong but... Let's move on, shall we?

Image from BuzzFeed

Max from Where the Wild Things Are: Mostly, I just want to dress up like Max because I want to wear an enormous onesie--er, wolf suit. This one would be pretty easy to do with one of the adult onesies that seem to be taking the place of the Snuggie. All that you'd need to do would be to sew on some ears and wear a Burger King crown and talk a lot about wild rumpuses (rumpi?) all night. I think I could handle that. [NOTE: The one in the picture here is gorgeous but costs more than a month of rent and I'm pretty sure you could get everything you would need to make a reasonable facsimile for under thirty dollars.]

Image from
TAAL

Miss Viola Swamp from Miss Nelson is Missing: Viola Swamp is so mich fun. She gets to be the bad guy and never has to deal with being disliked because she can just disappear back into Miss Nelson's closet. Plus, her outfit is super simple. An ugly black dress, striped tights, ugly black shoes, and (temporary) black hair dye are all it takes. Draw a disgusting mole on your chin and yell at people all night and you're good to go.

Alice from Alice in Wonderland: Yes, this one is a little overdone but it's also very recognizable. Just a blue dress and pinafore, some black Mary Janes, and a hair ribbon. I'm kind of obsessed with this trompe l'oeil skirt, which would be awesome with a puffy sleeved blouse and some white tights. Besides, Alice is pretty much my favorite book character of all time. I've always wanted to dress up as her and say things like "Curiouser and curiouser."

Image from PagePulp.com

[Bonus Section] Dorian Gray and his portrait: This one is a couples costume, which I normally hate, but it's so clever! One half of the pair dresses up in a nice suit and looks like a generally dapper dandy while the other half wears a similar suit with a photo frame around their neck and age lines drawn all over their face.

There are lots of options and I probably won't be any of these but you can bet that when I finally figure out what I'm going to be, it'll be from a book of some sort. So what are you going as? Halloween is only two weeks away. When I was a kid, I always waited until the last minute (once my mother stopped making my awesome Halloween costumes--seriously, they were intense) so I went as a hobo three years in a row. And while that's an incredibly easy costume--all you need are some oversized clothes and makeup to make your face look dirty and maybe a scampish hat--it's not the most fun. So start planning now, people, and get into the spirit (no pun intended) of the season.

Hobbit Mania

2012-10-05T10:00:00.000-04:00

You guys. Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" comes out on December 14, just a little over two months from now. Are you excited yet? Personally, I can't even talk about it in public. I turn into a blithering idiot saying things like, "I just can't even... I'm just so... I love.. And Gollum! Did you see.. Oh my gosh, I just can't even..." All eloquence goes right out the window.

For the record, The Hobbit is not just a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. These days,when you say "prequel" people generally think of a book written after the original series is finished meant to go back and explain some of the loose ends, similar to The Magician's Nephew in C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia (which is supposed to be the sixth book in the series, not the first and I can't even explain how much I hate that the publishers have reordered Lewis' works chronologically instead leaving them in the order Lewis wrote them and intended them to be read, but that's a rant for another day). The Hobbit was published in 1937, a full seventeen years before the publication of The Fellowship of the Rings.

Ahem, moving on, The Hobbit is a much simpler, lighter tale than LOTR. It was a children's story about dwarves, elves, hobbits, and one mean dragon. Other than that fourteen members of the expedition (yes, I can name them all from memory), there aren't a lot of extraneous names floating around to remember and the story doesn't have all that much nuance. The dwarves want their treasure back. The dragon, Smaug, stole it. They go on a quest to get it back. Bilbo, a hobbit, comes along as a burglar because... well, because otherwise the book wouldn't exist. I think I might love The Hobbit even more than LOTR precisely because of its simplicity and lightness. Given the sheer care and attention to detail shown in the LOTR movies, I feel confident that Jackson will do my preciousss Bilbo justice.

So now we get down to the meat and taters of this post. In case you've been living under a mountain (I'm going to cram in as many inside jokes and references as I can so bear with me), here is a quick rundown of the awesomeness that has flooded the internet in the previous months. Be aware that compiling all of this in one place may cause me to have a nerdapoplexy.

First of all, please tell me you've seen the trailers. Even if you haven't, lie to me or my poor little nerd heart might just break in two. And after that, watch even more footage that wasn't in the trailers. Now pick your jaw up off the floor and reattach it to your face. Then, go look at the character gallery and tell me if you think it's weird that I find two of the dwarves strangely attractive. Or rather, only tell me if you don't think it's weird.

I'll give you a hint. One of them is Thorin Okenshield.
The other one is Kili.

Are you geeking out yet? No? Okay, well look at these elf action figures, including a female elf captain of the guard (Hooray, empowered female characters!) and Legolas in all his blonde be-wigged glory. Also check out these posters, featuring Bilbo and Thanduil looking all brave and fantastical and these production stills (including one of Radagast the Brown). And if that isn't enough to get your nerd heart pounding, here's a shot of a flying Smaug. If villains are your thing, here's a little peek at the Goblin King for your nightmares.

Have I hyperlinked you into submission yet? Alright, calm yourself down by checking out Noelle Stevenson's Broship of the Ring, which reimagines Gandalf as an old hippie and Balrog as a ticked off bouncer. Brilliant. And if you want to feel better about your new and improved geek status, know that you're in good company. The folks over at Google are clearly Tolkien fanatics, too.

Look close, do you see it?

So take heart, my friends, the release of the first installment is only nine short weeks away. I know, I think Peter Jackson is a bit of a dragon for doing it in three parts, too. (I mean, the guy already has a treasure hoard as big as Thrain Son of Thror's, am I right?) But I'll still be there in the theater on opening night with my bucket of popcorn (because Longbottom Leaf is a little hard to come by) and my hobbit feet on.

Bonus Perks

2012-10-01T08:44:00.000-04:00

Earlier this year at ALA Annual, I had the incredible fortune to be at an advanced screening of "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." The movie is based on the book of the same name by Stephen Chbosky. Now, I don't want to say too much about it since the movie won't be released to the general, non-awesome-librarian public until October 5 (limited release September 20) but I will tell you that you absolutely without question must see it. Seriously. Go. See. It. The Freedom to Read Foundation provided a copy of the book to every member of the audience (which I was very thankful had the original cover rather than the movie poster because, even though I liked the movie, I really hate it when they do that) so I literally began to re-read the book as I was walking out of the theater. But alas, I have finished the book (again) and I won't be able to re-watch the film for another two months so I've begun casting around for other books to satisfy my hankering for slightly off-beat but ultimately uplifting stories about the dispossessed. Essentially, I want more Perks and I'll take them wherever I can get them.

I was very excited, then, when I read a review of Joe Meno's latest work, Office Girl, which compared the work to Perks if Charlie had grown up to be an experimental artist rather than a writer and had continued right on falling in love with damaged but irresistible girls. It's a very sweet little story about bicycling, self acceptance, young love, a very strange art project, and living in a time and a city that are big enough to swallow you whole. I should admit at this point that pretty much I'm obsessed with all things Joe Meno right now. I challenge you, though, to read this strangely beautiful and beautifully strange book and remain unmoved.

In my quest for more Perks-esque stories, I also stumbled upon a short story by George Saunders called "Jon" (you can read the whole thing on the New Yorker). Jon (or maybe we should call him Randy) is in a very different world from Charlie. While Charlie lives in middle-class mediocrity in good ol' PA, Jon is provided with every possible luxury and material comfort. But the two share a unique voice and a struggle to find a sense of self that isn't defined by their situation or past.

Next I went back to old favorites and revisited It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini. It's not a perfect match but I think Charlie and Craig would have understood each other. Heck, they might even have been friends on the inside. I've also mentioned Daniel Handler's heroine Min Green from Why We Broke Up recently. While Min is a bit more confident and self-actualized than Charlie, she shares his love of all things vintage, interest in art and literature, and desire for things larger and more important than the small town high school she's temporarily stuck in.

Of course, the thing that makes Charlie so beautiful is that he is utterly unique among YA characters. While there are plenty of characters who are struggling with depression, sexual abuse, and sense of self, Charlie's approach to all of these things is different because he neither hides from nor wallows in his issues. He is funny but he does not use humor as a defense mechanism. He is introverted but he still interacts with his classmates instead of retreating into himself. He is the perfect balance of "seriously messed up" and "okay anyway." And that's kind of wonderful, isn't it?

So read the book. See the movie. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll fall in love with Charlie and his friends and family and the utter, beautiful dysfunction.

Revisiting Old Favorites: Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Edition

2012-09-28T12:32:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, it was still weird to like vampires. Before the Twi-hards, before vampire soap operas like "True Blood" and "The Vampire Diaries" filled up prime-time TV, it was creepy and dark to like stories about the undead. But I did. Secretly, of course. I wouldn't have brought my vampire books to school to read during lunch but I sought them out in the public library. First I read everything I could find my Anne Rice (including The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, which I thought was a dark fairy tale and for which sixteen-year-old me was not prepared). After I had devoured the Vampire Chronicles, I found Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, specificially the Den of Shadows series (which has recently been re-released in an omnibus edition with all four books in one volume).

This author photo appears on the
back cover of the original
printing of every title.
Image property of Jean Renard.

Atwater-Rhodes is kind of incredible. She published her first book, In the Forest of the Night, when she was fifteen. Think about what you were doing when you were fifteen and then consider the fact that she wrote, edited, and published a book which garnered national acclaim from Publisher's Weekly, School Library Journal, and the American Librari Association. Over the next eight years (her last title was published in 2007), Atwater-Rhodes presumably went through puberty and published an additional thirteen books. Commence feeling inadequate.

Given all of that, I am fully convinced of the lady's rockstar status. I was more curious as to whether her books can continue to hold reader attention after thirteen years (In the Forest of the Night was published in 1999). First, I had to hunt the books down in the library and reread the books that I had read literally half a dozen times as a teenager. Then, I gave the books to one of my students to read to get an actual teenager's opinion on the writing.

Image property of ROLFrazzi

After a quick perusal, I can instantly recall why the books drew me in so deeply as a teenager. At that age, most of the reading I did was purely related to escapism. As a typical, miserable kid, I read to be transported to new worlds. I wanted stories with depth and history, with overlapping characters and acknowledged rules. I wanted Middle-earth but darker. Atwater-Rhodes' characters are well developed and they have backgrounds. They cross-over into each others' stories, even if it's just for a moment, and their personalities are consistent from one story to the next. It's an intense and multi-dimensional universe that's just close enough to our own to be seductive and just different enough to be fascinating. As you may have gathered, Atwater-Rhodes writes vampire stories. Her vampires don't sparkle, though, they're violent and flawed and surprisingly human. Even her villains have a strangely appealing quality because almost none of the characters she writes are either entirely good or entirely bad, an impressive feat for any author but especially for one so young. Reading them as an (occasional) adult, I found them just as compelling and diverting as I did as a teenager. Probably because of the age and permanence of most of the characters, technology, fashion, and other transient aspects of culture aren't much mentioned so the stories don't feel dated.

What's more, these books are chock full of positive female characters so they make a nice alternative for Twilight fans. In Demon in my View, when Aubrey, the antagonist/love interest (of course he's both, because it's still a teen romance) is being a jerk to Jessica, the protagonista, she doesn't mope about it. She slaps him. Even though she knows he's a vampire. Because he's being a jerk and that's what we do when people are being jerks to us. The ladies in these books are intelligent (Jessica is also a teen published author, like Atwater-Rhodes herself), strong (Turquoise of Midnight Predator is a vampire hunter), and resilient (In the Forest of the Night's Rachel avenges her murdered family a century after their deaths). They're the type of female characters girls need, much more akin to Katniss than Bella.

Image property of
Randomhouse

Would I recommend this book to a teenager today? Well, I did, so yes. I gave one of my students Demon in my View, which is a later book in the Den of Shadows series. Two days later, she came back in and demanded the rest of the books. When I told her I had read the book when I was her age, she was very surprised (I don't want to think about what that means in terms of how old I seem to these students) because it "felt" like a newer book. I took this to mean that the story felt like something an author would write today, like something teens today want to read. It probably helps that vampires are very in vogue right now so the series was a little ahead of its time.

So we have a verdict. The words and works of Amelia Atwater-Rhodes have stood the test of a nearly decade and a half and are as relevant and enthralling today as ever they were when first published.

A Reader's Manifesto

2012-09-25T09:58:00.000-04:00

Someday I will have a library. Not one that I work in or visit frequently or can walk to from my house, I mean I will have an entire room in my eventual dream house devoted to books of all shapes and sizes and subject matters with comfy, mismatched chairs, fraying ottomans, and a minifridge for wine and snacks so that I will never have to leave. I want a library like Belle's library in "Beauty and the Beast," except without the abusive benefactor and hair bows.

And there will be two spiral staircases
(Image property of Disney, Inc.)

Okay, so maybe mine won't be cartoonishly large and it won't have parquet floors but it will have books. Lots and lots of books. You see, it probably won't surprise you to learn that I am a book hoarder. I ferret them away in boxes above my parents' garage and in old duffel bags under my bed. I tuck them into old purses, the glovebox of my car, and the drawers of my desk. There is a stack four high on my bedside table and I recently found one sandwiched between my mattress and boxspring. It's official, people. My name is Christina and I am an addict.

I don't buy all of these books. Sometimes they just show up on my shelves and I have no idea where they came from. People give them to me or leave them behind. I bring them home with me from the Donation Box at work and forget to bring them back. (In my defense, I have bought way more books--new books--for the library on my own dime than I've borrowed and forgotten to return.) Some of them I pick up for a quarter at thrift stores and some I buy full price. Like Sarah Addison Allen's Chloe Finley (from The Sugar Queen), they hound me, appearing almost magically when I need them most. When I was going through a crisis of identity, J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey found me at a secondhand shop that I wandered into after getting coffee. When I craved something beautiful and sad, a teacher dropped off a copy of Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast with a box of books to be discarded from her classroom and I was transported by this by this paragraph: "I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."

There is something mystical and beautiful about the books. Somehow, they always seem to know what I need. Part of the power of the book, I believe, is the power of the reader. I needed Hemingway's words so I was looking for them. This is why I believe it is so important to read with intention. There is a grain of wisdom to be found in even the most trivial and ridiculous of stories. I know this because I am not only a voracious and intentional reader, I am in indiscriminate one. I read silly romances and Sylvia Plath alike and, while Plath writes with such a poetic power that I want to crawl inside one of her sentences and live in it for a week, I can testify that the silly romances have taught me a fair amount about life and about love. If you read intentionally, with focus and purpose, if you hunt out the pearl of greater meaning that each story carries, every single book can teach you something vital about the human experience.

Book Labyrinth in London
(Image from ThisisColossal)

I hold onto books that I have loved so I can read them again to see if I have changed and books that I have hated so I can read them again to see if I have changed. I hold onto books I have not read at all because someday I might and books that I cannot read (I have a volume of Russian poems in Russian) because they are beautiful. I love books fro their own sakes as works of art as well as for the stories they house. I love books because each one is the culmination of a human life, of words thought and loved and poured out onto a page. I love books because they transport, transfix, and transform me. I love books because they smell like paper and glue and history, because of their heft and weight. I love books because they shelter words that have the power to alter the way I approach the world.

I am a reader. I am a hoarder. Someday those two identities will collide and I will have the most beautiful and most eclectic library in the Western hemisphere, even if it is only one little room with fraying ottomans and comfy, mismatched chairs, and everyone will always be welcome to come in, read awhile, and be forever altered.

An Ode to Nerds

2012-09-21T15:12:00.000-04:00

Image from imdb.com

I want to be upfront with you all: I was not a nerd in high school. I was far too concerned with being cool, with listening to the right music, wearing the right clothes, and seeing the right movies. Even in college, when some of my classmates were shaving their heads or getting visible piercings, I stuck with things that were familiar. I didn't dabble in reinvention until grad school, when I was finally comfortable enough with myself to own the nerdiness that always lurked under the surface.

In library school, for the first time in my life, I found myself surrounded by people who weren't overly concerned with being cool. It was a beautiful place for a nerdling. I found myself freely admitting my love of British science fiction and openly acknowledging my obsession with zombies. I got giddy over authors and dressed up as Jareth the Goblin King for Halloween. In short, I finally gave myself permission to love the things I loved. And once geekdom had welcomed me in with open arms, do you know what I learned? Nerds are cool.

I don't mean that in the same what that I meant I was desperate to be cool in high school. I believe that the meaning of that word has changed since I walked across the stage in my cheap polyester robe. While in high school, being cool meant conforming to a very specific image. It meant fitting in, being a clone, changing yourself to match an ideal. Now, in the real world, those people are boring. The cool people, the ones you really want to hang around, are interested in things you've never heard of. They're people who can teach you new things and who bring fresh perspectives to conversations. They're interesting and the most interesting people I've met have all been bona fide, card-carrying nerds.

Here's the thing: nerds are passionate about something. It might be alternate realities or computer coding or MMORPGs. It could be table top gaming or yarn bombing. There are all different types of nerds: book nerds, computer nerds, science and math nerds, craft nerds, history nerds. What's more, nerds usually don't care whether their chosen geekery is cool. They just like what they like and screw whether or not it's "in." There's something really incredible and appealing about that attitude, isn't there? So okay, some nerds are kind of socially awkward and weird but I've found that if you're willing to own your awkwardness and weirdness, it becomes endearing.

I wish someone had told me that when I was in high school, although honestly I wouldn't have listened. Thankfully, there are plenty of awesome nerds out there in the YA world to set examples.

Image from Macmillan

Jessie from Into the Wild Nerd Yonder by Julie Halpern: Jessie (I love her) doesn't necessarily intend to be a nerd. Okay, so she sews a different skirt for every day of the school year and they're all made from novelty fabric patterned with things like pencils or fruit or popcorn machines. And okay, so she listens to audiobooks while she sews. But when she gets invited to play D&D and to sew some medieval style LARP costumes, she's not sure she's willing to take the plunge and become part of the Nerd Herd.

Colin from An Abundance of Katherines by John Green: First of all, we have to acknowledge that John Green is pretty much the King of Nerds. He and his brother, Hank, have one of the most nerdtastic Youtube channels in existence. Go check them out. Go ahead, I'll wait. Back? Alright, on to Colin. He's a former child prodigy who has an existential crisis when he realizes he hasn't grown into a genius. He spends the entire book writing a mathematical theorem to explain why he continually gets his heart broken by girls named Katherine.

Honorable Mention: Miles from Looking for Alaska also by John Green for memorizing the last words of dozens of famous people and pulling them out and using them in conversation.

Image from Simon & Schuster

Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky: Charlie has popular friends, he parties, he hooks up with girls. He doesn't look like a nerd but here's the thing: Charlie requests extra work from his English teacher. Throughout the book, Charlie regularly gets extra books to read and write reports about from Mr. Anderson and he likes it. He's the epitome of a book nerd.

Hermione from the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling: You knew she had to be on this list somewhere. Hermione studies like it's her job (which, seeing as she's a student, it kind of is) and it pays off. She helps save the world from He Who Must Not Be Named and keeps her less studious friends from flunking out of Hogwarts. Not too shabby.

Image from Random House

Wade from Ready Player One by Ernest Cline: Wade lives his life in a video game. Literally. In his futuristic society, everyone interacts in a massive online community called the Oasis. But even in this nerdy future, Wade stands out as a nerd. In the Oasis, there are three hidden clues and whoever finds all three inherits an obscenely large real world fortune. Wade, in order to find the clues, is absolutely obsessed with the pop culture of the 1980's. Trust me, it makes sense in the book.

So there you have it. Nerds are cool people and I am proud to be one of them. Being a nerd has taught me to be both passionate about my own interests and open to the interests of others. So while I've never personally played Dungeons and Dragons, I wouldn't turn down an invitation.

I'm Baaack

2012-09-04T11:03:00.000-04:00

It's official. Yesterday was Labor Day and today school started back up in the great state of Michigan. Summer is over. I don't know what you all did over the summer but I spent my free months working at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Until this point in my career, I had worked in school and public libraries and spent a good amount of time in an academic library but was hitherto completely ignorant of special libraries.

Image courtesy of Planetware

The beauty of being a librarian (other than, you know, the books) is that there are so many different directions one can go. Public and school libraries are an entirely different animal than academic or special libraries and each has their particular perks and hurdles. For example, there's a running joke that public librarians are essentially underpaid social workers but the same time, I loved getting to interact closely with patrons who both needed and appreciated my assistance. University librarians have a reputation for being "Ivory Tower Academics," meaning that they get to spend a lot of time thinking and researching about our field but they also have to regularly publish articles and have less time to spend with their patrons.

Special librarians, as it turns out, have really cool jobs and get to work with incredible collections but their interactions with the public are almost nonexistent. I also found that working the the library of an organization rather than a library that is an organization meant that my department was often forgotten or passed over. That can be both a blessing and a curse.

This summer, I was able to work on the papers of the philanthropic couple who worked for decades as curators of the museum. I learned about archiving and about space. I also spent most of my time holed up in the corner with a stack of antiques dealer catalogs creating a database of all the sources the museum used over the years. It was certainly a change of pace from my own library, a high school media center where there is rarely less than half a dozen students browsing, studying, and procrastinating.

My absolute favorite part of my job is these students. Whenever I meet someone new and tell them that I work in a public high school, I half-jokingly include that my mission statement is simply to make high school suck just a little less. Obviously I do much more than that, I also organize books and provide technical support and fill a dozen other little gaps. However, I also believe that the students are the reason my job exists. I work for them and with them and I believe in doing whatever I can to make the place they spend forty-odd hours a week a bearable place to be. I love working with teenagers, every hormone-ridden, surly, bubbly, fake, confused one of them. So while I appreciated my time at the Adler and I consider it an invaluable learning experience, it's good to be home.

YA or Young Adult?

2012-07-23T20:02:00.000-04:00

In the literary and educational worlds, YA stands for Young Adult, which refers to the group of people the ages of thirteen and eighteen and the books, movies, and other miscellaneous products intended for them. But today I want to talk about a different type of young adult, the young adult person, by which I mean the twenty-somethings who are emerging into the adult world and coming to terms with what that means.

The characters in YA cannot vote, buy cigarettes or alcohol (legally), rent a car in the state of California, or cross state lines with an adult without legal ramifications. The young adults we're talking about today can do all of these things (except the rental car bit, which can be seriously inconvenient). They have apartments and bank accounts--although both may be woefully small. Hopefully, they are gainfully employed, or at least seeking employment. They have credit cards, ambitions, and poor taste in wine. In short, they are people like me.

Who better to personify the notion of disenchanted,
disillusioned youth than Jack Kerouac himself?
Hipsters have been getting his words tattooed on
their wrists for years now.

YA lit is a recent but very important trend and I grew up during its advent. Having grown up with an entire class of books created specifically to address the issues that were prevalent in my life, I find myself feeling slightly lost now that I've left my letter jacket behind, leaving me to ask what happens when the heroines of my youth grow up. Where is the plucky heroine dealing with a dwindling bank account drooling over the Eddie Bauer catalog? Why are there no books about a twenty-something caving and hosting an online dating profile because--dang it--it's just so hard to meet people these days? Or working a terrible job and putting up with vague sexual harassment to pay for a graduate degree that may or may not result in a rewarding career? Or struggling with a desire to do something extraordinary while feeling tragically average? Or attending the wedding of yet another fresh-faced college acquaintance and her beloved, who once hit on the heroine at a frat party, with Good-On-Paper Guy, who her parents love but who is just missing something because the only thing worse than going with the wrong guy would be going with no guy at all? What happens when Ramona Quimby grows up, finds out that the boy she loved in high school is now openly gay and living in a domestic partnership in Vermont, moves to the big city, and discovers that being smart and funny just doesn't cut the mustard anymore? Then we had Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret and The Cat Ate My Gymsuit but now what? I want to read My Very First Existential Crisis or How Not to Make an Ass of Yourself at the Company Christmas Party. Those are stories we could really use.

I'm actually a little bit obsessed with Lena Dunham's "Girls"
Image property of HBO

I know these all sound a little melodramatic and I may have just outlined the entire first season of HBO's "Girls" but these are also stories that people my age are living. And when we feel isolated and confused, as the dispossessed youth invariably do, we need books to get us through the lonely night. I've done extensive research on the subject--by which I mean I've spent hours wandering the aisles of my neighborhood Barnes and Noble and public library, reading countless book blogs, and browsing my recommended Amazon titles. My results were meager but I did manage to find a few titles.

Image property
of Joe Meno

One of my recent favorites is Office Girl by Joe Meno, which follows Odile and Jack, two artists living in a city big enough to swallow them whole. Odile works a series of jobs she hates and has a string of meaningless relationships while she listlessly searches for somehing in her life that means something. Jack has a failed marriage and unfinished sound installation to show for himself when he meets Odile. It's a strange, sad little love story that perfectly captures feeling like the world is simultaneously too big and too small and the neuroses that are universal among--though not unique to--the early stages of adulthood. (You can read the original short story, which was later adapted into the novel, at booooooom.com.)

Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld starts out as a YA book but progresses into a young adult story as it follows Hannah Gavener from the age of fourteen to her late twenties. She deals with weird (seriously weird) family dynamics and the way they affect the rest of the men in her life, who love her more or less than she deserves. Ultimately, though, it's a story about the choices we make and how those shape the people we become.

Now, bear with me for a second on this next one. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite books. It tells the story of Ester Greenfield, who moves to New York as a young woman and has a mental breakdown when she discovers that being an adult is hard. It's full of honest, funny little tidbits like this: "I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn't taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers' sword and made me feel powerful and godlike." Plath writes with a poetic simplicity that I think of as very characteristic of the 1950's, similar to Salinger's style.

Image property of
Little, Brown, and Co.

Speaking of which, Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger is another beautiful, classic mental-breakdown story. This time it's Franny Glass who has a crisis of faith as she struggles to define herself. She comes home like the proverbial prodigal daughter and spends the entire book lying prone on the couch while her mother and brother try to restore her spirit. Franny and Zooey is much less obnoxious than Salinger's more famous Catcher in the Rye (read: the characters are still concerned with authenticity but they whine a lot less) so it's a perfect fit for the floundering twenty-something struggling to find a sense of self.

Break-ups and breakdowns seem to be everywhere in this list but that's only because they're a convenient vehicle for the underlying of longing, confusion, and detachment that seem to permeate the sub-genre. But with a little humor--and the right book--we can survive them. Heck, we're young, we're a little lost, we're ambitious, and we read. We can survive anything.

Weekly Download Reminder: Sync Audiobooks

2012-07-20T12:04:00.000-04:00

Well we're past the halfway point, people. Did you laugh last week? I'm going to be completely honest and say I'm a few weeks behind but luckily there's no expiration date on Sync downloads so I'll be listening well into fall. This week we go historical with some tales of Ancient Egypt.

For the YA fiends, we've got Cleopatra's Moon by Vicky Alvear Shecter, which is actually the story of Cleopatra Selene, daughter of the famous Egyptian pharaoh and Mark Antony. After her parents' joint suicide, the Egyptian princess is brought to Rome to live in the household of ambitious Roman emperor Octavianus. But even princesses have to deal with the pressures and insecurities of adolescence and Alvear Shecter does a wonderful job of balancing these elements of Cleopatra Selene's experience.

The intended pairing for Cleopatra's Moon was Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra but there has been a bit of a mix-up so the title isn't currently available for download. However, if you're dying to listen to another Cleo story, you're in luck as all of Shakespeare's works are in the public domain. You can download this version of the play from Librivox for free.

So get thee to a computer and get listening. Say what you will about her, Cleopatra was one of the most interesting women in history. Cleopatra's Moon will be available for download until July 25 and the Librivox production of Antony and Cleopatra is available indefinitely. Happy listening!

Image courtesy of Sync Audiobooks

__________
UPDATE: (7/22/2012) The intended version of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is now available through Sync. This dramatized production features the voice talents of Frances Barber and David Harewood, as well as a range of audio effects to lend a sense of place to the story. Sounds like an excellent production so I hope you all enjoy it now that it's available.

Image courtesy of Sync Audiobooks

Weekly Download Reminder: Audiobooks from Sync

2012-07-11T12:59:00.000-04:00

This week we change pace a little bit with some funny stories. We'll lighten the mood after a dark week of stories with some good old-fashioned humor.

To start with, we've got Funny Business by the editors of Guys Read, led principally by Jon Scieszka. Scieska and Co. bring us a collection of ten hilarious short stories from huge YA names such as Kate DiCamillo (author of Tale of Despereaux and Because of Winn Dixie), Christopher Paul Curtis (The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1993; Bud, Not Buddy; and Bucking the Sarge, among many others), Eoin Colfer (the Artemis Fowl series), Jeff Kinney (the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series), and more.

The classing pairing to this collection could only be by legendary American humorist, Mark Twain, who was so witty that the Kennedy Center gives out a prize every year in his honor to the best American comedian. Sync gives us The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, a wild and hilarious tale involving gambling, a very special frog, and--of course--a case of mistaken identity.

So are you ready to laugh? I don't recommend reading these in public, say in the train for example, as people tend to get up and move a few places away from people who sit giggling to themselves for no apparent reason. But if you don't mind being mistaken for a crazy person, have at it. You can download Funny Business and The Notorious Jumping Frog until July 18. Happy listening!

(Both images courtesy of Sync Audiobooks)

Confessions of an MPDG

2012-07-09T16:45:00.004-04:00

Image courtesy of Debra Brenegan

There's a new trope in the media today and it's getting a lot of attention. So much attention, in fact, that I would be very surprised if you haven't already heard of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (or MPDG, although that sounds more like a vitamin deficiency than a personality if you ask me). In case you've missed her, though, here's a quick rundown. The MPDG is a quirky, adorable woman who has never lost her sense of childlike wonder. She shops at vintage clothing stores and listens to her music on vinyl. She rides a bike everywhere not just for the environmental impact but because she genuinely likes her bike, which may be painted a pastel color and have a basket on the front. She sings all the time and picks flowers out of her neighbor's yards. Are you getting a vivid picture yet? In short (too late), the MPDG is an excessively girly free spirit who just wants to play the ukulele and teach the world to love.

MPDG's are everywhere in pop culture right now. Most identifiable among the MPDG's is Zooey Deschanel, especially in her roles as Jess on "New Girl" and Summer in "(500) Days of Summer." But Zooey isn't the only MPDG out there, the term was actually originally coined to describe Kirsten Dunst's slightly-psychotic-but-oh-so-adorable Claire in "Elizabethtown." And she's not alone. From "Garden State" to "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind" to "Dharma and Greg" to "Breakfast at Tiffany's," the MPDG has been around for ages but she's become unavoidable in the past five years. It is this humble blogger's opinion that the surge of MPDG characters are a response to the neurotic, sarcastic stereotype of women that are just as common today, a softer counterpart to the Liz Lemon's and Monica Geller's.

Along with all of the attention, MPDG's have gotten a lot of flak. Many feminist blogs and writers on the interwebs take offense to the MPDG's childlike enthusiasm and girly-ness. The argument is that the MPDG is just a caricature of the male fantasy and so has lost all agency. Of course, it goes much deeper than that. If you're interested in the arguments, take a look at these posts from XOJane, Jezebel, The Gloss, or Feminist Frequency. They all make a very valid point but I think they're missing something, too.

Image courtesy of XKCD

What these articles don't tell you is that a woman can be a MPDG and maintain her intelligence and strength. I like to go outside and dance around in the rain. I shop vintage. I sing almost constantly and the water bottle beside my computer is illustrated with a picture of a frog wearing roller skates. My earrings today are enormous peacock feathers. None of this makes me less intelligent, ambitious, or interesting. And what's more, the fact that I try to keep a sense of childish excitement about everything does not make me a child. It simply means that I refuse to contribute to the notion that being an adult is synonymous with being jaded and looking perpetually bored. So if drawing on my arm with markers when I'm bored and interpretive dancing around the house when I'm sad and rescuing small animals (I've been known to save rodents and toads alike) make me a MPDG, bring it on.

And in case you thought I was alone among the confident, kick-butt (we try to keep things PG around here) MPDG's and also because this post has got to relate back to books somehow, here's a list of some like-minded heroines.

Alaska Young from Looking for Alaska by John Green: Miles "Pudge" Halter falls for the wild, impulsive, and uncontrollable Alaska at his new boarding school. Self-destructive and tragic, Alaska teaches Pudge more than he expected about both love and loss.
Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery: Anne seems to make an appearance on most of my lists but she earned her spot on this one by pretending to be the Lady of Shallot and setting sail in a sinking boat.
Min Green from Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler: Min is "artsy" and "different." She throws a birthday party for an old movie star and frequents vintage stores. She's also incredibly cool.
Ramona from the Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O'Malley: She changes her hair the way some people change their toenail polish and delivers packages on rollerblades. Mostly, though, she does her own thing without asking Scott's permission, which is incredibly cool.

Some of these girls are tragic, some are hopeful and sweet but they're all just a little different from the norm. The best part about each of these characters is that they break apart the MPDG trope. Alaska is damaged, Anne is idealistic, Ramona has only dated seriously evil people until now, Min has the self-respect to do what needs to be done even when it hurts. They aren't some crazy glitterbombs who just rush around baking cookies (although they do) and dancing with strangers (although they might) without any real substance. They have problems and heartbreaks and triumphs. These, my virtual friends, are the real Manic Pixie Dream Girls and I am in good company.

And because even MPDG's (especially MPDG's)

like to make fun of themselves, enjoy.

And for the record, I love the Smiths.

Free Audiobooks from Sync

2012-07-05T11:00:00.000-04:00

We're a third of the way through Sync's free audiobook summer. Are you sunburned yet? One of the things I love best about audiobooks is that I can combine my all-time favorite pass time, reading, with secondary but still enjoyable things like walking around the city and sitting in the park and eating. I can't swim with them but since I don't swim with traditional books either, I don't view that as a loss. This week we've got a couple of good spooky stories to put goosebumps on your arms even while the sun warms them away.

In the YA corner, we've got Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake. Cas is a ghost hunter. He travels around the country with his mother hunting down local legends and dealing with them. When he shows up to the town Anna lives (or rather, doesn't) in, he expects a pretty straight-forward case. Since her brutal murder, she has killed every single person to set foot into the house she haunts. But then, for reasons neither of them quite understand, she spares Cas's life.

Our classic pairing is Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. This story, a little subtler, leads the reader (or listener, as the case may be) through tangled connections and dangerous secrets as our hero, Walter Hartright, meets a mysterious woman dressed in white by the side of the road one night. Who the woman is and how is connected to him is a mystery that could destroy his life.

As a fan of The Woman in Black bu Susan Hill and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, I love understated, dramatic scary stories (I've had Daphne du Marier's Rebecca on my To-Read pile for ages) so I can't wait to sink my teeth into these. You can download Anna Dressed in Blood and The Woman in White until July 11. Happy listening!

(Both images courtesy of Sync Audiobooks)

Weekly Reminder: Audiobook Downloads from Sync

2012-06-28T12:23:00.000-04:00

Week three people, are you keeping up? It's kind of a lot of reading to do in a short period of time but I try to keep those synapses firing when the sun comes out and most of my higher brain functions want to go on hiatus. Last weeks reads were a little girly but this week we come back to good old gender neutrality with two fairy tales.

The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud follows a boy wizard who is tired of being pushed around. So be summons us a djinn (that's genie to you Disney-philes) to show what he can do. But when he sends the rather taciturn djinn out to steal a precious artifact, he has no idea quite how much trouble he's getting himself into.

Tales from the Arabian Nights by Andrew Lang abridges some of Scheherazade's thousand tales. In this compilation, we get Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor, and a few more adventures as our storyteller weaves the tales she hopes will save her life.

So are you excited? I read Amulet of Samarkand as a graphic novel a while back when it was up for a Cybils award so I'm interested to see how it translates into a different format (it was originally a traditional novel, the GN was the adaptation). And I've been meaning to read Arabian Nights for ages. You can download The Amulet of Samarkand and Tales from the Arabian Nights until July 4. Happy listening!

(Both images courtesy of Sync Audiobooks)

Coming to the End of ALA 12

2012-06-25T15:10:00.001-04:00

Look, my feet are still in California but now they're very tired feet. They're much happier feet, though, now that they're in lovely, comfy Teva flip flops. Seriously, guys. I want to buy a dozen pairs of these and have a clever Italian cobbler put them into the soles of every pair of shoes I own.

I've had a great conference this year. As always when I spend any length of time among my fellows in the field, I feel encouraged and refreshed. There are so many librarians the world over who are refusing to accept the current state of things. They're fundraising and networking and creating Maker Spaces for their teens despite any obstacles. I feel honored to be a part of this profession.

To all of you who made ALA 12 a hugely enjoyable and educational experience, a heartfelt thanks. Can't wait to see you all next year in Chicago! Go Cubs!

ALA Annual is Here!

2012-06-21T11:52:00.000-04:00

Some of you might know that this week is the American Library Association's Annual Conference. This year it's in Anaheim, California, which means sun, fun, and Disney. This year will be my second year attending ALA Annual and I think I might be a little better prepared this year than I was last year. I had a fantastic time last year, of course. I learned a ton and met librarians that made me proud to be part of the profession and I can't wait to go back but this year, I'll be doing a few things differently.

Image courtesy of
Flickr user libookperson

First of all, I'll be packing lighter. I always say this and I almost never manage to keep to it but I really mean it this time, people. A few dresses, a few cardigans, and comfortable shoes. That's it. Okay, and a pair of jeans and a few cute tops for the cocktail parties and whatnot but that's it. I swear. Oh, and maybe a pair or two of shorts. Okay, this isn't going as planned. Moving on!

Secondly, I'll actually plan. No more wandering aimlessly through the convention center until the title of a session catches my eye, this year I will actually read through my conference materials and select sessions that are relevant to what I'm actually doing. I'm one of those obnoxiously fortunate people who absolutely adores what they do for a living and I cannot wait to learn more about my field. Professional development is cool!

Image courtesy of
Flickr user TwoHungryBlackbirds

Third, I'll be bringing snacks. Yes, I have turned into my ninety-one year old grandmother. Allow me to explain, last year, there were several days during which I did not eat. Not intentionally, I don't have the restraint for that, but simply because there wasn't time to eat what with the exhibit hall and the sessions and the meet-and-greets. And when you spend the day surrounded by thousands of cardigans and no food, you tend to get a little glassy-eyed. So this year, granola bars and dried fruit will be my constant companions.

Fourth, I'll be taking a little time out. I'm an introvert. That means that, as much as I might love the conference, I'm going to need a little bit of time all to myself every day. It might be a twenty minute lunch in a quiet corner or an hour at the end of the day reading in the hotel bar. I love librarians but most of them are pretty introverted, too, so I trust my fellow booknerds will understand.

Go ahead. Scan it.
You know you want to.

Finally, networking. I will talk to strangers and I will be passing out my awesome new business cards, which link via a very cool QR code to this very blog. I will link to and read other blogs and follow people I meet on Twitter. Collaboration, people, it's pretty much the entire reason libraries exist.

So there it is: my guide to making ALA Annual 2012 an awesome, educational experience. Stay posted for more info live from Anaheim!

Weekly Reminder: Audiobook Downloads from Sync

2012-06-21T11:00:00.000-04:00

Here we are in week two of Sync's free audiobook summer. Did you all enjoy last week's listens? Don't worry if you didn't because this weeks titles couldn't be more different from last weeks. We move into a gentler subject: the complicated but fierce loyalty of sisters.

Our YA selection is Irises by Francisco X. Stork. Irises tells the story of Kate and Mary, two sisters who couldn't be more different. Kate is sensible and intelligent, bound for Stanford in the fall. Mary is a little more flighty, all she wants to do is stay home and paint her way into oblivion. But when their father dies, leaving them to take care of their chronically ill mother, Kate and Mary must decide what they will sacrifice for the stability and survival of their family.

The natural pairing to Irises is Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility follows Mariane and Eleanor Dashwood, who are also two very different sisters, in their quest to secure husbands. The storylines are actually very similar, leading me to believe that Irises was at least inspired by Sense and Sensibility and might in fact be a modern retelling of Austen's classic.

I hate to play favorites but I've really been looking forward to these titles. My sisters, for all their insanity, are two of the most important people in my life. The sisterly (Why isn't there a female equivalent to fraternal?) bond is complex and maddening but also fascinating. You can download Irises and Sense and Sensibility until June 27. Happy listening!

(Images courtesy of Sync Audiobooks)

Californian Librarians

2012-06-20T19:33:00.001-04:00

Well my feet are safely planted in Anaheim, ready and excited for ALA Annual. The rest of me is here ready and excited, too, of course. Actually, my feet are kind of tired but the rest of my mind and body are raring to go, chomping at the bit, and other assorted metaphors implying readiness and excitement.

Stay posted (ha) for live info from the conference as the Guerilla Librarian is now blogging directly from her (my?) phone. Ain't technology grand?

Fractured Fairy Tales: Cinderella Edition

2012-06-19T11:01:00.000-04:00

I grew up on fractured fairy tales. The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, in which Alex P. Wolf finally gets to tell his side of the story, was one of my absolute favorite books when I was a kid. In recent years, these fairy tale retellings, or "fractured fairy tales" have pretty darn popular. One needs to look no farther than Gregory Maguire's Wicked, which of course inspired the fabulous Broadway musical, for proof. Maguire has made a career of retelling old stories, from Snow White in Mirror, Mirror to Cinderella in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. It's the latter story that we're going to talk about today.

Image property of
Scholastic Books

I never cared much for Cinderella; she always just kind of seemed like a big wimp to me--and her shoes made no sense. Call me crazy but I don't really see a cheerfully indentured girl who is rescued by a fairy godmother and nameless prince but never actually lifts a finger towards her own salvation as a strong female role model. Enter Cinder, the star of Marissa Meyer's Cinder. Cinder isn't your grandma's Cinderella. She's the best mechanic in New Beijing, a girl with serious knowhow and guts. Oh, and she's a cyborg. Some time in her mysterious past, which she can't remember, someone replaced some of Cinder's limbs with robotic parts but that hasn't robbed Cinder of her humanity. She's still a caring and sometimes cranky sixteen-year-old doing whatever she can to rebel against her overly strict foster mother. And unlike her Grimm counterpart, Cinder invests in her own rescue. She commandeers a vehicle, which she fixes herself, and makes a logical plan for her escape. Of course, the escape is thwarted by external circumstances because otherwise there would be no story. But even in those circumstances, Cinder is making a conscious decision to--twist--save the prince.

Image property of
Scholastic Books

Gail Carson Levine's Ella of Frell, heroine of the Newbery honored Ella Enchanted, doesn't exactly fit into the fairy tale mold, either. Ella Enchanted follows the original outline a little more closely (no cyborgs here but ogres and dwarves abound) with a crucial difference. Ella doesn't want to do what her stepmother and stepsisters tell her to do. She's been cursed with obedience by an idiot fairy named Lucinda. She is physically unable to ignore a direct command, no matter what the command or who issues it. But Ella doesn't let her curse get her down, either. She runs away from finishing school, charms ogres, and falls head over heels for the prince. Of course, the romance is complicated by the fact that she would lop his head off if someone told her to. But does Ella sit down and cry about it? Well, yes. But once she's done with that, she sets out to break the curse and secure her own happily ever after.

There are a whole pumpkin carriage load of these stories from the above mentioned Confessions, which shows there are two sides to every story, to Margaret Peterson Haddix's Just Ella, which tells what happens when happily ever after turns out to be pretty boring. Some of them are modern, some old-fashioned, some futuristic. There's a Cinderella for almost every genre and reader. Best of all, this crop of Cinderellas doesn't wait to be saved. She kicks off her glass slippers, hikes up her ball gown, and sets out to save herself. Now that's a fairy tale princess I'll dance with.

Happy Father's Day

2012-06-17T11:02:00.000-04:00

Today is Father's Day. Have you called yours to thank him for building that loft for your dorm room sophomore year of college? Or for teaching you how to grill? When you think of literary dads, you probably think of Atticus Finch first, that paragon of integrity who taught Scout and Jem to be good even when it isn't necessarily popular. But Atticus isn't the only literary papa worth praising, of course.

One of my favorite fictional father figures is Albus Dumbledore. Though Harry is an orphan, there are plenty of male role models for him to emulate, from Sirius Black (once he finds out that Sirius isn't a murderer) to Arthur Weasley to Mad-Eye Moody. But Dumbledore is one character who is present at nearly every important event in Harry's life, which I tend to think qualifies him for this honor, DNA or no.

In books, as in life, there are no perfect families and there are no perfect dads. But whoever the big guy in your life is, make sure to give him a ring today to say thanks.

Weekly Reminder: Audiobook Downloads from Sync

2012-06-14T11:00:00.000-04:00

This week is the very first week of Sync's very exciting audiobook program. In case you missed it, you can read more about it here. So here are our books for the week:

The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch tells the story of a post-plague America. Civilization has pretty much dissolved and Stephen and his father have only survived by keeping on the road, scavenging the barren and dangerous land of Florida. But when an accident renders Stephen's father unconscious, he must decide whether or not to trust a primitive settlement of survivors where everything isn't quite how it seems.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck follows a family of migrant workers trying to keep their heads above water dring the Great Depression, all the while working their way west towards the Promised Land, California.

On the surface, a survivalist novel about a brutal dystopia and Steinbeck's modern classic don't look like they'd have much in common. Both of them, however, are stories about travelling through a nation in crisis and about the redemptive power of family. You can download Eleventh Plague and Grapes of Wrath until June 20th. Happy listening!

(Both images courtesy of Sync Audiobooks)

Pottermore and More

2012-05-31T12:14:00.000-04:00

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard of Pottermore, online home of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter. Pottermore hosts exclusive content from Rowling, including additional pages of Harry Potter storylines and the ability to interact with the text. So here's how it works: each chapter is split up into key scenes, which players can explore by collecting special items and meeting characters. Players can also connect with other users, presumably to geek out over how cool Pottermore is. Once they've got the hang of things, players can also brew potions, learn spells, and duel each other, although the exact purpose of those activities is a little vague for me. Essentially, Pottermore is a forum for extreme fans to get together and glory in the utter awesomeness of the Potter-verse.

Property of J. K. Rowling and Warner Brother Entertainment

Though it's the most widely-known of its kind, Pottermore certainly isn't the only website that accompanies a story and allows the reader to continue their experience even after leaving the pages of the book. Erin Morgenstern's Alex Award winning novel, The Night Circus has a similar web presence. At the Night Circus, users can go on quests and, again, connect with other users to discuss the story and their progress through the game. It functions a bit like an online version of Dungeons and Dragons, with a choose-your-own-adventure element and a points system. Though it's a bit simpler than Pottermore, fans of the understated magic and mystery of The Night Circus will love this ethereal online companion.

Image Property of Failbetter Games

Given its wild popularity, it was only a matter of time before The Hunger Games had its own site, too. The Capitol is quite a bit more commercial than Pottermore, which confines its large merchandise section to a different site. The Capitol focus on the movies and the spectacle of The Hunger Games rather than the storyline but players can register to be assigned to a district, learn about district tributes, and explore movie content (my favorite is Capitol Couture).

The last one I'll mention here, although by no means the end of the list, is the Gallagher Academy website, companion to Ally Carter's Gallagher Girls series. The fictional Gallagher Academy is a school where characters in Carter's books learn to be international spies. At the website, users can look at courses like "History of Espionage" and "Advanced Encryption." They can also read about the history of the Academy, register as students, and learn more about characters.

Property of the Walt Disney Internet Group

There are, of course, lots of websites that allow users to interact with the text like this and I could write an entire series of posts about the book-related apps. But what's the purpose of this new crop of websites? Well if you're like me, you tear through books you like and are left wanting more. I always admire those people who have the self-restraint to read just a chapter at a time to preserve the book and make it last longer, kind of like those people who can eat a popsicle as it melts instead of biting off a big chunk and then suffering through a cold headache. But I'm not the sort to take things slowly and I have the self-restraint of a four-year-old, at least when it comes to books and food.

Much like the new wave of ebooks I discussed eons ago, the technology here allows readers to interact with their stories and beloved fictional friends. Websites like Pottermore allow readers to slip away again into the beautiful and fantastical worlds they have loved and to become a part of the story, to experience new dimensions and depths of fiction.

So is this the wave of the future? Will authors be paired with web designers instead of illustrators? I sincerely hope so. We live in a cyber-speed society, where a website that takes more than twenty seconds to load is considered "slow" and most of my students tweet multiple times a minute. We book people cannot expect to remain unchanged--reading is a slow, solitary pursuit in a time when "fast" and "connected" are the name of the proverbial game. Publishers and authors have to recognize this fact and to adapt to the changes--and opportunities--it creates.

Personally, I think it's a great time to be a reader.