Librarians to the Rescue

This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All - Marilyn Johnson (HarperCollins, 2010)

For the past two months, I have been working on my e-Portfolio, the culminating project for my MLIS. As I have pondered core competencies and looked for evidence that I have met them, I have been guided by Johnson's humorous and impassioned look at the library profession. She's popped up in 3 or 4 of my essays, and thus I don't have much desire to pull a lot of quotes for you here.

But I will recommend this book to library-lovers, as well as those who are interested in how we are navigating the Information Age. Also those who like charming looks at the hidden sides of "boring" professions.

Johnson covers a lot of territory - I remember hearing first that she gets into librarianship in Second Life and other adventures in cyberspace. And yes, she does. But that's only one part of it. She talks about Radical Reference and librarians out of the streets, hawking their trade for social justice. She talks about cataloging, and the cultural importance of good subject headings, the economic value of libraries, the tension between scholars and the general public at renowned institutions like NYPL, and the value of reading as a reliable cure for racing thoughts. (It was a relief to be reminded I'm not the only one who does this.)

Did she get everything perfect? Doubtful. Will she save librarianship? That's too loaded a question to even tackle. But it's a fun and often witty reminder that my chosen profession is home to as much variety and opportunity as I could ever hope for. (Provided I ever actually find a job.)

The People's History of the Fastest Game on Ice

Hockey: A People's History - Michael McKinley (McClelland & Stewart, 2006)

So, the blog title is kinda lazy, but I'm going with it.

This monster tome is the coffee table companion to what I believe was a CBC miniseries about 5 years back. It's about 9x12 and weighs in at.... a bunch of pounds (kilos?), and is chock full of pictures and sidebars. Including some amazing ones from early in Canadian hockey history and of a shockingly sweet 13 y.o. Wayne Gretzky.

The book is a little like if a Ken Burns documentary got shoved into a book. It makes strange segues, and fades to sepia a bit. Which is probably all the case b/c it was a documentary shoved into a book. But such fantastic stories. Girls using their skirts to help hide the puck as they deked around a defender, dudes whose names are on trophies being actual people. Getting drunk and trading a player for $1million for example. Or forcing everyone on your team to enlist during WWII.

It took me weeks to get through this thing - lots of lapses in concentration and intervening life and whatnot. But experiencing it over time, in bits and pieces, was sort of the way to go. How better to go through >100 years of one's favorite sport, especially as interwoven into the history of a country?

I'd like to mention the severe lack of Paul Kariya, but I guess that's to be expected. *I* know that he was a crucial part of the 2002 Olympic team, and that'll have to be good enough. :)

Isn't it romantic?

Call Me Irresistible - Susan Elizabeth Phillips (HarperCollins, 2011)

It was my grandmother that introduced me to Phillips. I was visiting and helping box up books to donate to the library (yay Grandma!) when I came across Match Me If You Can. Which I snapped up and read over the next 20 or so hours. I was smitten.

Anyway, one thing I like quite about about Phillips (although I guess this is common among romance novelists?) is the way the books inhabit the same world and include the same characters. For example, in this latest, the two leads are children of couples from her early books, and another former youngster makes a major appearance, and is set to star in an upcoming novel.

Meg shows up in small-town Texas just in time to break up her best friend's wedding to Mr. Perfect. Because she knows he's just not perfect for her friend. Then is stranded there. And she just keeps running into him, and from there romance ensues. The description of Ted's charmed life is hilarious. And while we eventually get his POV, it doesn't come until very late in the novel, so he remains as much a cipher to us as to Meg.

It's a formula, sure, but it works, and I really do find Phillips' books more charming than probably any other romance novelist out there.

Spun sugar

Bet Me - Jennifer Crusie (St. Martin's Press, 2004)

Over the summer, I did some research on genre fiction and along the way came across a reader's advisory guide to romance fiction that pointed me toward Crusie. I couldn't tell you what it said, but I noted the name with a "maybe I'll check this out sometime" sort of attitude.

So Bet Me takes on your typical mis-matched, romantic comedy couple. She's serious and a bit overweight, he's hot shit with a bad reputation. And thanks to a pile of misunderstandings all set off by a ridiculous bet by her ex, they end up on a date. Which is where fate takes over.

This book was insanely charming. I found everybody adorable. Friends, sidekicks, evil exes and family... it was like living in a little fairy world. With great banter. Seriously, the banter - and not just between Min & Cal - was really well-done. When I read romance, I tend to read it with a cynical eye. (Because I am - or ought to be - too cool for it, too intellectual for it.) But maybe because I'm trying to be more sincere in my enthusiasms in general, or maybe just because Crusie got past my defenses, I was sorta smitten. It was a really sweet reading experience.

The freshman years of life

Commencement - J. Courtney Sullivan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)

I am a sucker for books about recent graduates of elite colleges and universities, and how they adjust - in their different ways - to life outside of that bubble. Often enough this means constructing different bubbles, but that is of plenty of interest to me as well.

In this version, four women become best friends at Smith College, Sullivan's alma mater. And the narrative is interspersed with recollections of their time as students. And then they go in separate directions, and their friendships are stretched and challenged. For better and for worse.

Early on, the novel won me over with one of my favorite ever descriptions of Irish dance: "which Celia now credited with her perfect posture and complete inability to dance like a normal person." Love it :)

There was also a lovely description of the ways in which powerful relationships develop in college: "Back then, they had expanses of time in which to memorize one another's routines and favorite songs and worst heartaches and greatest days. It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it."

And maybe it's for that that I keep reading these novels...

The Little Things Add Up

The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun - Gretchen Rubin (Harper, 2009)

Sometimes it almost feels like certain books were written just so that I could read them. (No, I swear I don't really think the universe revolves around me.) This was one of those books. My friend Siel first recommended the book around this time last year. I couldn't tell you for sure why I didn't get it then, but when a patron had me add her name to the request list, I took it as a sign that the time had come. I mean, I had already looked at Rubin's blog, and read her contributions to Slate.

There were so many little things that Rubin mentioned that made me (literally, sometimes) exclaim, "Hey, that's just like me!" For one, the Pavlovian response that taking off contacts and putting on glasses means sleepytime. Another, the need to collect what she refers to as "gold stars." I could go on in this vein for a while, and certainly I ought to talk more about the philosophical underpinning of the book, but I sorta want to skip to the good parts... by which I mean how it relates to me. (Egoism, party of one.)

Rubin's premise is that while she's not unhappy, there is room to be happier, and she owes it to herself to see if she can be. Without making crazily life-altering changes. So for a year, she pursues her Happiness Project, complete with themes for each month, specific resolutions, and a chart to mark her progress. She acknowledges that each person's project will be unique, and indeed while I read it felt very clear which parts were important to me, and what other things are important to me that she didn't need to address in these pages. And so... my takeaways:

• January: walk outside more; get more sunshine; get enough sleep - it really matters; there are so many types of clutter, and chances are you'll be happier without them; the wisdom of "engineer[ing] an easy success"
• February: embrace physical contact (it's been an interesting road for me discovering when I am and am not a touchy-feely person); seek fewer gold stars; be considerate of the ones you love
• March: have an expansive self-definition; enjoy the moment instead of always anticipating the future
• April: remember the validity of others' feelings; keepsake happy memories; honor traditions; make time for projects
• May: fun is energizing; relationships thrive on common interests
• June: connect! - keep in touch; seek out new friends (hmm, writing this reminds me of that song about friends from Girl Scouts...)
• July: don't be afraid to spend - know yourself; make and stick to decisions
• August: appreciate the moment; be grateful; what we admire in others is a quality that is nascent in ourselves waiting to be fully realized (this from a commenter on Rubin's blog). [This is also the chapter where she discusses the fear of "tempting fate" with our happiness, an idea that I have struggled with since at least my freshman year of high school.]
• September: accept what you love; push to grow within an area of passion
• October: examine your "True Rules" - do they make you more or less happy? Hold onto my own mantra: Be Here Now.
• November: be willing to laugh, even at oneself (but I personally should probably beware too much self-deprecation); value others in conversation; "Enthusiasm is a form of social courage"
• December: accountability; acknowledge what makes you happy, not what you wish made you happy

So you see, there's plenty there. I feel like I will be meditating on different aspects of this book for weeks and months (if not longer) to come. How it will inform the ongoing project that is my life is not quite certain, but I already know I am grateful for it.

Every Unhappy Family

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

The opening lines of Anna Karenina came into my mind unbidden after I read the final page of Freedom. It occurred to me that there is something tragically beautiful in the tale of an unhappy marriage. Tragic, obviously. But there's real beauty there too. In the misunderstandings and the fears left unspoken, or spoken backwards. Why is there so much poetry in it?

Anyway. I liked this novel quite a bit more than I expected. I liked The Corrections, and this promised to be pretty similar (and was!), so I'm not sure why I was surprised. But I was all the same. Maybe I just didn't think I was in the mood to like something that received so much hype.

But Franzen writes the type of novel that tends to lower all my defenses. It is big and sprawling and delves deeply into the inner stories of most - if not all - of its characters. (Why do we not really get to know Jessica Berglund though?) Benefitting from something approaching omniscience, we get to see the bigger picture that the characters can't. And to wonder if it will become clear to them. And if such a thing really matters.

I suppose it is to be expected that I would think of Tolstoy, as Patty's experience of Natasha Rostova guides her thinking about fidelity to her husband. (Franzen - or Patty at least - provides a very different reading from my own about the triangle(s) of Natasha-Pierre-Andrei-that other jackass.)

I made a couple other notes, mainly about amusing cultural references like Conor Oberst, but nothing of great note. I am sorry to have forgotten a few of the other themes I had wanted to touch upon. The trouble with big books, I guess.

2010 WrapUp & Best Of...

I read a lot at the beginning of this year. And then life got really hectic and I stopped reading. As much as I ever "stop" reading. Anyway, so my total count for the year is somewhere in the neighborhood of 42 books. (This does not include romance novels, which I should finally be brave and just admit that I read about 6 times/year.... Dude, they have hockey ones.... and it also counts all those Vampire Diaries titles as a single one.)

Going back and making a best of list was difficult, especially since there was a lot of light reading that I really enjoyed. And then there was a Pulitzer Prize-winner that didn't crack the list either. But whatever.... it is what it is, to bring back a phrase that was finally starting to fade out of my vocabulary.

But here it is, starting with some not-quite-official selections...

*Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel - technically I finished this last Dec. 31, but it never had a chance to count on my books of 2009, so here it is. Lovely.

*War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) - well, obviously. This one also gets an asterisk because I had read the novel before. But not this translation!

And the rest, in reverse chronological order from when I read them:

The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins

I hadn't realized that YA dystopias could be so moving

North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell

Won't knock Austen off her throne, but such a joy to discover.

One Day - David Nicholls

I have heard critiques that it is a little too manipulative, but screw that. I was enthralled.

Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller

This memoir was stunning. I kept finding myself dumbstruck.

The Possessed (etc.) - Elif Batuman

The title of my blog post was Russian! Books! Stanford! - 'Nuff said.

Bel Canto - Ann Patchett

So much more beautiful and moving than I had expected.

The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk

Challenging, but worth the effort.

A Fortunate Age - Joanna Smith Rakoff

I will always be a sucker for these novels about college graduates whose lives look just enough like mine.

Dreams From My Father - Barack Obama

Excellent food for thought, and a reminder of the complicated and thoughtful man who became president.

2666 - Roberto Bolaño

Soooooo good. So interesting. So confusing. Will eventually require additional reads.

2011 resolutions upcoming.... Stay tuned.

Face of a Revolution

Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press, 2010)

After waiting 3 months between The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, I waited about 10 hours before diving into Mockingjay. I mean, what is the point in being finished with the semester if you can't do things like that?

So.

A lot of this trilogy is about the indignity of being having no control over your life, of being a pawn manipulated for the entertainment of others. Of finding ways to live with integrity in this system, of being authentically yourself. (This does seem a little like being a teenager, doesn't it?) Katniss is particularly compelling because of what I have to call - although the term is so inexact - her naivete; she is capable of genuine independent and surprising action, but within a system of other actors that continue and continue to try to use her to meet their own ends. This does not change in the third installment. In fact, if anything it gets more brutal.

This book was the saddest of the three for me. I found it difficult even as I couldn't stop reading - and it was both good and bad that while I was reading the suspenseful trip through the Capitol, J was arranging (arranging?) a three-part harmony to "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah" - the juxtaposition was creepily appropriate. But it finally ends. And while I saw a few different ways in which Collins could satisfactorily conclude, I felt like this perhaps made the most sense. It was always what I wanted, more or less.

This was some of the most fun I had reading this year. I'll be recommending it for sure.

Back to Panem

Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press, 2009)

For some reason that I won't try to understand, my library has far fewer copies of Catching Fire than of either The Hunger Games or Mockingjay. So - and since I was supposed to be concentrating on school anyway - I waited to request a copy, figuring that if one was free it was meant to be. Otherwise I was supposed to wait until the end of the semester.

But then I got impatient, and got on the list so that I would get the book right around the end of the semester. So as soon as I turned everything in last week, I got down to the important business of returning to Panem and finding out what was up with Katniss. (er, spoiler: she survives the Games in the first book.)

Anyway, there is more love-triangle drama. Of a decidedly tame - and thus adorable - type. Plenty of unexpected twists. And life in general there just sort of sucks. But Katniss remains this interesting, thoughtful, extraordinary young woman. And the other characters gain additional dimension this time around too.

The plot moves quickly, and I was surprised when I came to the end. Fortunately though, I had already snagged my copy of Mockingjay, so instead of waiting and reading something else, I will be finishing the trilogy this week instead...

BACK! (Also, more cheesiness)

The Awakening, The Struggle, The Fury, Dark Reunion (Vampire Diaries 1-4) - L.J. Smith (Harper Teen, 2007 - originally published 1991-2)

Nightfall andShadow Souls (Vampire Diaries - The Return 1&2) - L.J. Smith (Harper Teen, 2009 & 2010)

While I was busy being on hiatus and "not reading", I also decided that it was very important that I read a vampire book for Halloween. And then I figured I might as well read the whole series. Which is loooooong. At least the new ones. Smith, like Meyer & Harris, has let her vampire world get totally out of control. Whatever I read in Shadow Souls about demons and weird underground dimensions I still don't understand. And like Meyer, she just starts writing longer and longer books.

But they are entertaining. If you can look past all the ridiculousness and the sloppy editing, they are kind of fun. It was certainly all I was capable of taking on during the month of November.

(I like the show better though. Mainly for Damon.)

Going home, moving on

Get Lucky - Katherine Center (Ballantine Books, 2010)

You may remember that it was just a couple weeks ago that I announced I was taking a break from reading. And I really have had barely any time to read recreationally (Twitter aside).

But on the other hand, a week into my hiatus, I found myself desperately craving narrative. And even though I have a nice DVR backlog as well, I needed a book. And a book with a story. But nothing too taxing. A beach read, probably. And so that's how an advance copy of Get Lucky fell into my hands.

It's cute. The premise is that this woman returns home to Houston in order to be a surrogate mom for her sister and brother-in-law. (I immediately thought of Phoebe Buffay.) And also she is trying to figure out what to do with her life. And also the high school ex who she treated terribly back in the day is back in town... and superhot. (Also he dated Mary Louise Parker? Because of course he did.) Oh, and there's a library subplot, which is adorable. And another about how the sisters have come to terms (or not) with their mother's death when they were teens. That could have spun off into a different literary novel had Center gone in that route.

Sarah isn't particularly likable though. I mean, she's fine. But I never felt like I really got to know her. Which was a little too bad.

I love the book cover though... Flip flops! With a little shamrock! Adorable.

I want this

Ad in a recent New Yorker:


This is a Russian magazine called Snob. Obviously I must find myself a copy.

Free books!!!

I am still not reading (sigh) but I did get my hands on a free copy of Nicole Krauss's Great House. Yay. Yay yay yay!

Hiatus...

Sigh. School is hard. And I have real hours at work. And some other things going on.

All of these are good things, but they are meaning that for now I am limited my reading to the New Yorker and bits and pieces online. I'm not sure how long this will last, but for now, this blog is likely to be quiet for the next few weeks.