Tag Archives: Libraries

Library Loot Wednesday!

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the merry spinsterThe Merry Spinster finally made its way to me through the library system! It’s a collection of short fantasy stories and I’ve been quite eager to read it. The author also recently came out as trans, so this is part of my effort to read more inclusively! There’s apparently a lot about gender in the book, too.

tolstoy purple chairI also checked out Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, which is my PopSugar pick for “favorite color in the title.” It’s about a woman spending a year dedicated to reading, so I’m hopeful I’ll find something in here for another PopSugar prompt, “a book mentioned in another book.” Also, that chair on the cover? I WANT IT.

red clocks dystopiaRed Clocks finally arrived in my holds! I’ve been pretty excited about this one, but there were a lot of people in line ahead of me. It’s another feminist dystopia – I love those – this one set in a small Oregon fishing town, so – my home state! Abortion and in vitro fertilization are both illegal in this dystopia, and it follows the stories of women dealing with that.

pretending to be normal aspergerAnd one of the books off my Autism Reading List arrived from another library system – Pretending to be Normal – Living with Asperger’s Syndrome. This is the expanded version published in 2015.

women from another planet autismIn not-quite-library-loot, I also bought the Kindle version of Women From Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism on the recommendation of Catana, who commented on my review of Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate.

One of these days I’m going to gather some pictures of my library to show you guys my local branch. The librarians there are pretty awesome.

Library Loot – April 18th, 2018

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queens of geekI mentioned a couple of these yesterday in my Top Ten Books by Autistic Authors. Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate, and Queens of Geek are both books by autistic authors that I’m reading for Autism Acceptance Month.

I picked up one more nonfiction book, The Alternative Autoimmune Cookbook. It’s by one half of the blogging team behind the AutoImmune Wellness website. I’m currently working alternative aip cookbookthrough the cookbook written by the other half, The Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook. I have Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, a condition in which my immune system goes haywire and attacks my thyroid. I’ve been on the AIP diet for two and a half weeks at this point, and the amount I’ve energy I’ve regained is astounding. I’m sleeping better, and haven’t had heartburn since I started. So I’m eager to crack the other book for more recipes.

sing unburied singFor fiction I picked up Sing, Unburied, Sing, one of the most popular novels last year. (I requested it in December, but there was a long line!) For my Canadian read I got The Young in One Another’s Arms – besides being Canadian, it’s also about alternative family structures. My last book this week is To Kill A Kingdom, a young adult novel about predatory mermaids. I do like predatory mermaids!

It’s a pretty eclectic collection – but I am trying to branch out from my sci-fi/fantasy habit all the time!

 

Library Loot!

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I added Top Ten Tuesdays, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, three weeks ago, I’m going to try adding a Wednesday post as well! Library Loot is cohosted by Silly Little Mischief and The Captive Reader. Every Wednesday I’ll post what I’ve picked up from the library in the past week, which will give you some idea of the reviews to come on the blog in the following few weeks!

Since this is my first Library Loot post, I’m going to post everything I currently have out from the library.

the president's kitchen cabinetSome of the oldest books I have, that I really, really need to read, are a few that I didn’t get to during Black History Month. (Why is that the shortest month of the year, anyway?) The President’s Kitchen Cabinet and The Residence are both about the White House; the first specifically about African Americans’ role as chefs and cooks, and the second more generally about the White House’s servants and staff. In the same vein I have The Big Sea, the big seaLangston Hughes’ autobiography, which I sent for as a counterpoint to Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography. The Big Sea had to be shipped to me from a different library, so I didn’t receive it until mid-March. Around that same time I also picked up Jane Crow – the Life of Pauli Murray, about the jane crow pauli murrayoutstanding lawyer and activist. I read about her in The Notorious RBG and wanted to know more.

So I picked up Ten Little Indians in an effort to read more diversely, but then I found out Sherman Alexie is kind of a creep so now I’m not sure I want to read his work at all. I have other Native American literature I can read.

Fight Like A Girl I picked up to read short blurbs about prominent activist women that I might want to read more in depth about.

batman nightwalkerI have finished reading Batman: Nightwalker, Crimson Bound, and Anne Sexton’s Transformations already, so those are getting returned to the library soon. (I already have four more books to pick up!)

sexy librarian big book eroticaOne of my librarians actually recommended The Sexy Librarian’s Big Book of Erotica to me; I’ve only read one of the stories so far, but it was pretty hot, so I’m eager to read the rest of it!

wolves of winterThe Wolves of Winter will be my 13th Canadian book for my Read Canadian Challenge – and it’s a dystopia. Love dystopias! (Also look at that cover – it’s gorgeous – but I love winter.)

Another book I’ve had for a while that I really need to read is Philippa Gregory’s Changeling – I didn’t know she’d written a fantasy series, and I love her historical fiction books!

devil in the kitchen marco pierre whiteThe last book in my stack is The Devil in the Kitchen – Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef. It’s Marco Pierre White’s Memoir of growing up working class and becoming a culinary rock star.

So those are the 13 books I currently have from my library. I’m turning in Batman, Transformations, Crimson Bound, and Ten Little Indians, and picking up my holds sometime in the next few days, but I’ll go over those next week!

Book Review: Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library

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freeforallFree For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library
by Don Borchert
210 pages
Published 2007
Memoir

Like Quiet, Please, Free For All is a memoir from a public librarian. It was interesting, but I didn’t find it as engaging as Quiet, Please. So if you’re only going to read one, I’d recommend Quiet. If you’ve got time, though, this was an interesting second view on public libraries. It felt a little more detached than Quiet did; and there was a lot less biting sarcasm. I find it interesting that both books are written by male librarians, in what has been a female-dominated field for some time. I’ll have to go looking for a woman’s memoir about being a librarian, and see how it differs!

Free For All goes a little bit more in depth on the hiring process, and talks more about library pages, both topics I found interesting. To be honest, though, I found the entire book just kind of…blah. It’s not a bad book, and it’s a quick read at just over two hundred pages, but it’s just…blah.

From the inside cover of Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library:

“Mild-mannered librarian tells all!

Not long ago, the public library was a place for the bookish, the eggheaded, and the studious – often seeking refuge from a loud, irrational, and crude outside world. Today libraries have become free-for-all entertainment complexes, filled with deviants, drugs, and even sex toys.

What happened?

Don Borchert was a short-order cook, door-to-door salesman, telemarketer, and Christmas-tree-chopper before landing work at a California library. He never could have predicted his encounters with the colorful kooks, bullies, and tricksters who fill the pages of this hilarious memoir. 

In Free For All, Borchert offers readers a ringside seat to the unlikely spectacle of mayhem and absurdity that is business as usual at the public library. You’ll see cops bust drug dealers who’ve set up shop in the men’s restrooms, witness a burka-wearing employee suffer a curse-ridden nervous breakdown, and meet a lonely, neglected kid who grew up in the library and still sends postcards to his surrogate parents – the librarians. 

You’ll finally find answers to all those often-asked questions: What’s up with that Dewey Decimal System – do librarians actually understand it? (Yes, but they don’t all like it.) Do the library computers have access to everything, even porn? (Yes.) What happens if you never pay those overdue fines? Do they just keep adding up? (Sort of. It depends on what kind of day the librarian is having and how polite you are.) And what’s the strangest thing to land in the book return bin? (You won’t believe it, and it’s got absolutely nothing to do with great literature.)”

Book Review: The Library – An Illustrated History

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libraryThe Library – An Illustrated History
by Stuart A. P. Murray
308 pages
Published 2009
Nonfiction

This is one of those books that I could only read a chapter, sometimes two, at a time. It was really interesting, with lots of GORGEOUS pictures of libraries, but it’s still a history and sometimes boring. It was very in-depth, though, starting with “The Ancient Libraries” and moving through the middle ages, to the Renaissance, to the early modern period, to the 21st century. Murray talked about all the books lost to religions, primarily Christianity, suppressing other religions’ ideas and burning their books and records, and also mentioned in many places the casualties of war – bombed, burned-out libraries, priceless ancient books being lost to fire and looters. The latter was preferable, as that usually meant the book would resurface somewhere!

I was a little disappointed that he didn’t talk more about the development of cataloguing systems, and barely mentioned the Dewey Decimal System at all. I thought that was really odd, considering it’s the most-used cataloguing system today! He talked about the difficulty of maintaining a catalogue, but didn’t discuss a lot about how that changed in the modern age.

If you’re interested in libraries, I would definitely recommend this book. As histories go, it wasn’t nearly as dry as some I’ve read, and the pictures were fabulous. I’d definitely like to own this book someday, but for now it will have to go back to the library.

From the inner cover of The Library: An Illustrated History:

“The first libraries appeared five thousand years ago in Southwest Asia’s ‘Fertile Crescent’…the birthplace of writing, some time before 3000 BCE,” writes Stuart A. P. Murray, introducing his fascinating exploration into the history of the library. With the dawning of advanced civilization, the written word flourished and the need for libraries became paramount in many societies.

Throughout the history of the world, libraries have been constructed, burned, discovered, raided, and cherished – while the treasures they housed evolved from early stone tablets, to beautifully illumined vellum, and to the mass-produced, bound paper books and the digital formats of our present day. The Library opens doors to the libraries of ancient Greece, early China, Renaissance England, and modern-day America. This volume speaks to the book lover in all of us while offering a panoramic view of the history of libraries across the centuries.

Book Review: Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian

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dispatchesQuiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian
by Scott Douglas
330 pages
Published 2008
Memoir

“You catch a guy on a computer jacking off, just get a librarian – don’t try and handle it yourself.” That was the first thing Faren, the library manager, said to me on my first day of work.
I was a library page.

The opening lines of this book caught my attention immediately. I’ve always loved libraries, and have recently applied for a library page position at my local library. Until reading this book, I (perhaps naively) thought that would only mean shelving books. Quiet, Please is a look inside a public library – a peek at the quirky patrons, from the seniors having trouble with computerized book catalogs to the homeless who spend all day every day inside those walls to the teenagers hacking the library computers to look at porn. Douglas points out the eccentricities of librarians – people he thought knew everything about books until he actually began to WORK with them and found that many of them rarely even read. He tells us all of this in the engrossing style of your favorite uncle’s college stories – exaggerated, full of digressions, and sometimes only barely based on a kernel of truth.

One thing I found a little jarring – the opening lines of the book mention a patron using a computer on his first day of work. Yet, a chapter later, he’s describing the day the computers arrived at the library. So did he start before the computers were in the library or after? I don’t know, and that contradiction is one black mark on an otherwise remarkable book.

I had one other disagreement with Douglas; in the closing of the book, he states that libraries need to adjust to the way people are using libraries now, which I do agree with. But in his list of ways to adjust, he mentions organizing books by subject, like book stores do. When I was a child, I always thought this would be a good idea. If I was looking for Sci-fi/Fantasy books, why can’t I just go to the Sci-fi/Fantasy section and browse? As an adult, I see that this is a TERRIBLE idea. My local library arranges its fiction this way, and it’s incredibly hard to find anything I’m looking for. I know the author’s name – but whether it’s shelved in Science Fiction or Romance or Mystery or General Fiction….(they don’t have a Fantasy section, so they always get shelved elsewhere!) It wouldn’t be so bad if the catalog said “Fiction – Mystery” but instead the catalog always says Adult Fiction Stacks. Which could mean ANY of their categories. What baffles me a little bit about Douglas’ idea is that he also mentions non-fiction categories, and non-fiction is already categorized that way through the Dewey Decimal System. They might not be labeled, but they’re definitely arranged by subject. (Which brings up another beef I have with my library – if I want the catalog to display everything they have from Call Numbers 020 to 029, to find everything in library science and library studies, WHY CAN’T I?) /end rant

The book has not helped me decide whether I ultimately want to be a public librarian or a research/university librarian, which I am disappointed by. I thought it would help! His tales repel me a little bit – I want to be a librarian to work with books, not homeless people. But they also attract me – up until now, I’ve worked in retail and food service – heavily customer service oriented jobs. Public libraries seem to be an interesting mix of my past experiences plus what I hope to do. Ah, well. I have years of school ahead of me before I have to make that decision.

From the back of Quiet, Please:

“For most of us, librarians occupy a quiet, inconspicuous role as the occasional shushers behind the desk. But in QUIET, PLEASE, McSWEENEY’S contributor Scott Douglas takes these quirky caretakers of literature out from the safety of the stacks and places them front and center. With a keen eye for the absurd, and a Keseyesque cast of characters, Douglas delivers a revealing and often hilarious look into a familiar, innocuous setting that’s surprisingly anything but.

Witness the librarian who thinks Thomas Pynchon is Julia Roberts’s latest flame, the technician with a penchant for French pop, the patron who believes the government is canceling her print jobs, and the countless teenagers who know exactly where to shelve suggestions for further reading.

Punctuated by his own highly subjective research into library history – from Andrew Carnegie’s Gilded Age to today’s Afghanistan  – Douglas’s account offers insight into the past, present, and future of a social institution entering the digital age. And as his own library attempts to adapt and to redefine its place in the community at large, Douglas also finds himself searching for a place among the odd, exasperating, and desperately human lives around him. The result is a humorous and surprising take on the world of our literary public servants.”