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 school, which, for some reason, often has nothing to do with books, and then I get grumpy.

The point is, I like books. They smell nice.

I especially like young adult books, so most of the reviews on this here blog will probably be about those. If you think YA books are just for kids (or Twilight fans) and haven’t read one in a while, I strongly encourage you to pick up Looking for Alaska or Graceling or Speak or The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (or A Northern Light, or Luna, or Dairy Queen, or…), and prepare to be amazed.

YA books are like adult books: they can be crap, and they can be awesome. They can be simple or nuanced, hilarious or poignant, long or short, romantic or sarcastic or suspenseful or poetic or fluffy. I generally like them better than adult books, which might have something to do with the missing two years of high school on my transcript, but I think it’s really just that I like reading about teenagers. They have a lot of possibility.

Other things I like, that might come up here: intellectual freedom. The internets. Fair use. Repealing ridiculous copyright laws designed for the benefit of corporations rather than creators. Fighting censorship. Better funding for libraries. Feminism. Equality.

If you’re interested in my thoughts on things other than these, check out my other tumblr (I post a lot of pictures of cats), or even my livejournal, though it’s updated less frequently these days.

Anyway, welcome! I went to ALA this past weekend, where I got to meet several of my favorite authors and get free or discounted copies of awesome books. The tale is long and deserves several posts, so look for those over the next couple of days. And I’ve set up the comments to accept Disqus, Facebook, Twitter or OpenID accounts, so you have no excuse not to comment.

(Okay, you don’t HAVE to comment. But when you get right down to it, isn’t this internet thing marvelous because of the sense of community it gives us?* Don’t you WANT to comment?)

*And, you know, the pictures of cats.