books
08 May 2012

and it was still hot

Last October, I posted about my favorite Maurice Sendak book.

This past Saturday, I carried around this t-shirt for three or four hours while I worked at my bookstore, trying to decide if I had enough money to buy it.

During three years in grad school, I have seen about three movies in the theater. One was Where the Wild Things Are.

In my picturebook class, we studied an impressive list of fifty illustrators. Sendak was not on the list, we were told, because we would keep talking about him all semester whether he was on it or not.

Today, my program was asked by national news operations to comment on the life and legacy of this artist and author.

Today, I have been asked to put together a book display in my library to honor his passing.

When I was small, my mother read me In The Night Kitchen; I think I will probably always remember her voice, his words, in this way.

weekly
07 May 2012

2012: week eighteen

April 20 – May 5

On Sunday, I went for a 2+ mile run, then swung by JP Licks on the way home for a small scoop of Oreo ice cream. With sprinkles.

On Monday, I threw a banquet. I really did.

On Tuesday, I slept in until 8 a.m., and dropped about 700 dollars on car repairs. Yeaaahhh…

On Wednesday, it was misty outside and my hair swelled to three times its typical volume.

On Thursday, I accidentally stayed late at work.

On Friday, I had my first weekday-off-with-nobody-else-home-and-nothing-much-to-do since I don’t even remember. I suspect it was sometime in October.

On Saturday, I saw the supermoon.

Reading:

Listening to:

  • Podcasts, podcasts, podcasts…

Watching:

  • LOST  The boy has me on a strict nightly regimen. Unfortunately, we’ve started watching the episodes we haven’t seen 100 times, so we have to start paying attention…
  • Picked up Switched at Birth again… luckily, it seems I haven’t forgotten a thing!
  • I keep trying to watch videos on our desktop and then cursing our desktop and then fantasizing about throwing it out the window. So, I’ve watched the first 3 minutes of a number of different shows, hoping for different results. Alas, my old computer can no longer play new videos, and my laptop has no audio. Fun times.

 

books
05 May 2012

may links

Interview with Molly Leach

So, how awesome is the 50th Anniversary cover of A Wrinkle in Time? This interview with the cover, Molly Leach, talks about how she incorporated the artistic “theme” of the original cover while creating something entirely modern. Excellent.

Fever 1793

I don’t gravitate toward historical fiction, but this post by Laurie Halse Anderson reminded me of how much I did like her story of the Yellow Fever plague… completely horrifying. Which apparently is how you suck me into a historical novel. Scare the pants off me.

The Problem is Not the Books

In my library class the semester, we’ve gone back and forth about what the librarian’s role is in providing “girl books” to girls and “boy books” to boys. I can see both sides of the argument… it’s hard to argue that librarians should ignore what their patrons want to read in lieu of more “gender neutral” titles, but at the same time, why promote a broken system? This article by author Saundra Mitchell, sums up the broken system pretty convincingly, but I’m still ruminating over how this comes to play in a practical library setting…

Rejection Letter

“This writing thing, it never has any guarantees. And I don’t mean that in this “well, of course it doesn’t, life doesn’t come with a receipt,” kind of way. I mean it in a gut-wrenching, black hole, you-will-occasionally-feel-so-worthless-that-you-will-want-to-hide-under-something-in-the-closet-for-the-next-year way.”

How, exactly, do you develop thicker skin? This article doesn’t have the answer, but it shows that no matter where you are in your writing career, rejection can knock you down. Maybe it’s just part of the process for some sensitive people (see: me)

 

Five Year Plan

Our plan is dreaming big, but it’s also possible

At this point in my life, I am thinking a lot about long-term plans – 5 years-ish. I liked reading about how this mom was able to propose a plan to get her where she wants to go, even with a family to worry about. It’s a balancing act, making plans with other people’s goals and opinions in the mix, but it doesn’t mean you have to be conservative. I’ll be keeping this post in mind as we continue to dream and plan over the next few months.

How I Decide Where to Focus My Energy

You don’t need a huge grand startup to make your life fun and interesting. You just need to have a challenging goal that you are trying to reach, each day. You need to be able to make money doing it: that is what a good job is.

Caveat: I think Penelope is 50% insightful 50% completely nuts. The trouble is, she alternates within a single post. Insightful, crazy, insightful, crazy. So I keep reading…

Anway, this post is about what to do when you look at your life and realize your personal career trajectory and then decide to either “stay the course” or develop something else.

15 Things You Should Give Up In Order to Be Happy

I clicked on this link, expecting to see practical, tangible things. The kind of things I imagine will make me feel better if I give them up – caffeine, sugar, stressful relationships, sleeping in…

but this list is like 100% zen. “Give up labels, your need to impress others, self-defeating talk…”

Sometimes, I like to read articles that remind me happiness and minimalism is not all about denying yourself, but giving up emotional garbage, too.

Organized Bravery

During times of change, the only organizations that thrive are those that are eager to interact and change as well. And that only happens when individuals take brave steps forward.

A little Seth Godin piece that rang true for me, especially my thoughts about the future of libraries. Let’s be brave and take risks, people!

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books
04 May 2012

just a list of books

I read this article in the New York Times a few weeks ago, a personal essay describing the author’s “Book of Books,” an aging notebook kept for over ten years in which she jots down the title of each read book. I find something romantic about that idea, but I am the type of person who finds most notebooks romantic. However, I am a woman who loses notebooks, spills things upon them, carries them in her backpack on a rainy day rendering everything she owns to become quite soggy. I could never keep a notebook in the same place that I was reading without losing it, destroying it, or leaving it somewhere odd to be forgotten.

Enter: the blog. I will never lose/abandon/forget my blog. A list kept on the info page of my ancient Livejournal, years and years before LibraryThing and Goodreads existed; it was the first time I was able to keep track. It became a habit, to read, to finish, to log on and add a line to my growing list.

My blog in its current format has slowly evolved from this habit, this process, of documenting what I read. Like Paul and her tattered BoB, it serves me in some kind of nostalgic, narcissistic way – I can look back over what I’ve read, over the years, and remind myself of the summer I read nothing but romance, the year I read The Boyfriend List 3 times, the semester I slogged through the thousands of pages of forgotten 19th Century fiction, the time I read through the Harry Potter series in two months and when I closed the 7th book, I immediately ran back to The Sorcerer’s Stone. I can make charts and graphs and count pages and genres and see my preferences and patterns over long periods of time. I can spend hours thinking about myself and my reading and what that means to me.

It’s a comfort, a pleasure, to read and to think about what I’ve read and to self-monitor and to gaze upon my accomplishments. I think that reading makes my life better, and I like to reflect on this phenomenon.

I like to think about why certain stories feel appropriate for different people, different settings, different uses.

How people move from book to book, how they decide when to put one down, how they decide which books are “best.”

I like to think about how I can help others find this same comfort that I feel when I am surrounded by lists of books.

book lists
03 May 2012

library card exhibitionist – vol. 2

Checked Out

  1. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan on audio
  2. Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry last school book!
  3. When Parents Text: So Much Said, So Little Understood by why haven’t I returned this?
  4. Just Kids by Patti Smith
  5. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver on audio, for Lance
  6. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling on audio
  7. Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Sum
  8. Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt on audio
  9. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson on audio, for Lance (he doesn’t like it)
  10. Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids by Bryan Caplan
  11. Contagion overdue because I left the disc in the player… gah!
  12. The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai on audio
  13. Will Grayson, will grayson on audio, because Lance just listened to it (and liked it!)
  14. Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody
  15. The Dip by Seth Godin
  16. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbarch on audio
  17. Dead End by Jason Myers still dirty
  18. Level Up by Gene Luen Yang
  19. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
  20. We All Fall Down by Nic Sheff

 

On Hold

  1. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  2. Something Blue by Emily Giffin
  3. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
  4. Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout So Lance will return my school library copy so I can graduate….
  5. Drift by Rachel Maddow
  6. A Practical Wedding by Meg Keene
  7. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
  8. Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson
  9. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern which will likely not arrive in time for Jules’s bookclub… I will try anyway!
  10. An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler
  11. An Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose
  12. Someone Like You by Sarah Dessen
  13. Thumped by Megan McCafferty
  14. The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein
  15. Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James Do I feel shamed knowing my librarian will see that this book is on my hold shelf? Yes. Did that stop me? No. I am 310 in line for 47 copies, though…

 

4
libraries
01 May 2012

catch the reading bug

Been thinking a lot about myself as a professional. My potential career. Where I’ve been, where I want to go.

Where libraries are. Where they are going. Where I think they should go. The librarian’s role in the community, in society, throughout history. What part of this history I’d like to play.

Job hunting, apparently, makes me more philosophical than usual.

When my information seeking devolved into navel-gazing, I found this:

Hand-cut letters, an hour or so of my life spent standing on a creaky desktop, stepping over computers.

One of my major contributions to the field.

So far.

 

 

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lance romance
30 Apr 2012

2012: week seventeen

April 22 – April 28

This life of mine is a teetering balancing act, right now. I keep adding things on top of the stack, carefully, but I have to be absolutely steady. Unwavering. If I think about failure too much, I start to get panicky and then I don’t perform and then I get behind and things start slipping. I must have absolute faith that everything won’t come crashing down on me.

I’m about to finish the semester without any major catastrophes. I haven’t even been sick, if you can believe it. I had a sore throat for like, one day.

But after a few days where things started to tilt, I realized just how much I absolutely rely on the support of this boy that I love. The crazier my schedule gets, the more he steps in to make my ridiculous schedule more manageable, more pleasant, and in some cases, just plain possible.

Some examples from the past seven days:

  • Helping out with dinner when I can’t keep my brain focused on more than one process at a time…
  • … and when my blood sugar falls so low I can’t make decisions or full sentences, ordering me take-out.
  • Cleaning up after my sloppy self and not complaining when I keep piling up the mess.
  • Doing the dishes twice for my every once.
  • Even though he thinks I am crazy and am inventing smells, my heart skipped a beat when he spent an hour Googling and cleaning our disgusting, stinky dishwasher.
  • Driving me to and from work, even across the river, even without prior arrangement.
  • Driving me to get coffee, even when I wake him up too early on a Sunday morning.
  • Driving me to work across the river at 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday, and when I dropped my iced coffee in the middle of the sidewalk, he went back and bought me another and hand-delivered it so I wouldn’t be late for work.
  • Deciding in the midst of all THIS, that he wouldn’t mind just dealing with allllllthis FOR THE REST OF TIME!

All of these acts of service while also listening to me whine about work, applying appropriate comforts when I cry about the future, and generally forgiving me for being the world’s worst human.

Thank you. Thank you. Thankyouthankyou.

I could not do my life without you.

Reading:

Listening to:

  • I listened to an episode of JD’s Cocktail Lounge on Monday and had the song “Dividing by 70” stuck in my head all week.

Watching:

  • LOST – We are trucking through this series with amazing speed. It helps that we’ve seen the first 2 seasons 3-4 times now…
  • Accidentally/on-purpose watched the first two episodes of Girls. I like it!

 

books
28 Apr 2012

comfort reading

I’ve had a rough couple of days, friends.

But I also had a Barnes and Noble giftcard.

Today, I spent my lunch break at the Harvard Coop, browsing for something guaranteed to make me slightly less morose.

This is what I found:

 

Martha Stewart Weddings, because I am 27 years old and have never purchased a wedding magazine.

Heaven is Here because I am a longtime (pre-crash) reader of the NieNie Dialogues, and I needed something linear and not-YA and not challenging and that I don’t need to write a professional review of. This is exactly the kind of book I can blow an entire evening on.

Although perhaps the second choice is a bit questionable (reminds me a bit of when I decided to read The Fault in Our Stars the day my beloved roommate moved away…), both are doing their duty today.

Retail therapy at its absolute finest.

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books
25 Apr 2012

ya-lit pro-tip #1

 

Between Shades of Gray

and

Fifty Shades of Grey

ENTIRELY DIFFERENT BOOKS.

Please take care when

  • adding books to your To-Read pile
  • ordering these books for your library
  • buying a present for your teenage niece or cousin
  • attempting to learn more about Lithuanian history
  • reading your Twitter feed where it seems acceptable to refer to either book as “Shades of Gray”

This has been a Public Service Announcement from the Coalition to Prevent Book-related Confusion/Scandalization.

6
books
24 Apr 2012

i want my hat back…

I spend a few hours of the week in the company of some fairly nerdy college girls.

They are also quite Internet-savvy, as nerdy college girls often are (I should know), so they are probably reading this. Hello, my nerdy friends!

Anyway, they are often chatting away while I try to get some work done around the office and I catch snippets of their conversations about who Tweeted so-and-so while they were in class and what they were writing about for their Victorian Science Fiction class and the differences between costumed and non-costumed people at Anime Conventions.

One day a few weeks ago, one girl said to another – I’m assuming within the context of their conversation, in mock-serious tone…

“I want my hat back!”

The other girls said: “Giggle giggle giggle giggle…”

I said: “Say whaaaaaaaaaaa…..?”

Apparently, this popular-in-its-own-right picturebook – Jon Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back– is a minor league internet meme.

I’m glad everyone likes Hunger Games. I’m glad Harry Potter is a big success.

But I especially like it when children’s literature hits the counterculture. When it shows up on Tumblr and the nerdy college girls of the world think it is cool.

(It also stands to note that I could not resist trying to assert my own coolness in their little nerdy friendspace by bragging that I am, in fact, a former Candlewick intern. Clearly my grasp on cool is questionable, at best)

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