TwentySevenLetters / B

More of the same, but different

Books, quickly: Printz-honor book Surrender, by Sonya Hartnett. I have no idea why this is considered YA; like Thursday's Child it's told from the POV of an adolescent, but that doesn't necessarily make it a teen book. There's nothing untoward about it, but i just think it has more adult appeal than teen appeal.

Hellbent, by Anthony McGowan. It had its moments. The basic premise: a kid gets hit by an ice-cream truck and finds himself in hell. He's in a very boring room, surrounded by books on gardening, philosophy, history. The radio only gets classical music or educational programming. But surely somebody must like this, right? So it stands to reason that somewhere in hell there's a room full of video games and punk rock. And all he has to do is convince his guard-demon to help him find it. It should have been a very funny book, and in parts it was--but the constant scatological "humor" wore thin pretty quickly. I get it. Hell is shitty in every sense of the word. I can probably push this to adolescent boys pretty easily, though, if I hype that aspect.

I'm almost done with the Best American Non-Required Reading 2006; I'll finish it in the next day or two. I've enjoyed the previous volumes, as they were entertaining and engrossing and even engaging. But this one blows the others away. Alexander has a friend who said that this volume is a better chronicle of our times than any other volume, and possibly than any other book, period (except the friend phrased it better than I did in repeating it), and he's absolutely right. This is the book to throw in the time capsule to represent the mid-2000s. Hurricane Katrina, an American soldier's blog postings, sympathetic profiles of Middle Eastern soldiers, the Iraqi constitution, a Canadian's ambivalence toward getting his US citizenship... Just read it. You won't be disappointed.

Tomorrow I should get the draft of my grant back for the final round of edits. Library staff is very confidant that I will get this grant. The state will give me--me!--$20,000 for teen services, based on what I said in those 21 pages. I appreciate their support, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up. Regardless, I'm just excited that I'm almost completely done with this and I can get it off my plate.

Several programs last week, since it was school vacation. Two extra Dungeons and Dragons sessions (total: 22 kids), and a board game night with 14. 14 kids to play board games! They broke down into three groups--one group played something one of the D&D kids brought along; our fabulous library page played Wooly Bully with a second group; I got my butt kicked at Munchkin (twice!) by a group of 12-year-old boys. Who did really enjoy Munchkin, though, so even my losses were easier to take. Tonight I was showing Serenity, because one of our other pages had requested I do so. He swore he'd come and drag along a bunch of friends. Total attendance: zero. He's Dead To Me now.

Wednesday night kicks off our town-wide one-book-one-community reading thing. The author is coming to speak, and the whole committee (which includes me) is having dinner with him before his talk. I'm not mentioning the title or the author's name, for fear he might ego-surf and find out that I hated his book. Not just disliked, but honestly thought it was stupid and boring. I have to sit through dinner with a man whose book I hated, while nine other women fawn their adoration all over him. Pray for me.

Things I've finished recently

(A) The first draft of my grant, and the first round of edits. And the first pass of the budget for both years. My director was really happy with how much I managed to do on my own, and while she did re-write large portions in her editing, she told me that it was very easy to do it because I had committed so many ideas to paper already. All she did (she says) is translate it into grant-language. Even if she's being modest about her contribution, it was very nice of her to tell me that I did a good job on it. yay me. I will be very, very happy when this is sent off to the state board of library commissioners, and is off my plate entirely. Of course, it's going to be July before we know if we got the grant or not. Sigh.

(B) Our tax returns, mostly. I did the best I could with it; now it's going to a real CPA for verification. Assuming I did it right (and I feel fairly confident about it), we only owe about $800 total, between both states and the federal. Note to any considering moving or changing jobs across state lines: do it January 1. Seriously. Partial-year resident forms are a gigantic pain in the butt, especially if you have to file a Schedule C, also.

(C) Cleaning up my kitchen. Don't think this rates a mention? You didn't see my kitchen.

(D) A few books, though not many: Leaf Storm, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (well-written but not totally my bag; I liked the shorter pieces in the collection much better than the longer ones); The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula Le Guin (how have I missed this gem of sci-fi all this time? This was really, really good, though we own a crappy edition of it with thin pages and cheap ink that bled around the really tiny font, so it was hard to read for a long period of time--I'd have given up on it if I hadn't been enjoying it so much); and Chicken with Plums by Marjane Satrapi (another excellent graphic novel from the author of Persepolis; a more emotional story than I'd expected). Current read: Surrender, Sonya Hartnett's newest and a Printz honor book. It's like Thursday's Child in that it's excellent, but I think it would be more appreciated in an adult collection--it doesn't seem like it would have a lot of teen appeal, and it moves slowly. I'm loving it, but I'm 28, not 15, and that makes a big difference.

19 books left on the to-be-read shelf. I'll never get through it all if I keep bringing things home from my job at the crack house library.

Vacation!

I'm taking my very first vacation day today, so I get a three-day weekend. Ahhhhhhhh. This is fantastic. Three days that I don't have to think about my grant (the first draft is done! Hooray!). Three days that I've spent (so far) reading, a bit of cooking, and playing video games. I need more three-day weekends.

Cooking: nothing too spectacular. Today I'm going to set up a cider beef stew in the crockpot; we'll eat it for dinner tomorrow (since it will need some time to meld together after cooking). A Tangy Cherry Chicken that was surprisingly good--something I tried on a whim out of a Rachael Ray cookbook. Actually, I think that might be all I've cooked of note. I've been cooking a little more, since Alexander's been working at the bookstore three or four nights a week, but--well, I'm never going to love cooking, but at least I've become fairly competent.

Reading: oh, the book binge! I finished Sister Emily's Lightship (Jane Yolen), which I enjoyed. A lot of it was fairy tale retellings, which I particularly like. Then I read a bunch of graphic novels: Little Vampire Goes to School (very cute and fun), Runaways, v2 (still great; much better than you'd expect from a standard teen superhero story), Agnes Quill (which takes on very different tones depending on who drew the story, but overall it's one I'll be following), and The Tale of One Bad Rat (I've actually never read this before, despite it appearing on nearly every list of notable graphic novels--and now I understand why). Then I whipped through one of the Printz honor books for this year--John Green's An Abundance of Katherines, which brought together teen break-up quasi-comedy with math, and was a really fun, quick read. I can see why it got the nod. Now I'm in something completely different: Leaf Storm, a collection of stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. If I don't emerge within a week, send in a search party. It's a short collection, but reads kind of slowly. It's good, though.

I have 21 books left on my To-Be-Read shelf. I kind of got waylaid with the pile of library books. Oops.

Summer Reading '07: Uh....

We've picked a theme for the Summer Reading Program. This is the good news. It's going to be a science theme, leaving programming open to virtually anything: animals, dinosaurs, plants, food/cooking, inventions, building/construction, egg drops from second-story windows, etc. We have a fair number of program ideas already, and we're all getting excited about running programs for the kids--because who doesn't get excited about blowing stuff up?

What we don't have is a catchy title for the program. We were leaning toward Mad Science, but it turns out there's an educational (edutaining?) franchise that operates under that name, and since they have two locations in this state, they're afraid people will get confused, so they won't let us use it. Which means we're still looking for a name that covers the broad range of all sciences without sounding like school. And without sounding dumb. Mad Labs? Mad About Science? Summer Reading: Down to a Science?

I put this to the few readers I have: What should we call our summer reading program? What catchy phrases are there about science that aren't academic-sounding? (Reminder: you can comment by clicking the time stamp below. We fixed everything else, but that's a problem that Blogger created and we can't get it fixed properly. Sigh.)

Ch-ch-changes

You may notice that the horizontal ad bar on the right there is gone. We have no idea where those ads were being picked up from, as we didn't change any of the ad code and suddenly we were getting banners instead of, uh, whatever vertical ads are called. It's gone and the page displays normally again.

Also, the archives are working again, with virtually no help from our end. It's a Christmas miracle, I guess. I bugged Alexander to fix it, and he clicked a few of the links and asked, "what's wrong with it? It looks fine." So, who knows what happened, but it's working again. Yippee!

Book update: Daniel Handler, The Basic Eight. This book was great. I liked it, it was fun, it was a fairly quick, engrossing read. I'm hesitant to say too much about the plot, as it was very reminiscent of another book--but to mention the title will totally ruin The Basic Eight, so you're best off just reading it for itself, and waiting until you're finished to put it down and rant, "That was just like ______________!"

Currently I'm reading Jane Yolen's Sister Emily's Lightship, a collection of short stories, because I'm trying to clear off my to-be-read shelf and also clear stuff out of my house, so the more stuff I can read and return to friends, the better. (Summer: you'll have it back by the end of the week.)

Happy birthday to me

No, it's not my birthday yet. But on my birthday, the fifth Harry Potter movie comes out. (July 13! I'm taking the day off and going to the movies!) And a week later, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is released, on July 21. I'll be reading on a delay, most likely, as my copy will be coming from either Canada or the UK, depending on the exchange rate, but either way--that's going to be my birthday present to me. Hooray!