Library Ninja
Brandy Danner is a librarian specializing in young adult services.
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Where are you going, where have you been?
Why the Joyce Carol Oates reference: don’t know.
(But bonus points to astute blog readers who caught the reference and/or know the story.)
It’s been a busy couple of weeks.
Since I last blogged, I’ve had four programs (and one more prior to the last entries that I didn’t mention), with varying degrees of success.
The quick run-down:
On October 11, we brought in Mentalist Rory Raven.
His act was hard to promote, since I didn’t really know what he did, but now—I do!
He does mind-reading tricks, spoon-bending (very popular with the teen set), and other assorted parlor tricks of seeming-clairvoyance.
The show was pretty cool.
Rory (a very nice guy, by the way) expressed some doubt about the teens’ interest in the show, but the teens who came (12, of 15 who signed up) ate it up.
They weren’t texting their friends (or each other), or slumped in their chairs, or anything, and several approached him after the show for help with spoon-bending, so I’d say it was a success.
However, “success” isn’t enough of a word to express the program we had the following Monday, the 16
th.
Bill Caskey came in to do his college admissions talk.
I may have mentioned Caskey before, as he came to
Providence several times to do his thing there, and it was always the best-attended teen program we had, bringing in 20-30 people each time.
Still, that didn’t prepare me for the SIXTY-FIVE who came here, and asked questions, took notes, and called the next day to inquire about extra handouts.
I think I’ll be coasting on the success of this for a while.
The duct-tape craft went pretty well—not to the same extent, but well enough.
I’d chosen duct tape because I thought that—maybe—I’d get some boys to come and make wallets or something.
Instead, I had six girls, and they all made flowers.
I can’t help but find this adorable.
Also, one of the six girls was a library volunteer, who decided to NOT volunteer that day so she could play with tape instead.
The October book discussion went marginally better than some of the others. This time I had three girls come to talk about Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Unfortunately, only one read the whole book. One read most of it but didn’t get around to reading the ending, and the last girl read the first couple of chapters and the last couple, and couldn’t figure out why the book would be interesting or creepy. (“She’s just a girl with no friends and nothing to do, and she’s walking around the yard. It’s how the book starts and how it ends. What’s the point?”) We spent about 10 minutes of me trying desperately to keep a discussion moving, and then I gave up. We chatted some about Harry Potter. Then the movie adaptations. Then (god help me) if Rupert Grint is cuter than Daniel Radcliff. Then who’s going to the sixth-grade dance. Then I sent them home. Because there wasn’t any point anymore.
Interestingly, all three girls, when asked, said I should continue doing book discussions. They made no promises that they’d actually read the books or anything. But with the holidays coming and all the programs and shift-switching going on, I’m blowing off the discussions until at least January, and I’ll be trying to think of a better way to run them—something that might be worthwhile. But the kids seem to want the discussions, for some reasons… on leaving, one mother (the one whose daughter has come faithfully, with little to say, the one who picked the horrible book because she thought I wanted to read it) asked if they’d chosen a book for the next discussion. I explained that I was putting it off to January. “Did they pick a book for that, then?” Uh, no. Because that’s TWO MONTHS AWAY.
The costume party Thursday night was kind of a bust—seven girls (8th and 9th graders), all of whom seemed to have a good time, and four more (3 boys and a girl) who wandered in to load up on food and then disappeared for 45 minutes before coming back for more food. The 7 who had a good time, though—great. But for the amount of time I spent preparing for this party—not so great. Ah, well.
And now? I got interrupted while writing this. The reference librarian downstairs came up to ask if we had any books on pregnancy, what a baby looks like at different stages. Because there’s a 16-year-old girl downstairs who wants to know, and started her question with “I’m fifteen weeks. Is this what I should look like?” She’s overwhelmed by books like What To Expect so we needed something without too much text. It took some searching, but I found a book that had photographs of a fetus for every month along, with an approximate size and what’s developed so far. I ran it downstairs, and the reference librarian asked if I wanted to give it to the girl and introduce myself, which I did. I showed her the two books I found (“this one has more photos; this other one has photos and line drawings, and is worded for really little kids, so it’s not all that informative”). She flipped through the first one in awe. “This is what my baby looks like right now… thank you, this is exactly what kind of book I was hoping for. Thank you.”
And THAT is why I do this.
Media binge: Books
Recent reads! Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in Landscape. I don’t know that it’s my favorite of his books, but it’s pretty high up the list. At 13 years old, Pella Marsh loses her mother to a brain tumor and her father moves the rest of the family to the planet of the Archbuilders—a mostly-uninhabited planet with one small developing town. The planet’s inhabitants also include the Archbuilders, strange, artistic aliens enamored with the English language, and household deer, tiny, mostly-invisible animals with which Pella associates more strongly than she expected. It’s described as a sci-fi western, which seems pretty accurate to me.
Also by Jonathan Lethem: Wall of the Sky, Wall of the Eye. A mediocre collection of short stories. The first one was almost good, until it took a turn for the predictable. The rest were mostly forgettable. Lethem is capable of writing good short fiction (see Men and Cartoons), but he sure didn’t put any of them in this book.
The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, by Jane Poynter. Lots of this book was very interesting: establishing the biosphere, stocking it, living inside it, and the psychological effects of living in 3 acres with 7 people for 2 years. (Think The Real World on crack, I guess.) The book was interesting but could have used a better editor to streamline it a little, and a copyeditor to deal with the multitudes of superfluous commas.
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I know a lot of people think this title is superlative in the extreme, and while I’m not sure I’d call it “heartbreaking” or “staggering,” I flew through this book. I really do like Eggers’ style (from his introductions to the Best American Non-Required Reading series to You Shall Know Our Velocity), and I like memoirs of interesting people, so I don’t see what’s not to like about this book.
Choke, Chuck Palahniuk. This wasn’t quite what I expected—it focuses more on the main character’s sex addiction (and his trawling of recovery groups for dates) than about his habit of choking in restaurants so that people will save him, feel responsible for him, and send him money. Even though it wasn’t the story I’d expected, it was still a pretty good read. I’ve only read one other of Palahniuk’s books (Lullaby, which I preferred), but he is an author I’ll keep reading.
Lost and Found, Carolyn Parkhurst. It’s a reality game show where pairs of contestants travel around the world to decipher clues and find objects they’ll have to carry with them the rest of the game. The chapters are told from different characters’ perspectives: the recovering-homosexual couple who wants to spread the word of Christ, who helped them over their deviancy; the has-been television stars who haven’t worked since adolescence; the mother trying to reconnect with her daughter, after the daughter gave birth to a baby without her mother knowing she was pregnant. It’s not a book that will change the landscape of American literature, but it was a fun book, and well-written.
The Last Days, Scott Westerfeld. Frequent readers of this blog know how much I love Westerfeld, but I have to say that he let me down this time. It’s a sequel to Peeps, his vampire story. This time it’s a group of New Sound musicians who are brought together to save the world, or something. Aside from not being very interesting, the worst part is that each chapter is narrated by a different band member. Which would be fine, if Westerfeld had managed to give each member a different voice. Sure, each chapter starts with a name at the top, but if your mind wanders midway through the chapter, you find yourself skimming for clues—instruments, other characters; names, whatever—to figure out whose story you’re reading. I’m sorry, Mr. Westerfeld. I love your other books, but this one? was a dud.
Media binge: Movies and Music
Movies! Thank You For Smoking. We watched this last night. Attention, Hollywood: make more movies like this one. I don’t mean recycle the plot—I just mean use a script that’s sharp and funny, and get some talented people to pull it off. And really, how can you go wrong when a movie involves William H. Macy delivering the line, “The great state of Vermont will not apologize for its cheese!”?
Chumscrubber. Not anything I’d heard of before, but still really good. Some funny lines, but it’s mostly about the deeply disturbing plot. Donnie Darko minus the bunny. A teenage boy, Dean, finds his friend’s body hanging from a rafter. Unfortunately, this friend was the source for all the “happy pills” dealt at school, and the dealers want Dean to somehow procure his dead friend’s stash. To encourage compliance, they kidnap Dean’s little brother. Except they get the wrong kid.
Napoleon Dynamite. I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. There were some elements that were very funny, but on the whole, it left me cold. I didn’t care about any of the characters, and while Napoleon’s dance at the student council debate was amusingly cringe-worthy, it wasn’t enough to balance the apathy of the rest of the movie. I think I’m in the minority on this one, though, and I’m okay with that.
Benny and Joon. I watched this movie again recently. I didn’t really expect anything—I was looking for something of the sappy, heartwarming variety. But I’d forgotten just how good this movie is. Aidan Quinn still gets around, and Mary Stuart Masterson appears from time to time, but this isn’t exactly a movie that relies solely on its Names to make it a good movie. Quinn and Masterson both gave excellent performances, but really—the movie belongs to Johnny Depp. He’s sweet and charming, to say nothing of his impressions of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. And also: wow, what a difference 13 years makes. Johnny Depp looked so young!
Music. Last weekend we detoured through a Newbury Comics, less with the intention of spending money and more with the not feeling like going home just then. But while we were there browsing around, we found that the Decemberists have a new CD out, The Crane Wife. Doubly exciting that it just came out last week and was therefore on sale for cheap, so we picked it up. It’s not as catchy an album as, say, Picaresque, and I’ve only listened to it through once so far, but already I can tell it’s a really strong CD. The sound is a little more hi-fi than their previous albums, but it doesn’t feel forced, or unnatural to them—it just sounds like normal growth of the band. And, any band that uses the word “dirigible” is okay by me. (And I have tickets to see them November 4! I’m very excited, even though our tickets are kinda bad.)
We also picked up a couple of Death Cab For Cutie CDs—Plans and We Have All the Facts And We’re Voting Yes. This is a band that’s been recommended to us, and now I’ve been hearing them on the radio recently and enjoying it, so we figured we’d try a couple (also out of the Newbury Comics sale bins). I’ve listened to Plans and I’m impressed. This is a band that will be going on my Christmas list.
I’m so cool
Wednesday afternoon I went to a consortium-sponsored seminar about MySpace and its use in/for libraries. My director is half-way to being on board with it, but we’re still discussing certain elements (like, do we really want to link it from the library website, and if we do that, do we want/need a disclaimer page between them, etc.). The meeting was useful and interesting, seeing as, while I’m a big fan of technology, I just don’t get social networking sites.
Now that I’ve gone to this meeting, and heard from 3 teenagers and 4 librarians about how they use MySpace personally, professionally, and promotionally, I have to say: I still don’t get it. From a promotional standpoint, it makes sense, but the personal pages? One out of the seven uses the blog, and she admitted that she’d only started the page a couple of days before the meeting. The rest use it to build up lists of Friends, most of whom are people they’ve never met and don’t want to (at least in the teens’ cases). So it doesn’t make sense to me.
But, I can see that it’s very popular, and the teen section of the library would benefit from having one, I think. My director is on vacation for a couple of days, so I can’t really get clearance right now to start a library page. So I made one for me, so I can see how it works and what sorts of things it can do. Right now, I see that it can make ugly pages with bad, cluttered layouts, and there’s not much to be done about that. I also see that it can’t find me by name, but I don’t know if that’s because I’m new or because their search is screwy. But I’m sure I’ll learn, and maybe I’ll even discover the appeal. In the meantime: Friend Me!
Book undiscussions
Last week was Banned Books Week, and I fear the area teens took it a little too literally. I scheduled two book discussions—one for high schoolers and one for middle schoolers. The high school book—Geography Club—was pretty good, though I didn’t expect anyone to come. (In fact, they didn’t.) The middle school book—Fly By Night—was awful. It was close to 500 pages. It was boring, it was slow, it was tedious. It was a nightmare to get through this thing. I read the first ten or twelve pages and wandered away for a week and a half, and managed not to think about it at all in that time.
For me, that’s pretty impressive. I have huge problems abandoning any book, because even when it’s bad I’m still curious what’s going to happen to the characters. I still wonder how the author plans to bring it all together. I can probably count on one hand the number of books I’ve abandoned mid-way through in the past decade. (I’m getting better, though; three of those are in the last two years!—and one was a collection of short stories, so I don’t really feel like I abandoned that one mid-way, exactly.) That I managed to wander off from this book for ten days without a twang of curiosity (or regret!) says something about the book. It says something unflattering about the book.
Alas, a couple of copies of the book had been checked out, though. One of them had gone to the girl who came to the previous book discussion. I’d had a selection of books out on display and asked her to pick whichever one sounded most interesting for the next discussion. She’d asked if I’d read Fly By Night, and I said no, but it got some good reviews. So it might be terrible, but I honestly didn’t know for sure. She picked it. And one of her friends checked out a copy later. So with two potential attendees, I had to soldier on and other 470 pages.
It took days. Literally, three days, sitting at my desk, reading this book. (And getting distracted by all the other pretty! shiny! tasks! with which I could distract myself from this boring, boring book.) But I finally finished it, two hours before the discussion was supposed to start.
3:30 rolls around. Girl and Mom show up, sort of, and Mom tells me that if I’m getting up for the discussion, I can just stay sitting, because Girl only got through eleven pages before putting it down. “She called her friend, to see if she was planning to go, and her friend said she only got through nine pages,” Mom reported. I confessed that, having read the whole thing, it didn’t get any better. Mom laughed a little, then said, “[Girl] picked it because she thought you wanted to read it. I told her, if she’s not willing to speak up for herself sometimes and voice her own opinion, these sorts of things will keep happening!” I explained that I’d said I didn’t know if it was any good; I hadn’t read it and I didn’t mean to give her the impression that I was lobbying for it. And I apologized to the girl, too: “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know it was horrible!”—which made her laugh, at least.
She picked it because she thought it was what I wanted to read. This is so tragically adorable I hardly know how to react.
