Brandy Danner is a librarian specializing in young adult services.
Harry Potter and the Huge Page Count
First: Summer Reading sign-ups continue apace, and I'm up over 100 teens registered already. I think it helps that I put a sign up on the shelves that hold their required reading, telling them that if they have fines on their cards and can't check out their summer books, signing up for the program gets them a Free Fines coupon. I have 108 teens so far. Hooray!
Second: Tonight is the All-Ages Harry Potter Discussion/Predictions/Support Group. I have no clue how many people to expect. All I know is that we've told a bunch of people about it, lots of the tear-off slips are gone from the library flyers, and a reporter with the Lowell Sun was mentioning the group in the article he's publishing today. We're serving up butter beer (chilled, because it's 6:30 and still 92°--and because we bought cold cups instead of hot), chocolate (to ward off Dementors), jelly beans, and Weasley's Ton-Tongue Toffees (actually just regular butter toffee, but eat at your own risk!). Wish me luck!
Third: in preparation for tonight's festivities, I just re-read the series thus far. I started last Monday, and finished at 12:30 last night, meaning I read close to 2800 pages in 8 days, while also doing crazy things like going to work and museums and having friends over for meals and making jam. Current read: Joey Pigza, because my brain REALLY needs a break.
Summer Reading: Down to a Science!
Sign-ups for summer reading started today, the first day of summer vacation. Since 9 AM I've had 25 kids sign up already, which is pretty great for the teen program. (Past records indicate that the best summer ever had about 170 registrants by the end of August.) At least 4 have signed up for the mailing list, and most have entered the Win The Last Harry Potter Book drawing. And we're completely cleaned out of the entering-sixth-grade required reading book (Jerry Spinelli's Crash). It's going to be a busy summer, and it's off to a good start!
Whee Books Hooray!
It probably happened about a week ago now, but according to my GoodReads.com list, I’ve passed the 100 book mark for 2007. Of the 102 currently on the list, about 30% of them are comics, which isn’t a bad ratio, in my mind, since most of them were good.
I’ve noticed, though, that the quality of my reading material has improved this year, or at least it seems like it has. This might just be an effect of public logging of each book—if people are going to see what I read, then I should be reading a higher caliber of authors, because I don’t want my friends to know just how many “guilty pleasure” books I read. I’m still not really into the classics—I can’t muster any enthusiasm for Fitzgerald or Melville—but I’ve been exploring some less-popular, more respected (and respectable) authors.
The new authors I’ve been reading are mostly the women I read in high school/college and not since, but I’m trying them now and really enjoying them. Women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote way more than just The Yellow Wallpaper; Shirley Jackson, previously known only for The Lottery; even Margaret Atwood, whom I recognize as likely being the party guest who brought the cat in Moxy Früvous’s “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors.” I’ve been trepadacious about Joyce Carol Oates, because I tend to think her short stories are just the right length and her novels are about a million pages long, but I’ll probably try to get over that in the not-too-distant future.
I think Hemingway is next on my list of Revisited High School Authors, even though he’s not a woman. I’ve liked nearly everything of his I’ve read, though one American Lit professor ruined The Old Man and the Sea by making us read it aloud, each student reading one paragraph, around the whole room until we’d made it through the whole book. Hemingway for kindergarten, I guess. (She ruined The Education of Little Tree the same way, incidentally. I don’t have fond memories of that class.)
But the next books on my list, after I finish the Margaret Atwood I’m working on, is a re-read of the Harry Potter series, I think. Because in just under 2 weeks, I’m leading an all-ages discussion group on the whole series, and it would be nice if I remembered some of the details.
