The Book Thief

Last Saturday my sister and I and a couple of her book club friends met up at the Provo City Library to see Markus Zusak speak. Is there anyone out there who hasn't read The Book Thief yet? Because if so, there is probably a jagged, Book Thief-sized hole in your soul. Please fill it. No pressure.



We were so excited to hear him, and he did a great job. He was funny, self-deprecating, and a good storyteller. Plus he seemed really excited and touched to see such a big, appreciative group (500 people) who wanted to hear what he had to say. I took some notes, of course, because I am a big nerd.

And did I mention that he is young? And Australian? And kind of cute? Not that I'm saying that here, just, you know. Some might.


Here are his words on writing:

Bad things happen in life, but it's okay because you get your best stories out of it.

1. Mind your own life. Writing what you know is important. He said that for The Book Thief, the seeds of the story were planted by hearing his parents' stories of their own World War II experiences in Austria. Those stories were important to him and he wanted to write and expand them.

2. Do the simple things well. You don't have to be a genius to be a good writer. The small details are what make your story believable, so get them right.

3. It's the unusual or the unexpected that gets the biggest reaction. He said, "I don't have a great imagination, I just have a lot of problems." It's while trying to solve these problems in your writing that you hit on the good, unusual, unexpected things. That's how he came up with the idea of Death as the narrator.

4. Rewriting makes good writing. He did about 150-200 edits on the beginning chapters of The Book Thief. (Note: Just hearing that made my eye twitch.)

Then he opened it up for questions.

Q: In The Book Thief, why were there so many spoilers, like all the premonitions about which characters were going to die?

A: There were lots of reasons.
1. Because Death is a different sort of narrator, he wanted Death to tell the story a little bit to the left or right of the way we would tell it.
2. He wanted to see if he could get people to keep reading once he's already blown the mystery.
3. He wanted to prepare the reader (and himself) for the bad stuff. It didn't work. We were all a mess at the end.
4. One sentence (the premonition about ---------'s death) just came to him as a voice in his head, so he just went with it. You listen to that voice or instinct.

He thought The Book Thief would definitely be his least successful book, so he wrote it exactly the way he wanted to do it.

Q: How do you deal with writer's block while trying to create something that's engaging?

A: He says that he feels a lot of people get stuck when life happens and writing (understandably) moves down on the priority list. But writing has to be #1 or #2 on your priority list. You have to spend time with it. You have to be patient. You will fail over and over again and have problems, but getting around those problems is what gives you your content. If you knew your book would never get published, would you still want to work on it?

Q: As aspiring writers, we are told we will have to be able to "kill our babies." How do you know when it's time and you need to just chuck something that isn't working?

A: He thinks he may not be the best person to ask about this. For him, if a story isn't working, he looks to see if he can take what is good and move it into something new or different. The answer might just be to cobble your best ideas together, or to move it a little to the left or the right. Don't kill anything off completely if there's something good there.

When he finished speaking, he went into the other room to get ready for the book signing. We'd all been assigned to groups of 25 and we were to be called up in order. They gave very strict instructions about not bringing more than 2 books to be signed & not holding up the line by asking him to pose for pictures. They had this down to a science.

What they did not count on, however, was Mr. Zusak. He is not a rush-through kind of guy, and was taking time to speak with people as they came through and personalize each inscription. While I'm sure this was mind-blowing for the people in the first group, after an hour or so we realized that this meant we were in for a long, long, loooong wait. So we settled in and waited.

Disaster struck when GH called me.

GH: Where are you?
Me: Waiting to get my book signed, it's taking a lot longer.
GH: The baby has been crying for the last hour.
Me: He WHAT???????

Here's the thing, and I will try to say this in code lest my beyond-superstitious spouse accuse me of tempting fate. The Tiny Dark Lord doesn't actually ***. I mean, yeah, if he's hungry or he's had a bad dream or there are sadistic nurses poking him with needles he'll let us know of his displeasure, but once we get the immediate need met he's okay. Heavens be praised, he wasn't c***cky, he hasn't been si*k yet, and he most definitely has n*v** just cr**d for no apparent reason.

Me: But---but--but--did you feed him?
GH: YES. I fed him.
Me: Is he tired?
GH: I'm sure, but he won't go to sleep.
Me: And you've changed his diaper.
GH: What do YOU think??

That's all I had. The only other option was that he was dying. I could hear his angry, angry cries through the phone.

Me: Well, I can't just leave yet. I'm the driver and we're all waiting to get our books signed. But I'm hoping it should be much longer and I'll come home just as soon as I can. Try taking him outside, or taking him for a drive!

GH hung up, hating me mightily.

So then we waited. And waited, and waited, and waited some more. And the longer we waited the more convinced I was that something dreadful was happening.

Me: Oh my gosh, what if GH shakes him? We never watched that video the hospital gave us about not shaking your baby! He could be shaking him!!

Jenny and the other seasoned moms tried gently to tell me that some babies just get overtired and cry. It's just what happens. There's really nothing to be done for it. And then they got to sit and listen to me fret until they probably wanted to knock me out with their books. I called GH--the baby was still crying. I hung up, feeling more and more anxious. We waited some more. I texted GH to see if he'd taken him on that car ride and if it had worked. No answer. They finally called our group number and we sprinted to the line, only to learn that there were still 80 people in front of us and it would likely take another hour before we got our books signed. It was after 9pm at that point, and it was here that I began my ever-so-attractive meltdown.

Jenny handed me her iPod. "Here, play Angry Birds." Because that's what you do with a child who is embarrassing you in public and saying things about wanting to hit Markus Suzak in the head with a chair.

Me: What if there's a hair wrapped around his toe? I just read about that. A baby had a hair wrapped around her toe and it turned black and they almost had to cut it off and if they'd waited one more hour she would have lost her toe!

Jenny: He doesn't have a hair wrapped around his toe. Your hair is 3 inches long, it can't wrap that many times.

Me: But what if he DOES??? What if his toe is already black? What if it has already fallen off and is just bobbing around in the foot of his sleeper???????

Jenny: Yeah, I'm done with this.

She went off to find someone to fix the situation. She explained to one of the People in Charge that she was stuck with an insane person who had a crying newborn at home and that we really, really, really needed to leave and could not wait anymore. The Person in Charge, who shall hereafter be known as Angel of Mercy, came over and said she could just take our books with our names, have Mr. Zusak sign them at the end, and then leave them at the reference desk for us. I almost collapsed in tears right there in the hallway, just before I recognized the Angel of Mercy as a librarian I actually know and have had Thai food with before. So I'm hoping she remembers that I am not always a foaming-at-the-mouth insane person.

We raced out of the building and into the car. I called GH to see what the situation was.

Me: We just left, I'm taking these girls home and then I'll be there. How is he?
GH: Oh, he's fine. I took him for a drive about 30 minutes ago. Fell asleep as soon as the car started moving.

On the one hand, that was very good to hear. On the other, a heads-up would have been nice. Then we could have skipped all the "blackened-toes-bobbing-around" discussion that is probably making it onto other people's blogs with the heading of "The Insane Freak at the Markus Zusak Signing."

But hey, all's well that ends well, right?

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Newbery rundown

My dad emailed me last week after the Newbery awards were announced, wanting to see how I felt about the titles they picked (especially since a lot of the ones I really liked weren't on the list). I was careful, you'll remember, not to list my choices as "predictions." If I were going to be predicting, I would have made different choices. I was just going with the ones I personally liked the best.

But let's have a look at the winners!


When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. I was glad this one won. I enjoyed it, and I think I might enjoy it even more if I were to read it a second time. The occasional discussion of time travel (by kids who were reading A Wrinkle in Time and debating how such a thing would work) might put off some kids. And if you haven't yet read A Wrinkle in Time you might feel like you're missing out. (But seriously, if you haven't read A Wrinkle in Time then you're missing out anyway. In life. Because that book is good. So please go read it.)



Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin. I didn't read this one during the big pre-Newbery glut, but a couple of my colleagues did get to it and really liked it. It was one of their top picks. Also, the illustrations are really cool. So if you're an audiobook person, please make sure to at least pick up a print copy and thumb through it.



Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose. Oooooh, edgy! Sort of. This is one I flipped through when I was reading books for the Sibert (nonfiction) award and I thought it looked really good. It's about Claudette Colvin, a Montgomery Alabama teen who was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus several months before Rosa Parks. But the local civil rights leaders weren't ready to launch a big campaign and they possibly didn't want Colvin to be the poster child of said campaign. By the time the Rosa Parks-induced boycott came about, Claudette was a pregnant teen who had to quit high school. (That's where the edgy part comes in, depending on what you feel your kids are ready to be reading about. It's not discussed in detail but it's for sure a thing.) This book does a really good job of showing what was going on in the civil rights scene and quite a lot of the story is told in Claudette's own (sassy) words.



The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. I knew this book would be likely to place, but it wasn't on my list because I hadn't read it. I hear differing opinions about whether the vocabulary will put this over the heads of most pre-jr-high kids--or whether it might even be a tiny bit boring. But it's about a spunky turn-of-the-century Texan gal who wants to be a scientist when she grows up, rather than a housewife. I've put it on hold so I can read it.



The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick. Meh . . . I read the end. It was fine. It wasn't on any of our top lists.

So there you have it! I feel like the committee made some safe-but-for-the-most-part-good choices (nothing as wacky as that let's-hack-up-bodies-with-machetes Surrender Tree from last year) Has anybody else read any of these? Are you mad about anything getting left out?

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Getting my votes in

On Monday all the Newbery/Caldecott/Sibert/Geisel awards will be announced, and I figured I'd slip in my picks now so that just in case something I like gets a medal I won't look like I jumped on a winner bandwagon after the fact. Cuz, you know, street cred among librarians is an intense, intense thing. Shivs slipped into cardigan sleeves and all that.

I've been reading off the lists of "books with potential" that other libraries are using for their own Mock Newbery competitions. Only . . . here's a the thing. Not too many of the books I've read this year have blown me away and made me want to run out and tell everyone about them. There are certainly some that I really like, and that I think are better than the others, but nothing that really brie'd my baguette, you know?

Reading so many books in a short amount of time, though, made me notice certain trends.

This year, war is a big one. Several books are set during the Vietnam war:

All the Broken Pieces

Kaleidoscope Eyes
Neil Armstrong is my Uncle and Other Lies Muscle Man McGinty Told Me

And there are a couple dealing with Iraq/Afghanistan

Peace, Locomotion

Heart of a Shepherd

I know that in kids' books one of the first thing you want to do is get rid of the parents, but a lot of these did it in some pretty depressing ways. First we had the (many, many) kids who are foster kids or orphans:

Peace, Locomotion

SLOB
Carolina Harmony

The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg

All the Broken Pieces
Neil Armstrong is my Uncle and Other Lies Muscle Man McGinty Told Me

And the ones who are dealing with the death or abandonment of a parent:

Love, Aubrey

Also Known as Harper
The Girl Who Threw Butterflies
Kaleidoscope Eyes

Heart of a Shepherd
All the Broken Pieces

Cheery, huh? But now on to my faves.


#1: SLOB by Ellen Potter. Technically, because of the age of the narrator, this one is YA. And it's wonderful. It's about a bright (perhaps genius) middle-schooler named Owen. Owen is the heaviest kid at his school and is busy working on two inventions, one of which is a trap to catch the person who keeps stealing the Oreos in his lunch box. I would recommend that you NOT read other descriptions of the book, because they might give too much away. One of the best things about SLOB is that you begin reading a seemingly simple tale about a fat kid's problems at school, but then it becomes much more emotionally complex (and breaks your heart) as crucial elements are revealed.

All the Broken Pieces by Ann Burg. This one is written in free verse, and is about a 12-year-old boy named Matt whose mother had him airlifted out of Vietnam with the departing US soldiers. His adoptive family loves him and he's on his way to being the star of the school baseball team. But he is met with some racism on the team and must slowly come to terms with his painful memories of Vietnam and of the mother and younger brother he left there.

Heart of a Shepherd by Rosanne Parry. This is another War book, about a boy named Ignatius who is left to try to run his family's Oregon ranch practically on his own while his father (along with all the other military reserve members of the community) is serving in Iraq and his brothers are away with the Army or at college. Religion plays an important element in the story--there's a Quaker grandpa and the community's new Catholic priest. This is a coming of age story that I really enjoyed.

Love, Aubrey by Susan LaFleur is one of our "abandoned/orphaned/neglected girl makes good" entries, and I think it's the best one of them. Aubrey's father and sister are killed in a car crash, and her mother pretty much implodes with grief and runs away, leaving her behind. Aubrey goes to live with her grandmother in another state, where she begins to get settled and makes friends. The book is a series of letters that Aubrey writes to an imaginary friend, where she works out her feelings about being abandoned, not only by her father and sister but also by her mother. It does have a hopeful ending though, in case you were worried.

Peace, Locomotion is the sequel to 2003's Locomotion, which I haven't read. I do like Jacqueline Woodson, though, and I really liked this. It's told in a series of letters from Lonnie to his little sister. They both live in foster homes after the death of their parents, and they communicate through letters and occasional Saturday visits. Lonnie talks about his struggles at school, the teachers who encourage him in his poetry endeavors, and his foster mother's worry over her son who is fighting (and then goes missing) overseas.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead is the book with the strongest Newbery buzz. I'll be fine if it wins, even though I believe I liked SLOB better. It's about a 6th grader named Miranda living in 1979 New York City. She's reading A Wrinkle in Time, and suddenly starts to receive mysterious anonymous letters that predict future events accurately. The notes are urgent and indicate that something important is about to happen. While she tries to work this out, Miranda is also having friendship struggles and helping her mother train to be a contestant on the $20,000 Pyramid. You definitely should read this one. And then once you get to the end you will be probably tempted to go back and read it again to find the clues you missed the first time around.

Does anybody have their own Newbery predictions or favorites? (And yes, I believe those two things are frequently incompatible, since it seems that some Newbery committees are just hell-bent on choosing books that they loved the pants off of but which no child would ever want to read. Which is fine, I guess, if you take Children's Literature to mean "Literature about Children" rather than "Literature for Children.")

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Valentine's Reading List

This post is mostly for my sweet friend Tonya, whom I met when I worked at the library in L****. She would come in and ask for book recommendations, and then it turned out that we had pretty much the exact same taste in books. Soon I was smuggling her all the best stuff and we were having lunch and braiding each other's hair on a regular basis. (Note: this is why you make friends with your librarian. She might be an excellent hair braider.)

But now I'm not in L**** anymore and she's mad at me for leaving her recommendation-less. Also I keep refusing to sign up for Goodreads. Because yeah, I need to be spending more time on the Internet. Tonya says she'll let me off the hook for at least the next couple of weeks if I do a post about what books to read for the Valentine's season, much like I did at the start of Christmas.

Not all (read: any) of these are about Valentine's Day, but they are some of my favorite books about romance and/or love.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. As if that wouldn't be on here. Best when followed immediately by Colin Firth. Also brie and Cadbury Whole Nut Bars.

Bridget Jones' Diary, even the mother of all Brit Chick Lit. Please don't blame me for the swearing. Or if you fall off your couch laughing and hurt yourself.

Confessions of a Shopaholic. Yes, by the end of the 2nd one in the series I wanted to strangle Becky for having learned absolutely nothing. But this first one is frothy fun, I tell you. Also, the movie looks like it's going to be beyond stupid. She liked to shop in the book, she wasn't a clown in training.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. I just read this a couple of weeks ago and really loved it. There's a bit of romance in it, but mostly it's about this amazing community and the people in it and by the end you just love them all and want to go live there.

The Magic of Ordinary Days by Ann Howard Creel. Sweet, cozy story about finding love in unexpected circumstances (like, when you're an unwed pregnant girl in 1940s Colorado and your minister dad ships you off into an arranged marriage with a stranger).

I Like You by Sandol Stoddard and Jacqueline Chwast. Yes, this was one of those books your RA read to your entire floor your freshman year at BYU during bonding time. And???

Hug Time by Patrick McDonnell. I just read this picture book for the first time and possibly ovulated at how cute an' sweet it was.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. Not romantic at all, but great if you're in the mood for something snarky.

The Princess Diaries series by Meg Cabot. You may think (rightly) that this series has gone on about 8 books too long, but nobody does hilarious & clueless teen romantic angst like Mia Thermopolis. Plus she gets it about Ioan Gruffudd. Enough said.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Because Jane is awesome and stands by her principles and totally gets everything in the end. Then go watch the movie and sob your face off during that part where she and Mr. Rochester are on the bed (!!!!!!) and he's begging her not to leave him. Sob, puppets, Sob!!

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emma Orczy. I'm sure if I were to read this for the first time today I would have issues with it. After all, there are lines in it that read, "she was weak; she was a woman." Issues. But I saw the movie version with Jane Seymour when I was 7 years old, I read the book when I was 12, I've seen the musical like 4 times, so yeah. There's really nothing to be done for it. It's totally swoony. I am weak, I am a woman.

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim. Four depressed women leave rainy 1920s London to share a castle in Italy for a month. While there, they have hijinks with pasta and rediscover their capacity for love and happiness. The movie is great too.

Possession by A.S. Byatt. For when you like your lovers star-crossed and poetic.

Last but not least, the epic tome that brought Desmama and I together, her absolute favorite, Apache Lover.

What are some of your favorites? And if you don't care for my list, The Independent published its 50 Best Romantic Reads in 2002 with the tagline, "Alone again?"

Nice one, Independent.

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I got nothing

But my SISTER does.

What with the rising hysteria over the coming release of Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn, she created a survey that made me snort IZZE soda out my nose.

Head on over if you could use a laugh at Bella's expense. Which, you know, should be all of you.

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Higher Power of Censorship

Susan Patron is one of the speakers at the conference I'm at. She wrote last year's Newbery Winner, The Higher Power of Lucky. You may remember the associated furor over the inclusion of the word "scrotum" (a dog's, mind you), which I commented on briefly. She'll be speaking during one of the lunches so as to remind this group of important things like the part where we are meant to be librarians and not raving lunatics who freak out over the idea of the word scrotum existing in books or on mammals. Not that I think we couldn't do with a few less scroti in the world, because we sure could.

She's having a book signing later today. Thing is, I didn't actually love her book. So I don't know if I want to buy it. If I do, though, I want her to sign her name and then write the word SCROTUM on the title page. Because then my copy will say it four times instead of three.

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This reader's advisory stuff is getting easier

It's nicest when people ask for books and it turns out that we have the exact same taste. Because I can just tell them about all my favorites and they think I'm this brilliant mind-reader. And usually we become best friends and I invite them to join our book club.

Sometimes people come in who are interested in something completely cool, like the elderly gentleman who read The Kite Runner and became fascinated with Afghanistan. So it was always fun to have something waiting for when he'd come in. By the time we'd gone through everything in the collection (and some things that I ordered especially for him) he could probably have taught a university class on the subject. Those are the fun days.

The less fun days are when people come in who hate everything good (read: everything that I love). Because what can I even recommend for them? One patron returned a DVD and was really irritated because not ONLY had the characters been speaking some strange tongue but they'd written the English words on the bottom of the screen. Written! To be read! In a movie! My efforts to defend the foreign language film collection (which could not be more my baby than if I'd given actual physical birth to it) fell upon deaf and hostile ears.

I've figured out how to work with this, though. I think of the books and movies that I love and esteem and would protect with my life. Then I take their exact opposites and hand them over.

"Here's The Ultimate Gift. You'll love it."

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Blah blah Golden Compass blah blah

Someone who clearly does not know me very well sent me one of those "BEWARE THE GOLDEN COMPASS FOR YEA VERILY IT SHALL SUCK OUT YOUR SOUL" emails. I was not impressed, and kind of wanted to write this person back and ask that the next time he chooses to blindly pass on inflammatory information like a mindless, mindless drone that he kindly leave me out of it.

My acquaintance isn't the only one sending this stuff out, though. I just read that an elementary school principal in Bountiful, UT sent an email to the parents of his students back in October, warning them about the film. Which, WOW. I was glad to read that he got a reprimand from the district, because as a parent I would have been well bothered by that.

The quite witty Eric D. Snider wrote a blog post about the whole hoopla surrounding the movie/books. His basic point: If you haven't read the books or seen the movie then you don't actually know what the message or intent is. All you know is what you've heard from other people, and it's kind of silly to just repeat those things as fact without checking for yourself. He made his point so well that I'm not even going to bother but will instead refer you to him.

But seriously. If you don't know whether you should let your kids read the books, read them yourself and then decide. Or, if needed, find someone who has read them, whose opinion and judgment you trust, and consider that. Also? The things you take away from a book may be completely different from the things your kids will get out of it. They might just see a great adventure story. I'm not saying you should give them, say, a bodice-ripper on purpose in the hope that it will go over their heads, but I am saying that the things that set you squirming might not make a dent to them.

I've read the series and there is quite a bit (especially in the third book) about throwing off an oppressive and cruel religious authority . . . which, um, wouldn't we be kind of . . . for? Some of the themes might bring up some really great conversations and teaching moments with your kids, where you can discuss how what you're reading aligns with your own beliefs, and how you can decide whether something is worth reading or not. And isn't it a good idea to help your kids develop the kind of critical thinking skills they'll need for when they head out into the world and start reading things that you haven't pre-approved?

So yes. You may decide that you just don't want to deal with the ambiguity and that you have neither the time nor the interest to screen these for your kids, so you're just going to pass on the whole thing. Which is absolutely fine. But if that's the case, please just say that rather than joining the screaming masses who take one quote from the author (who, let's remember, knows that nothing sells quite so well as scandal) and create a crusade out of it.

And stop sending me emails, because they just make me cranky.

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Editors don't get paid nearly enough

Part of my job at the moment is to do all the purchasing for the library, and one thing I look at is the New York Times Book Review bestseller list.

Number 1 for last week is Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell. I went over to Amazon but saw that it has received 102 customer reviews with an average rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars. Which, ouch. Then I saw the first customer review and I absolutely had to share this bit with you. Props to eagle-eyed Top 1000 reviewer Terry Matthews, who notes:

Between pages 65, 66 and 67, Cornwell writes

"...he's done the unthinkable."

"...he might be capable of the unthinkable."

"...not if he did the unthinkable."

"He may have done the unthinkable."

"...she hopes ... that the unthinkable hasn't happened."

"Assuming he's done the unthinkable..."

What's *unthinkable* is that this mess got through the editing process. Is there no one brave enough to stand up and say, "Miss Cornwell, this won't do. Bring it back when it's worthy to print or get a ghost writer."?

Wow. That is so, so very awesome, especially when you consider that "unthinkable" is pretty much a word you use when you don't know what else to say but want to sound all dramatic. And to use that word 6 times in three pages? Means you were suffering from a pretty big mind fart. I think I'll hold off on this one. If people as for it I could always show them the bad reviews and ask, "Are you sure?"

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Lazy Friday

Lazy on the blogging front, that is. I'm being a crazy person at work. But I need to take a moment to brag about my book club, which is The New Awesome. We met a couple of weeks ago to chat about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The theme for the food was "local," and it just had to incorporate some kind of local product. Up here we have Weeks Jam, Aggie ice cream, Cox honey, and all kinds of good stuff. Here are some of the things we had:

Zollinger apple cider

Gossner's smoked squeaky cheese

Goldfish crackers from the nearby Pepperidge Farm plant, which, yes, kind of a cheat, but hey--I love me some goldfish. (Note: You can also buy 2-lb bags of Godiva chocolate for $8 there, which is pretty much the way to buy my love.)

I made a rustic apple tart using Pepperidge Farm puff pastry and brought Gossner's cream to pour over it. It was dang good, if I do say so myself, and really easy. The most time-consuming part was peeling and slicing all the apples.


(pic from Martha Stewart's Everyday Food: Great Foods Fast cookbook, which you should really go buy right now because it's amazing.)

Next month we're reading The City of Ember, and it's a bit trickier to know what kind of food goes really well with this. Only canned items? Food that grows in the dark? Bats and baby orcs? None of these sound especially appealing to me.

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How to be a bleeding-heart pinko commie treehugger

Because really, who doesn't want that? Y'all remember how much I loved Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. My book group is reading it this month and I can't wait to chat about it--seems like at least one other member is liking it too.

A few weeks ago on the PUBLIB listserv (for public libraries & librarians) one member asked for ideas about consumerism-type books, as her library's book club wanted to read one. And oh, did people respond. We're librarians, remember? Asking us for book recommendations is pretty much like throwing prime chum in the water next to both seals and surfers.

I figured I would get the list up here so that anyone who may want to be considered for membership at our future hippie compound in Montana (other members: Daltongirl and Sakhmet, who is pushing for a milder climate, which I can get behind). can get caught up on the syllabus. And possibly also so that I don't lose the list.

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power and Politics of World Trade, Pietra Rivoli.

Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, Judith Levine

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, John de Graffe, et al

Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, Paco Underhill

Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreicht

No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies, Naomi Klein

Shock Doctrine: Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein

A Year Without “Made In China”: One Family’s Adventures in the Global Economy, Sara Bongiorni

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else, Michael Gates Gill

Bittersweet : the story of sugar, Peter Macinnis

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, Michael Norton

Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan.

Crunchy cons: the new conservative counterculture and its return to roots, Dreher 2006 (psst! This one is about conservatives who eat organic vegetables without shame!)

American Mania: When More is Not Enough, Whybrow 2005

Consuming religion: Christian faith and practice in a consumer culture, Miller 2005

Don't get too comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems, Rakoff 2005

Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed is Shipping American Jobs Overseas, Dobbs 2004

I want that! : how we all became shoppers, Thomas Hine

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcom Gladwell

The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki

Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, Susan Strasser

And really, this is a whole nuther blog post in the making (so, you know, gird up your loins for that one) but I really do not understand what the deal is with conservatives and the environment--or, I should say more specifically, with Mormons (who tend to be politically conservative) and the environment.

Is it because we believe in the Last Days and so there's really no need to bother preserving the earth because it's just going to get all burned up anyway?

Does living in Utah and other wide-open spaces make us feel like there's always going to be more of everything and if there isn't then that's not our problem?

Is it because conservation and the environment are frequently supported by the politically liberal, and we should never believe anything the liberals say about anything, including things like "Hi, my name is Bob" and "My, the sky looks hazy today." Probably this whole environmentalism thing is just a trick to get us running abortion clinics out of our garages.

And guess what else? I don't care if global warming turns out to be fake. Seriously. I absolutely do not care. It will not change the way I feel about my responsibilities and my feeling that I should be trying to make the world a better place rather than squeezing every last bit of use from it and leaving nothing for the people who come after me. And it's funny that more LDS people (and Christians in general) don't talk about this, considering what we are taught about exactly those ideas: stewardship, responsibility, moderation, unselfishness, preparation, priorities. If you need scriptural evidence, look at what God told Adam when he gave him stewardship over the earth. Look at the parable of the talents. It's right there.

Aaaand possibly I won't be needing that second blog post now. Woops.

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Pretty sure I need this

It's a new shirt over at Threadless, and it is my new favorite thing.



Nice, huh?

I probably owe you all an apology. I've been pretty distracted lately on account of work stuff. Which I know is amazingly lame of me since it's not like I'm being a cool spy or anything who gets to wear all the different outfits and wigs and then make out with Michael Vartan. (Or am I . . . ) It's like when Sydney Bristow would be all whining about her masters program and I'd yell "Shut UP already! Where is Vaughn? Why isn't Vaughn here now and speaking the French and making me shake the windowpanes with my squeals???" As I'm sure you did, too.

All I'm actually doing is running a library and being a lone reed. And even though there are stories there that would have you writing your congressional representatives, I can't actually tell them if I want to keep this job. But I can say that I'm working on making this place amazing beyond belief and that it feels really, really good. And I've let the City know that I'm interested in the actual Real director position in the hopes of moving that many notches higher on the Intimidating To Young Mormon Men scale. (Least intimidating: dental assistants, high-school students, and coma patients. Most intimidating: lawyers, doctors, and feminist goddesses of doooooom.)

So here's what I've been working on for the last few weeks:

Setting up free wireless access so that the glassy-eyed Runescape-addicted 11-year-old boys can now bring in their own computers and play until their eyes dry out and their fingers fall off.

Installing free, open-source timers on the public computers so that the computer starts doing the kicking off for me and I can just sit at my desk with my feet up and laugh evilly when people get automatically logged off after an hour. Because I like to bottle the tears of children and use them in secret midnight ceremonies.

Starting a new storytelling program. Because I've really, really missed the storytime rush, what with the screaming, the negligence and subsequent perv bait, the vandalism . . . [sigh] . . . all good times.

Making friends with the other library directors in the area, who are actually a pretty cool bunch.

Revolutionizing the acquisitions process by introducing a little thing I like to call record keeping. It's an amazing thing. I can now staunchly recommend it.

Buying fabulous, fabulous things for the collection, and ignoring the very existence of items like Blonde Ambition: The Untold Story Behind Anna Nicole's Death. Books like this, to me, are the literary version of rubbernecking. And just because it's on the Times Bestseller list one week doesn't mean it'll be on there two weeks later (and it wasn't).

Compiling all the yearly stats and writing a 3-year plan for the library's future, which . . . wow. Because I was really getting bored before, you know, with all the free time. So finding out about this all of a sudden was pretty much the same as getting Ioan for my birthday (in Righteous, Noble, Slave-freeing and France-Defeating mode rather than Stretchy, Jessica-Alba-Pretend-Liking mode or even Drugged, Accidentally-Marrying-Wrong-Blond-Person-in-Mexico mode) for my birthday.

I need a vacation.

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Yes, I judge people by their bookshelves

And their video/DVD collections, if it comes to that. To me it's the best way to tell if someone's a kindred spirit. When I was 14 I went to babysit and was stunned to see an exact replication of my father's bookshelves in this couple's living room. Complete with the leather-bound Louis L'amour, the Tom Clancy collection, and the Jason Bourne novels. So when I come to your house please don't be surprised if I move directly to the book shelves and possibly knock over your aged grandmother in the process. If you don't have bookshelves at your house, then . . . I'm really not sure what we have to talk about, actually, and we should probably just call it a night.

So yes. I am highly attracted to bookshelves. I cannot resist them. And on Sunday I created something that I'd seen other people do and which is pretty much my new favorite thing ever:



Book. Shelf. Porn.

Who even knew that my books arranged by color would be so sexy? They're suddenly so much more interesting this way.



Now I just stare at them and make love to them with my eyes. And when friends come over drag them upstairs to Gaze upon the Hotness.

The only problem is that now it's just a tiny bit harder to find what I'm looking for. I previously had a shelf designated as Bathroom Reads. Now those stand-bys are all interspersed among the others, which will possibly lead to me doing the Bathroom Dance in front of the bookshelf and maybe bursting a kidney. Still. It's a small price to pay for beauty.

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The 80s were always a bad idea

Read a post today by MBC (a lovely and witty fellow librarian spinster whose blog I recommend) that jogged a special, even sacred memory which I must now share. A couple of weeks ago I weeded through some of the YA collection, looking for ripped up, outdated, low-circulating items. What I found were stacks of books with cover designs from the 1980s, complete with the worst of the day's fashions. MBC describes how difficult it is to convince teenagers to take a book seriously when the cover model is wearing pegged pants. And oh, what truth she speaks.

The biggest treasure in the collection for me, though, was an entire shelf of books with titles like Too Young to Die. They all have really soft, misty photography on the cover, with pensive models wearing pastel-colored sweaters. I remember reading books just like these in the late 80s and early 90s. I owned one in which a girl starts volunteering as a candy striper and not only loses weight because she works so hard that she forgets to eat, but she also meets a teen cancer patient named Matt and he becomes her boyfriend. Until he dies. Now I have to wonder what exactly was going on with us as young girls that made terminal cancer and the teens who have it such a riveting literature form?

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This is what I get for deciding to embrace the fall

I get tomorrow's forecast, which looks like this:

Rain/Snow
Likely
Hi 51F

Yeah, the weather is on my craplist. That mess ain't even right.

Fortunately for me, tomorrow is the start of Banned Books Week, about which I am very excited. I mean, sure, my director decided to leave that same week in what can only be an effort to steal the First Amendment's thunder. But that's okay.

Here's what I have on the roster, and I'm glad now that it's a low-key as it is, given everything that's happened since the initial plans were made.

We've made pirate-themed displays to go with this year's theme, and we're displaying copies of books from the ALA's 100 Most Frequently Challenged books of 1990-2000 list. I've also made brochures that include that list and the list of the big challenged books for 2006.

We're doing a drawing during the week, and I have 14 copies of books like The Giver, Bridge to Terabithia, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Witches to give as prizes. I also bought bookmarks to give out, and 2 of the ALA posters.


We have "I read banned books" buttons to wear during the week.

I kind of really, really wanted this canvas tote. I couldn't decide though if it was fabulous or if I was just turning into an Education Week participant and my next step would be denim jumpers and white Keds.


Anyway. Which banned book are you going to read next week to celebrate?

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Have found new meaning in life

Always a good thing, non? Remember that one time when I sat through a Relief Society lesson about how it's important to be self-sufficient and to can peaches?

Here were my questions:

What's up with canning and all that? Why should we do it? If I already have a year's supply of peaches from Costco then shouldn't I be good? Why on this sweet earth should I spend a Saturday up to my elbows in sticky nastiness just to give myself botulism? I mean, if you like to do those things and you like knowing where your food comes from and it gives you a feeling of satisfaction, then that's wonderful and I say more power to you. But what if you just don't care?

So that's the question I really wanted to ask, even though there was no time for it: If you really could not care less about this stuff and you can get your food/clothing needs met in other ways, why bother with it? Should we learn just because you never know what might happen and it's good to have as many self-reliance-type skills as possible? Because I actually can accept that as a reason. I just want to know if there are others.

So that's where I was at.


Then a couple of weeks ago I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. The School Library Journal's review of the book says, "Give this title to budding Martha Stewarts, green-leaning fans of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and kids outraged by Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation." Which, me . . . me . . . me . . . Only they should also have included "Mormons who need a reason to care about canning."

Because oh friends, I now care. This was one of those books where I kept calling people up and saying, "And then do you know what the Man did???"

The premise is that Kingsolver and her family packed up and moved from Tucson, Arizona to a farm in the Appalachian mountains. They felt that after so many years of living in the middle of the desert they'd made enough of an environmental footprint (all their food has to be imported in from other places, because hi, desert) and were ready for a change. So their experiment was to see if, for a year, they could live comfortably on foods that they either produced themselves or which came from local sources. For them a big part of it was not wanting to waste fossil fuel and other natural resources to feed themselves. They did cheat by buying olive oil & spices that come from other places, but for the most part they stuck to their guns for the experiment. And they seemed to eat pret-ty darn well, it seemed to me.

Barbara Kingsolver is a fiction writer who wrote, among other things, The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible. I will be honest and say that there are a few places where she comes off just a bit too "Hey, remember the part where I'm a really deep author? Because I am. Check me out with my deep descriptions."

Anyway. It was kind of fascinating. Because Kingsolver not only writes about her family's experience, but she talks about the larger picture of food production in our country and where we're headed as a people. Answer: Nowhere good. She makes the point that in just a couple of generations we have lost a lot of the knowledge and skills that are needed to produce food. Much of the US farmland has been moved into crops like soy and corn, which are nice and all but won't actually cut it if our food importation channels break down. (ps. And then so all that corn and soy aren't getting wasted they put them in all of our foods, which makes us fat. Thanks for that, America.) And if/when our current system of food-getting fails, we're going to be in trouble. We can do without electricity but it's a bit harder to do without food.

You also read about the benefits of buying local fruits and vegetables and of eating these things in their season. A few benefits:

You keep your neighbors in business, which helps your local economy, schools, libraries, etc.

Foods taste better when they're in season. You're a lot more likely to want to eat your veggies when they actually taste good. You know how you're always excited to see your summer clothes when you pull them out of storage? It's like that. Because you get to wear them when it's the perfect time for them, and then you pack them up again before they have a chance to bore you. And then it's time to be excited for fall clothes.

You enjoy more variety, rather than only eating the few breeds of fruits and vegetables which have been deemed hardy enough to survive thousand-mile trips and uniform enough to look nice in the supermarket. Example: the delicious and very cool-looking heirloom tomatoes I bought at the farmer's market on Saturday. They have names like Jubilee and Pink Girl and Brandywine. Last night I made pasta primavera with my farmer's market tomatoes, squash, and zucchini. It was fabulous.

You get better information about where your food has been, how it was raised, and what's been done to it. Or what hasn't been done to it, as the case may be. Or what it might do to you. Who doesn't love eating wax with their apples? Who doesn't love wondering if animal remains and feces were part of your beef's diet?

You help the environment, because you're not wasting loads and loads of gas having your food trucked in.

You're not exploiting people in developing countries who work under awful conditions for terrible wages and then ship all the food they've produced to us.

The more you support local food, the more local food your neighbors can produce, which leads to even more tasty local options for you, the consumer. And then it's like this big food love fest.

You get to stick it to The Man. Which, really, for me is always one of the best reasons to do things. Did you know that there are varieties of tomato which have been genetically engineered to produce sterile seeds? That way you can't save them and plant them the next year--you have to buy more from the seed company. That kind of crap just enrages me, no matter what form it takes. If food is becoming a form of intellectual property, what's next? Killing babies, that's what.

Yes, it can be more expensive to buy local rather than going through Wal-Mart. But the very reason that stuff is cheap is possibly because it isn't very good, it might kill you, and because the farmers have been screwed over. And even if you don't have the space or resources to grow the stuff yourself, you can still support the farmers who are Fighting the Good Fight.

Now let's reintroduce the canning thing. This way you can still enjoy all those lovely seasonal local foods during the off-season times. Kingsolver recommends buying up all the local stuff you can find at the end of the summer to can or freeze. The farmers win because they are able to sell everything from that year's harvest, which means they can invest in next year's. We win because we have a freezer/pantry full of good stuff at very good prices.

So yes. It gave me lots to think about. I can't start growing all my food in the back yard, but I can do some things. A coworker gave me two bags of corn from her garden, so I froze them in freezer bags. I found Utah peaches at the grocery store, so I bought a few pounds and froze them. My neighbor has two apple trees which hang over into my yard. I've been picking fruit for the last couple of weeks and eating it with lunches and breakfast, but I think it's time for a real harvest.

This, to me, feels pretty cool. Because I'm getting these guys when they're absolutely at their best flavor, I'm getting them for practically nothing, and I haven't wasted anything or exploited anyone. And I'm being a force for social change. Next year I might even try it with jars and everything.

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I weep for the world sometimes

The lovely Eva forwarded me this article about a recent Associated Press survey about the nation's reading habits. She must have known that my blood pressure had been taking it relatively easy and needed a kickstart.

They surveyed 1,000 people and found that 1 in 4 people read no books. Like none. At all. But before I could start freaking out about what is wrong with people, I kept reading. According to the article, the people who read no books "tend to be older, less educated, lower income, minorities, from rural areas and less religious." So what this indicates to me is that at least some of the non-reading is to do with literacy levels. If you can't read, or read at a low level, or at a low level in a language that is not English, then of course that would be a barrier. Also, it's harder if you don't have the money to buy books and either don't have access to good library services or are too busy or intimidated to use them.

Yesterday was a good time to read the article because earlier in the day I went to a luncheon at Cache Valley's English Language Center, where they filled the local librarians in about what they're up to. Also they fed us upscale funeral potatoes. Mmmmm . . . funeral potatoes. Anyway. They received a grant to help the children of migrant workers. What the studies are finding is that the ESL training for these kids in school is not enough--they're not retaining what they're learning, so there needs to be more reading at home. So one of their big goals is to get these families reading together at home and using their local libraries. They told us how this program works, and to expect to see some new families coming in--families who might have very limited or no English and who may have never been in a library before. So we need to be sure to be welcoming and helpful, etc. I think this is pretty cool.

But. Back to the article. Here are some more of their findings:

Women read more than men, and old people read more than younger people (shocker).

There are more readers in the Midwest than in the rest of the country. This, to me, makes sense. If I lived in Ohio I would spend as much time as possible with my nose in a book, imagining that I was someplace else.

Southerners are hooked on religious books and romance novels, which sound like strange bedfellows, but whatever. Maybe it's one group reading the Bible and another group reading the smut.

Democrats and liberals read a little bit more than Republicans and conservatives. Am not going to make the obvious joke about conservatives not needing to read because they know everything anyway. Oops, except I kind of just did.

Men read more nonfiction than women do.

And now I'm running late for work, so I can't do anymore analyzing. But seriously, if you can read, will you please pick up a book and read it? If not for me, then do it for the stats.

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