November 2009
3 posts
Mystery of Argleton, the 'Google' town that only... →
John Green fans will appreciate this article about a Google Maps paper town…
Quiz: Kishi Creation or Fashionista Flop? →
about halfway through this quiz I realized that I could just read the description, and if it sparked a faint memory in the back of my brain, it was from one of the 100+ Babysitter’s Club books I read (and reread) as a child.
“If you (librarians or book fair chairs) live in a community that is so...”
– Six Boxes of Books: Scholastic censors Luv Ya Bunches
October 2009
6 posts
Librarian jobs & salaries not looking so good →
Remind me again why I’m in graduate school?
4 tags
On Hating Female Characters | Justine Larbalestier →
I am noticing this somewhat acutely right now because quite a few people are hating on Micah Wilkins the protagonist of Liar. […] I happen to love Micah, as I do all the characters in my books. I’m well aware that I’m not an impartial observer, but I have a sneaking suspicion that were Micah a boy even with all the same flaws s/he would not be attracting such hate. I suspect that there...
3 tags
Ugly battle has librarians in Oak Brook turning to... →
“Don’t cry crocodile tears about people who are making $100,000 a year wiping tables and putting the books back on the shelves,” Xinos smirked, apparently referencing the fired head librarian, who has advanced degrees and made $98,676 a year. He said Oak Brook had to “stop indulging people in their hobbies” and “their little, personal, private wants.”
...
2 tags
“With respect to personal lives, an issue that came up during these events was my...”
– Kristin Pekoll, YA librarian at West Bend Community Memorial Library (regarding the censorship attempts earlier this year), in the October 2009 issue of VOYA.
I would think it’s the other way around. Parents have trouble seeing their kids as ever being sexual people, so they gasp in horror if...
4 tags
Can YOU spot the threat to young minds?
Consider the following excerpt:
“Hulya?” she says. “Hi!” “Yaz!” Hulya says. “Waddup, cuz? Keeping it real?” Yasaman grins, because Hulya only talks this way when no one else is around. To Yasaman, she’ll say, “Give me some knuckles” or “Yo yo yo,” but to their elderly büyükbaba and büyükanne and their gazillion of...
3 tags
school tosses out 20,000 books, basically turns...
owlswallowvowels: libraryland: notentirely:
via a friend who is a librarian…
Cushing headmaster James Tracy explained that the library is the “nicest space on campus” and that bookshelves wasted precious space that could be put to better use. The library will be transformed into an interactive learning center, faculty lounge, with a $50,000 cyber café and $12,000 cappuccino machine.
“We are...
September 2009
9 posts
3 tags
5 tags
“Storytelling is the traditional vehicle mankind uses to pass wisdom from one...”
– Laurie Halse Anderson
The rest of the post is definitely worth a read. It’s about challenges to her books, and her eloquent responses to them.
3 tags
1 tag
“There are plenty of well-supported objections to the literary and ethical merits...”
– Where the Popular Kids are Sitting, by Karen Healey
2 tags
“I think a lot of this terror over Twilight is just a reflection of how stupid we...”
– Lizzie Skurnick, author of Shelf Discovery
5 tags
Entertainment Weekly attempts to review Catching... →
For anyone who hasn’t seen this, it’s EW’s FAILtastic Catching Fire review, and I quote:
Last year, Suzanne Collins published The Hunger Games, the first in a projected young-adult trilogy about Katniss Everdeen, a heroic adolescent girl who crushed on a sexy hunter. In between romantic daydreams, Katniss shot strange beasts, dodged force fields, and battled murderous zombie...
2 tags
2 tags
August 2009
12 posts
3 tags
Monsters from the Id: The Library as Metaphor →
The library has become the deep, dark woods through which the hero must pass, battling dragons and ogres along the way. This actually works, but the censors have forgotten that the deep-dark woods is a metaphor for our own minds, and the monsters are aspects of the self.
2 tags
“I congratulate Jim and Ginny Maziarka, the vigilant parents in West Bend who...”
– Read not, sin not? I think not - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Scathing op/ed about the West Bend clusterfuck.
1 tag
“In brief, we hold that local school boards may not remove books from school...”
– The Supreme Court, Board of Education v. Pico
2 tags
“Intellecual [sic] freedom in the warped sense of giving children access to...”
– West Bend’s very own FAIL WHALE, Ginny Maziarka, defending her position that “Intellectual freedom for minors is DANGEROUS” and inadvertantly delivering the most hilarious blog comment I’ve read in a very, very long time.
If you’ve stopped keeping track of the whole West Bend library fiasco...
6 tags
Review: City of Glass, by Cassandra Clare (2009)
City of Glass is the third book in the Mortal Instruments trilogy, the first two of which are City of Bones and City of Ashes. They’re written by Cassandra Clare, who, as you may or may not know, was a very popular (and somewhat controversial) Harry Potter fanfiction author back in the Golden Fanfiction Age between the releases of books 4 and 5. This makes her pretty easy to make fun of, for...
1 tag
“Can you imagine the uproar if a 2009 politician were to introduce the concept of...”
– Dave Holmes (via notthatkindagay)
It’s true.
2 tags
“One very clear example can be seen among those who believe that the library...”
– Censorship-Free Libraries: Let’s Just Call It Obscene!
3 tags
2 tags
“She writes, “they are allowing young children to read about things that there...”
– Censorship-Free Libraries: Porn, Predators and Prevarication (via notemily)
(Reblogging oneself on tumblr is surprisingly difficult to accomplish.)
Censorship-Free Libraries is a new blog discussing the ideas surrounding the West Bend library challenge. I particularly liked this quote, as I think...
3 tags
Read Between the Lines « Courtney Milan’s Blog →
Next time an author talks about her cover, pay attention to what she doesn’t say. If she doesn’t say “I love it!” she probably doesn’t love it.
One more post on the Liar cover, because I think this one needs to be seen. Apparently people have been accusing Justine Larbalestier of lying, because she supposedly praised the cover before she was against it. Courtney’s post explains why...
2 tags
WFMAD
Laurie Halse Anderson has kicked off the second annual Write Fifteen Minutes a Day (WFMAD), and the rules are simple:
Commit to write for 15 minutes a day for the entire month of August.
Just do it.
I’ve decided that writing for me will count as any kind of writing—pen&paper or computer, journaling, blogging, fictioning, poeming, whatever, but it has to be a time when I sit down...
1 tag
Library fan nears 25,000th book →
July 2009
25 posts
2 tags
Board asks public about library options - JSOnline →
I’m a bit apprehensive about this. Basically, the Milwaukee library system (city, not county—suburban libraries, including the one where I work, would be unaffected) is going to be revamped, with a lot of neighborhood libraries being replaced by “mixed-use libraries,” “area libraries” and/or “express libraries.” It always makes me nervous when...
3 tags
fake cover time!
In the grand tradition of the fake album cover meme, the blog 100 Scope Notes has posted instructions on how to make your own fake YA novel cover:
CREATE YOUR DEBUT YA COVER
1 – Go to “Fake Name Generator” or click http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/
The name that appears is your author name.
2 – Go to “Random Word Generator” or click http://www.websitestyle.com/parser/randomword.shtml
The...
3 tags
and may the odds be ever in your favor
I finished reading The Hunger Games today. I know, I know, I’m the last YA fan on Earth to read it, and I did feel kind of guilty for snagging an ARC of Catching Fire at ALA when I hadn’t even read the first book yet. How dare I take the sequel away from people who were already salivating for it?! I felt like someone would find out and screech “IMPOSTOR!!!” and then...
5 tags
John Green on the LIAR cover and the death of... →
John Green adds his voice to the chorus of bloggers writing about Justine Larbalestier’s Liar cover.
On publishers choosing covers that will appeal to a broad audience:
I would argue the job of a cover is not to get the book to the broadest audience but instead to get the book to its best audience. Cover design is important at point of sale, but most books are sold by word of...
5 tags
Justine Larbalestier speaks out on the Liar cover...
I picked up the ARC of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar at ALA, but I haven’t got around to reading it yet, so I didn’t know about its Cover Problem until Duncan brought it to my attention a few days ago. In short: the cover features a white girl with long straight hair. The protagonist of the book is black, with short nappy hair, and can pass for a boy on occasion.
I’m sure...
5 tags
Review: A Summer to Die, by Lois Lowry (1977)
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I first encountered this book when my library was weeding its children’s paperback collection. I grabbed several out of the pile destined for the recycling bin, including this one. I knew Lowry’s work, but I didn’t know this was her first novel, or how good it would end up being.
I loved it. It was beautifully written from start to finish. The setting...
2 tags
Library fight riles up city, leads to book-burning... →
The West Bend debacle on CNN. Nothing those of us who have been following the case haven’t heard before, but the article does mention at the end that the Mazarkias are “gearing up for another go at the library.” Oh yay.
3 tags
ALA lesson #2: The Power of Teh Intarwebs
I didn’t have a Twitter for a long time. “That’s stupid,” I thought. “Why would I want to reduce my thoughts to 140-character vignettes? And who would want to read them? I’m content with updating my Facebook status. And my Tumblr. And also my LiveJournal.”
But when ALA started, I knew some of my favorite authors would be tweeting about the conference, as...
1 tag
“Mom looked after him with that special fond look she gives to things that are...”
– Lois Lowry, A Summer to Die
1 tag
1 tag
“I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still.”
– Sylvia Plath (via robot-heart)
3 tags
“My guess is that most people would be embarrassed to admit they wouldn’t buy a...”
– Are We Letting Boys Be Book Bigots? - MSN Movies News (via librarianpirate)
I think the problem isn’t with boys. I think the problem is that books designed to be interesting for girls have girl protagonists, but books designed for girls are often not interesting to boys. That doesn’t mean the...
3 tags
“Diantha McBride, you might have 30 years’ experience as a librarian. But when...”
– Are We Letting Boys Be Book Bigots? - MSN Movies News (via librarianpirate)
YES YES YES, a thousand times yes.
I also love this quote:
“My guess is that most people would be embarrassed to admit they wouldn’t buy a book because the main character wasn’t white. Why we’re...
2 tags
The Cathartic Pleasure of a Good Cry - NYTimes.com →
I still hoped it was a phase they’d outgrow, even after Zoe, who is now 20, passed along her extensive collection of Lurlene McDaniel weepers (including “Mother, Help Me Live,” “Sixteen and Dying” and “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep”) to Ella, now 18, who in turn gave them to Clementine, 11.
But after my girls moved on to the harder stuff, the oeuvre of Jodi Picoult — full of battered wives, date...
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
“I was perpetually grief-stricken when I finished a book, and would slide down...”
– Marya Hornbacher (via robot-heart)
3 tags
ALA lesson #1: you can't do everything (but that's...
I have a confession to make: I didn’t go to a single discussion panel at ALA. I registered full price, so I could have gone to any of them, and there were several that sounded fascinating. But… I didn’t.
Sure, I would have loved to see how the BBYA process works, especially since there has been talk of removing the list altogether (to which I say: bad idea, or the worst idea?),...
2 tags
obligatory introduction post
HELLO INTERNETS
I am often surrounded by books.
I like to read them. I like to write them (or, more often, daydream about writing them, getting published, becoming famous, and getting to hang out with John Green and Scott Westerfeld and Maureen Johnson all the time. Ahem). I’m a clerk at a library, where I check them in and out and put them on shelves and alphabetize them. I go to library...