Hi, I'm Emily. This is the lowdown on what I'm reading, what I'm doing in my MLIS program, and my thoughts on librarianship, particularly of the YA variety.
As far as burning out, keep in mind that you'll be living and breathing libraries. As in, you're really going to care about your classes and your coworkers are going to be supportive beyond belief. It makes it easier to get through, I promise. As you probably know by now, librarians are good people.
As for credits at a time, my advice is to base it on whatever work you can get. Do as much library working as you possibly can, and base your course load around that. Personally, I worked part time and took classes full time for my first 2 semesters; then when I managed to get 2 part time jobs that added up to a 42 hour work week, I went to school part time, because that's what I could handle. Look into your program's summer semester - not everything will be offered, it's shorter, and you lose your break, but it's also often cheaper and will help knock those classes down and get you where you're going faster.
It's entirely possible that I started listening to this not because of the upcoming Brad Pitt movie, but because Alan Alda reads a small section of it.
In related news, M*A*S*H was a big part of my high school years.
Plot: Following the global war against the living corpses, Brooks compiled interviews illustrating life during the epidemic that were considered too personal or colorful for the official reports.
Anyways, this was way cooler than I thought it would be. I've never actually read a documentary novel, but assuming they're anything like documentary films, then this story/acting was excellent. A few of the actors sounded like they were reading, but most of them did sound like they were speaking. It's really intense.
I guess what I've seen from people who didn't like this book was that it's not about characters or plot. I really enjoyed that it was mainly a thought experiment about what it might take to topple the current world order and what war and disease mean without humanity.
Plot: Clay gets a box of tapes in the mail, and when he plays them, discovers he is one of the recipients of Hannah's suicide note, a series of stories she recorded and sent to the 13 people who caused her death.
1) Hey, wanna do something awful to yourself? I recommend getting this as an audiobook and listening to it through the tapedeck in your ancient car, via an iPod-cassette adapter. This is an amazingly acted audiobook, and that is a positively heartbreaking way to experience it.
2) Remember Maureen Johnson's coverflip project? This isn't exactly what she was talking about, since it was written by a male author, but this is definitely a book that got the girl-book treatment. Look at that cover - wistful teen girl staring into space on a swing. That's not the cover of a boy-book. Which is a real shame, because what this story is is Rape Culture for Teens 101. It's narrated by a teen boy, with his horror as he listens to the escalating story of how the people in Hannah's life created and perpetuated an unsafe environment she couldn't live in. It's horrifying to listen to, and I think that the strength of this book as a social commentary is that it's very much about all the little things, and the fact that they aren't isolated incidents in Hannah's life - they're all related to each other, and they add up.
Plot: It's the last night of senior year, and Lucy wants to find and meet the mysterious graffiti artist Shadow. Ed and Leo, the secret identities of graffiti team Shadow and Poet, take Lucy and her friends on an adventure to find the elusive artist.
Really lovely, and a nice portrayal of a character with a learning disability. I recently complained that one thing I didn't like about Why We Broke Up was that the fake films Min describes don't really give a lot of insight into her character, because they're a fictional frame of reference so we don't have full context and they aren't described in a way that told me what they meant to her. In this story, which relies heavily on art and poetry, the art is handled really well, despite being described and not seen. The artwork is explicitly about the characters' emotions and worldviews, and the descriptions focus more on the characters and their interpretations than the images themselves, and Leo's poetry is offered up in full.
It's also one of the better uses of multiple perspectives, which seems to be a big trend right now, since it focuses a lot on perceptions. That was something else that bothered me about Why We Broke Up - I spent the whole book wanting to know what Ed thought, even before I knew the ending. This book was definitely more what I like - even though I know part of the point of WWBU was that it was biased and completely about Min, I'd rather see the big picture, which Graffiti Moon does without losing focus on each character's thoughts, emotions, and worries.
Happy Memorial Day Weekend!
SUMMER READING STARTS SOON!!!
Pick up your reading logs from the Help Desk starting June 3rd. So much going on.
Just look at the poster. It looks like someone said, “Let’s just throw all the things on it”. And then their boss said, “As long as there’s a flying submarine, I’m cool with it”.
laura-in-libraryland reblogged your post: Overheard in the library: Yeah, well, I dont...
Was it a librarian?
No, it was one of our students. And I think she caught me trying not to laugh. Little does she know, this half of her school library staff spends her free time looking at cat blogs.
Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler, art by Maira Kalman
I almost broke up with this book several times, and, like Min, only realized when it was over that we should have broken up weeks ago.
Summary: Min loves movies, and Ed's the co-captain of the basketball team. After their breakup, Min writes a letter, explaining why they broke up as she places everything that she saved to remember him by in the box she's going to leave on his doorstep.
It's not like I really hated it. It was okay enough that I didn't really stop listening to it, but I mean, it took me weeks to get through it listening to it in tiny bits, and then finally just saying, "Dammit, Emily, power through," and finishing the last 2/3 in like 3 days.
Maybe the art really, really added to it. I glanced through it when I first rented the audiobook, but by the time I finished the thing, I had returned it to the library.
I never really quite got to where I warmed up to Min or really sympathized with her. I think partly, it's because hearing her explain why everything was a sign that Ed was totally the wrong guy for her in the nasally, petulant voice of the narrator, just made me want to tune her out. Like damn, she's not my friend, I'm not obligated to listen to this and nod at the right times.
I know Min makes a point that she's not any kind of person - she's not a jock, or a jock girlfriend, or an arty kid, or anything. And we don't ever really get to know her, despite all the talking and explaining she does. The only way we might have gotten to know her is if the movies in the book were real. But they aren't. There's no way to get any insight into who Min is by recognizing what she loves about these movies. I have no idea what kind of movie buff she is - is she an 8 1/2 kind of girl, or when she says she loves movies, is she into It Happened One Night? I have no idea.
It's also one of those books where it takes place now, but no one has phones or computers. If a book is great, you don't notice. If a book is kind of bugging you and the main character wants to direct movies and loves film but never once talks about having any film equipment or hunting down torrents or DVDs of movies that are hard to find, you notice.
And then the word "gay." The first time Ed said it to mean "stupid and girly," I thought it was weird that Min just let it go. Because she really did just let it go. She picks apart everything Ed did wrong as she went along, but the first time he says "gay," she doesn't make any retrospective comment. Later, she calls him on it, but that first time ... it was weird. And then from then on, he continues to call things "gay," only he says "the word I'm not allowed to say" instead. Really, Min? That's cool? She knew enough to call him on it in the first place, she knows enough to call him on that, too.
Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison
I didn't read this book when I was in middle school and all my friends were reading it because I thought my parents would flip out. I'm 24 now and my dad flipped out when he saw it.
Which I'm sure marketing thought would help it, but whatever.
I know this is supposed to be a hilarious series everyone loves, but maybe I missed my window on loving it. I totally see where it fits in with Meg Cabot and Megan McCafferty and other writers like that. But the whole time, I couldn't help but think, "What My Mother Doesn't Know was funnier."
I didn't hate it; it's fairly fun (though with rather a lot of internalized sexism on Georgia's part) and a very easy read, despite the gratuitous use of UK English slang, which borders on annoying but pretty clearly establishes who Georgia is: she's very much the kind of kid who wants to be in the know and in the thick of it, but doesn't always get it right.
I think part of my problem is that the boy-crazy 14 year-old genre just makes me so uncomfortable. Yes, I knew girls like that in middle school. Yes, I just said that I thought What My Mother Doesn't Know is hilarious. But I think the difference between Sophie in WMMDK and Georgia in ATaFFS is that Sophie's stream of consciousness poetry puts ALL of Sophie's insecurities on display, and she worries about a lot of things, including a lot of totally normal and totally bizarre worries about boys. Georgia, on the other hand, worries mainly about boys and her looks, specifically her nose, and in kind of a shallow way. And I get that part of the humor is meant to be how oblivious Georgia is to the way she treats her friends, but it just didn't work for me. I did really like the stuff about Georgia's family, and for some reason, as ridiculous as the way she basically forgets about her dad and isn't much bothered or affected by his move did strike me as funny.
Anyways, Angus was my favorite. There's one bit, early on, where Georgia says that sometimes he hears the call of the Highlands and then describes his weird cat freakouts, and if my cats where gigantic strays found in Scotland, I would totally start calling whatever the heck the Hershey-cat is doing right now "hearing the call of the Highlands."
The original cover does a lot right - it acknowledges all three characters and the film aspect of the book, and is gorgeous to boot.
I think that if it were being marketed as a girl book by a woman author, the grand gesture Greg and Earl make - making a movie to cheer up Rachel - might make it onto the cover. Never mind that it's not a romantic gesture and it turns out to be the least inspirational film ever made.
The librarian impulse at work - I have not actually applied for any jobs today, but I spent my afternoon researching and now my "job advice" folder has like 10 more bookmarks in it.
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