Brandy Danner is a librarian specializing in young adult services.
Best Mini-Reviews
As part of our summer reading program, teens submit mini-reviews of books they've read for our weekly drawing. Some of my favorite reviews so far:
Title/Author: Magic's Child / Justine Larbalestier
Comments: An okay ending to a bad series
Would you recommend this book? yes!
Title/Author: Out of the Dust / Karen Hesse
Comments: This is the best book in the history of life.
Would you recommend this book?YES!
Title/Author: Spiral Bound / Aaron Reiner
Comments: This is the perfect graphic novel (unless you like swears and violence)
Would you recommend this book? Of course!
Title/Author: Crash / Jerry Spinelli
Comments: This story is very nice. The author has an imagination.
Would you recommend this book? Yes, I would.
Title/Author: The Unbearable Lightness of Being / Milan Kundera
Comments: I'm reading this book, I don't know if I'll like it, but it makes me seem like I am cool like Harold Bloom, who is my hero.
Would you recommend this book? Sure, why not.
Happy birthday to me!
I have 365 more days to do all the things I planned to do before I turned 30. Luckily, I don't think there's anything on that list, because I've never really been much for setting arbitrary time frames. At least, I never made an official to-do-before-30 list, so, okay, I guess I can check list-making off the list. (Did that sentence make any sense? It did in my head.)
The week leading up to my birthday was pretty good. In work news, I found out Tuesday that my library won the Serving 'Tweens and Teens grant I wrote back in February, so the state is going to give me $20,000 for teen programs and services, and limited remodeling of the Teen Zone. Not only will this look great on a resume, but I now have at least 2 years of job security, because nobody in their right mind will want to implement my Grant Year Two project, in which I outlined a plan for a semester-long marketing/consumerism/visual literacy program, which will culminate in having the teens develop their own print and (local) TV ad campaign to promote the library in general and Teen Zone in particular. Hell, I'm not totally convinced I want to take on this project!
Wednesday we found out that we're also being given a $20,000 grant via ALA to renovate the whole children's room, and everything needs to be picked out by the end of August. It's not really my news, because I'm not in charge of the children's room, but WOOHOO $20,000 to bring the room out of the 1980 orange-and-mustard color scheme. Hooray!
Thursday was my director's birthday and I took Friday off, so YAY birthday cake in the staff room.
Friday: we found an apartment. It's in Central Square, which is further in than I wanted to be (we were mostly looking around Porter) and we'll have to get our own laundry machines (there are hook-ups) but the place is huuuuuuuge. We had to sign over our souls, and some big checks, with the tentative lease, but it looks like a go pending income verification. So unless the management company thinks we three--a bookseller, a librarian, and a teacher at a tech college--look like utter deadbeats, we should have a new address come September 1.
Following that good news, we went to see Harry Potter. A good adaptation, but man did they hustle through the first, I dunno, 200 pages or so. Come to think of it, the whole thing felt a little rushed--it could have used another hour or so--but the cuts they made were understandable. There were still little glimpses of the character development I wanted to see, so it's not all bad. The casting was fantastic--Umbridge in particular was so amazingly, pleasantly awful, and whoever designed her office, covering every inch of every wall with decorative plates of meowing cats was a freakin' genius. I have read some people commenting that the movies are starting to lose all intelligibility to people who aren't already well-schooled in the PotterVerse, and that's probably right. Not a problem for me, and the very reason why people should be READING BOOKS instead of just watching the movie.
We finished the night at Buddha's Delight in Chinatown, which was, as usual, really enjoyable. That they can turn soy protein and wheat gluten into such a range of meat-like foods is amazing in itself, but its also amazingly good and dirt-cheap to boot. And you can't go wrong with the pineapple milkshake made with condensed milk. Oh, I swoon thinking about it, but yum. We rolled home, and then my birthday was pretty much over.
Today I mostly stayed on the couch, watched junk TV, and finished the really boring phase (unfolding corners of blocks) of the quilt I'm working on. I really want to finish this quilt, because it'll be much easier to move a blanket than it will 168 squares of fabric.
