Sunday Salon...Mother's Day!

A few of the plants and flowers we will be putting into containers today.

Happy Mother's Day.  My husband takes me to my favorite nursery every year for Mother's Day and we buy plants for all our deck containers and pots.  Then he helps me fill them when we get home. The pictures are some of the flowers we bought.  Today, after church, we go to work planting them.

Remodeling Update:  we got all but two of our boxes unpacked. I put up decorations and pictures. It feels like our home again.


Weather today... Sunny and warm. It is supposed to be a lovely day in the Pac NW. I think I'll request a quick spin in the convertible for a Mother's Day gift.

I'm still reading: The Obsidian Blade by Pete Hautman. Book One of the Klaatu Diskos trilogy. About his work Hautman says, "I've been thinking about this trilogy my whole life. when I was a teen, this is what I wanted to read---sci-fi, adventure, the past, the future, and a mind-bending mystery all in one." -from the book jacket
 
I'm listening to: Shanghai Girls by Lisa See. I am entranced by the reading of this audiobook. This is next month's book club selection.

Book finished this week:  All my completed books this week were quick reads that I found when I was moving around my library.

• Casey at the Bat by Ernest Thayer, illustrated by Joe Morse
• Remember: The Journey to School Integration by Toni Morrison.
• God Went to Beauty School by Cynthia Rylant.

Scripture lesson in church: Micah 6:8 "He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
    And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God.^"

I'm praying for: Gary, who has a lung infection that has kept him unwell for months.

Around the house: Planting flowers in my containers and pots on my deck and driveway.

From the kitchen: Apple pancakes for breakfast Saturday.

Memorable event of the week: Dinner out with friends last night. We laughed and talked for hours.

A favorite quote this week: "A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary." ---Dorothy Canfield Fisher

 

Libraries 101..Sorry Dewey

Several years ago, when my daughters were young, we went to the public library to look for American Girls books.  Each of the girls had an American Girl doll and they enjoyed reading the books about their particular doll. Each doll had a set of six books written about them. At the library I had to use the card catalog to locate each of the six books which were located throughout the Junior fiction section because the books were written by different authors.  The children's librarian on duty didn't have any pity on us because they had a strict policy of shelving books correctly according to the Dewey Decimal system. They also had rules about shelving fiction according to the author of the book. She understood that it was a hassle and confusing, but the kids should learn to navigate the catalog to locate the books they want.

That lesson really stuck in my craw.  Shouldn't we think about patrons when we organize our libraries? Years later when I went to school to become a librarian and then got my own library, I was confronted with the same issue. It took me several years but I finally decided that patrons ease of use was more important that rules set up by Dewey years ago.

The issue came to the forefront when I had several classes in the library doing project on immigration.  My books on the subject were located in both the 300s (social issues) and the 973s (US History). I spent my whole day running back and forth, finally pulling all the books and placing them side by side on the top of a shelf making them more accessible for everyone. When the classes were finished with their projects I shelved the books in their proper locations in the 300s and 900s. A few days later kids, who hadn't finished the project on time, started trickling in wanting to locate the books they needed.  Once again I spent several days running back and forth between the two sections before I decided that Dewey was not going to send out the library police if I re-cataloged the books and put them together in one spot. Now I can walk kids and teachers and point to one location for all the immigration books.

All my immigration books in one spot in the library.

In order to do this I had to recatolog the whole lot.  I found a section of the 300s between 312 and 318 where I had no books at all.  I assigned new dewey numbers to everything so that I could
get country books next to each other, too. Admittedly it took a bit of time and effort but it was worth it.

Since then I have done the same thing with the drug books, assigning all of them 362.29 numbers even if the assigned Dewey number meant the book should have been shelved with health issues in the 600s. I decided it made more sense to batch them all together in one spot.  Kids don't care if books in 362.29 should be books about scoial issues related to drug use and the ones in the 600s are more about the health issues related to use.  They just know that they can walk to one spot to see if I have what they are looking for.

Even the fiction section of the library has received my scrutiny.  First, I took all the books by Orca Book Publishing and put them together in one spot.  These books are geared toward reluctant readers and are designed to be high interest but low reading levels.  I talked to the Special Education teachers and they all agreed that it would work best if we just called these books Orca Books (rather than Hi-Low Books) and they should be placed together somewhere for easy assess. I even put ORCA instead of FIC (short for fiction) on the spine label so that my TAs would know where to shelf them. This has been a huge success.  The SPED teachers send kids up from their classrooms to get another ORCA book. The kids all know exactly where they are and don't require my help in locating them.  By the way, I am a huge fan of Orca books.  If you aren't familiar with this publishing company check them out. (Orca Book Publishing.)

Books about Halo all shelved together by title, not author.

Secondly, I took all of the Halo books that are so popular with boys that are in the XBox game and placed them in one spot, re-cataloging them as FIC HAL (for the title, not the author.) I decided to do this to undo the frustration over the American Girls book at the public library. I'm sure that the authors of the various books don't care where I put the books in my library, just that kids still want to read their books.

This summer I hope to tackle another issue...biographies verses subject matter. But that is a blog for another day.

I hope Dewey doesn't mind.

What frustrates you when you go looking for books on a topic at a library? If you are a librarian, have you done any similar fixes?  Please share your thoughts and ideas.


 

Review: Rotters by Daniel Kraus

Rotters by Daniel Kraus recently won the 2012 Odyssey Award for its outstanding audiobook. I challenged myself to read or listen to all of the ALA YA book award winners this year and felt that I should listen rather than read this book since that is the format that earned the book its award.  Kirby Heybourne indeed do a masterful job reading this macabre and gruesome book. He used different voices for different people and his pacing and timing were excellent.  The only problem was that no matter how good a job Mr. Heyborne did with the narration, the story was still macabre and gruesome.

The story is told in the voice of Joey Crouch who has to move to Iowa to live with a father he has never met after the accidental death of his mother. At first his father is distant and elusive but soon Joey learns what his father does.  He is a grave robber. Even though he is repelled by this gruesome and horrifying activity Joey soon finds himself going along with his father and becoming a grave robber himself.


Even as I write this short summary of the book I marvel that I even finished listening to this whole book...hours upon hours of listening to it.  I am not a person who likes horror genre books and usually only accept gruesome topics if they are attached to a nonfiction book, so it is pretty amazing that I made it through this one to the end.  I must admit that there were some pretty exciting scenes that had me on the edge of my seat but mostly I had my hand over my mouth in horror of the thought of digging up corpses and relieving them of their treasures.  Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

While listening one thought went through  my head repeatedly, what kind of research did Daniel Kraus do to be able to describe the contents of coffins and the decomposing bodies with as much detail as he used?  He obviously had done a lot of research.  I sure hope it was from books.  That's all I'll say on that subject!  Ha!

The book while quite well written did not appeal to me, obviously, but it may be just the thing for the student or adult who enjoys a twisted, macabre tale. Fans of Edgar Allan Poe may really relish this one.

Retrospective Wednesday...The Power of One

Retrospective Wednesday is a feature at My Head is Full of Books designed to give bloggers a chance to highlight a book that was published in previous years, in the hope that it will cause others to go back and read it. The featured book must have been published one or more years ago.  Please leave a comment and link back to Headfullofbooks from your blog post. Join in the fun highlighting favorite "old books."

 This week I am featuring a retrospective look at the book The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay, which was published in 1989. It is set in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s, young Peekay dreams of becoming the welterweight boxing champion of the world. Born into a world divided by racism and hatred and on the brink of war, Peekay must triumph over injustice and does so in a spectacular way. His whole life is about the power of one, the power we have to rise above our circumstances and make a better world for ourselves and others.

Just this week a young man returned this book to the library.  When he handed it too me, I clutched the book to my chest and said, "oh, this book is so good, so powerful." The young man, who isn't a big reader, looked me right in the eyes and said, "This book is a life-changer. I am a different person now that I have read this book." I kid you not, he really said that.  A high school boy said that a book changed his life. And not just any book, but The Power of One, which isn't just a good book, but it is a "clutch-it-to-your-chest" good book. A book that speaks to power that we each have within us.

Trust me on this one.  If you haven't read it, do!  If you are a high school or public librarian and you don't have this book in your collection, get it.  It won't fly off the shelf.  But every year or so someone will discover it and it will be a life-changer for them.  It is worth the expense, I promise.

Top Ten Quotes (Reprise)

The Broke and Bookish

 These are some of my favorite quotes.  

I reprised this list from one I made a few years ago.

1. "That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive- all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment." 

---The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrons, pgs 11-12.

2. "When I visit the back corners of my life again after so long a time, littlest things jump out first." "Even when it stands vacant the past is never empty." 

---Whistling Season by Ivan Doig, pages 1 and 344.

3. "I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story." 

---The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, pg. 246.

4. "Remembering is a word I use for praying. Sometimes it's like waiting for music to come out of silence." 

---Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork, pg. 147.

5. "...even after fifty years it retains its aura of brimstone and taboo...what people remember isn't the book itself, so much as the furor. Ministers in church denounced it as obscene...the library was forced to remove it from the shelves...There's nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy." 

 ---The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, p. 39.

6. "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." 

---Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

7. "...until Ammu shook her and told her to stoppit and she stoppited. Around them the hustling-jostling crowd. Scurrying hurrying buying selling luggage trundling porter paying children shitting people spitting coming going begging." 

---The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

8. "Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering." 

---The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, pg. 11.

9. "His question caught her off-guard, and she didn't know what to do with it. The part of her that was open to the universe was facing in another direction just then." 

---Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins, p. 327.

10. "Shall we go to Bethlehem, boys, or shall we dance?"

 ---The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog by Dave Barry.

11. "I try to fend off the oceanic sadness, but I can't. It's such a colossal effort not to be haunted by what is lost, but to be enchanted by what was." 

---The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson, p.275.

12. "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to totally suck." 

---Feed by M.T. Anderson, p. 1.

 13. "You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope." ---Captain Wentworth in Persuasion by Jane Austen                                                                        

 

It's Monday, May 7th, and I'm reading...

Sheila at Book Journey

Jen and Kellee at Teach Mentor Text

What I am currently reading and my progress:
1.  The Obsidian Blade by Pete Hautman- Pete describes this as part sci-fi, part adventure, part historical, part futuristic. The reviews are coming in as this is a good one.  I hope I will concur. I've barely started it,  I'm only on around page 35.

2. The Iron King by Julie Kagawa-This is the first book in the Iron Fey series which is hot, hot, hot in my library.  I am reading it to evaluate if I want to include it in my Nifty Fifty cart of special books.  So far so good but I'm only on the 2nd chapter.


What I am listening to:
-The Shanghai Girls by Lisa See, read by Janet Song. I am mesmerized.

What I've recently finished:
1.  Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzgerald I half listened, half read this book at break neck speed. A paranormal romance that had me on the edge of my seat.

2. Soldier Bear by Bib Tak.  Translated from Dutch, this book won the 2012 Batchelor Award for translated works. It is a Junior book and it really wasn't a favorite.

3. Love and Leftovers by Sarah Tregay. Written in verse, this coming-of-age story has a lot going for it.


What I hope to read next:
I have three library books piled up next to my bed and i want to read them before I have to return them:
-The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour. I read a not-so-great review after reading a few good ones which has caused me to pause.  Hmm.m.m.
-Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi. "When Aria, a sheltered and fragile Dweller, is exiled from her home in Reverie, she must face The Death Shop, a land filled with cannibals and dangerous energy storms, and her only hope for staying alive depends on Outsider Perry, a savage hunter" Sounds ominous, doesn't it?
-The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen. This is my next audiobook.
-The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. This is my next book club selection and I must pick it up from Margaret G-F as I am only 31st in line at the public library.  Ha!

What are you reading and how do you like it?

 

Sunday Salon...May 6th

Remodeling Update:  All the contractors have finished with us now we are left alone to finish up painting and reorganizing our "stuff" and furniture. Just a few touches of paint here and there and we will be done today and we can hang the curtains and pictures and make our home homey again.

Weather today... Sunny and warm. It is supposed to be a lovely day in the Pac NW.

I'm reading: The Obsidian Blade by Pete Hautman. Book One of the Klaatu Diskos trilogy. About his work Hautman says, "I've been thinking about this trilogy my whole life. when I was a teen, this is what I wanted to read---sci-fi, adventure, the past, the future, and a mind-bending mystery all in one." -from the book jacket

 
I'm listening to: Nothing, but I will start Shanghai Girls by Lisa See today on the return trip from Seattle after dropping off my daughter back at college. This is next month's book club selection.

Book finished this week:  

• Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick. A paranormal romance.  I usually try to avoid this genre of book but this book had me by the throat and I HAD to read it and read it fast!  I now know why it is so popular in my library right now.
• Soldier Bear by Bib Tak. This won the Batchelor Award in 2012, an award given to books translated into English. This book was originally written in Dutch. I read this as part of my challenge to read all the ALA Award winners for 2012.
• Love and Leftovers by Sarah Tregay. A coming-of-age story written in verse. A quick, yet surprisingly deep story.

Scripture lesson in church: John 13:12-14 ¹² When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. ¹³ “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’and rightly so, for that is what I am. ¹⁴ Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash each other's feet.

I'm praying for: For loving patience.

Around the house: Painting.

From the kitchen: Parmesan Chicken that was divine.

Memorable event of the week: Doing wedding-related things with my daughters.

A favorite quote this week: "Reading that book was a little like eating an undercooked brownie. It was completely gooey." - my student, Melia W. answer when asked if she liked the book The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight.

 

Review: Love and Leftovers by Sarah Tregay

When Marcie and her parents for the New Hampshire for the summer she has no idea that everything in her life is about to be turned upside-down. When her father admits that he is gay and in love with a man everything changes.  Now she and her mother are living on the East Coast away from her boyfriend, Linus, and her group of friends, The Leftovers, and Marcie is miserable and lonely.

The first half of this delightful coming-of-age book, Love and Leftovers by Sarah Tregay, is set in New Hampshire, the second half Marcie is back in Boise. Told in verse Love and Leftovers is a very believable book about first love and the complexities of high school relationships.  Marcie, who often behaves like a teenager, not in compliance with the wishes of adults, is a sympathetic character grappling with issues related to her parents and their problems, and how to navigate uncharted waters of attraction to and attention from the opposite sex. The story moves along at a quick clip due to the terrific poetry.

"In both of my classes
my teachers sound like
the one in the Peanuts cartoons,
talking gibberish.

Because all I can hear
all afternoon
is my heartbeat
thumping out its new mantra

Love dub/love dub
Love dub/love dub
Love dub/love dub" -p. 413

I'm sure that fans of Ellen Hopkins and Sonya Sones books will delight in this book. Some readers may be put off because the book looks so long at 432 pages until they realize how much white space there is on each page. But, as the reviewer for Kirkus Reviews says, there is a lot of depth in between all that white space. I'm guessing that this book will fly off the library shelves and that readers will tell their friends about it. It is that good.

 

2012 Top Titles in GKHS Library

2012 Most Popular Books in the GKHS Library, so far this year!

Title	Genre
1. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins	Dystopian (2nd book in series)
2. Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins	Dystopian (1st book in series)
3. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins	Dystopian (3rd book in series)
4. The Maze Runner by James Dashner	Dystopian (1st book in series)
5. Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor	Fantasy
6. Divergent by Veronica Roth	Dystopian
7. A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer	Memoir/Nonfiction
8. Crescendo by Becca Fitpatrick	Paranormal Romance (2nd Book in series)
9. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green	Realism
10. Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick	Paranormal Romance (1st book in series)
11. Inheritance by Christopher Paolini	Fantasy (4th book in series)
12. The Scorch Trials By James Dashner	Dystopian (2nd book in series)
13. Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick	Paranormal romance (3rd book in series)
14. Berlin Boxing Club by Robert Sharenow	Historical fiction
15. The Death Cure by James Dashner	Dystopian (3rd book in series)
16. Halo by Alexandra Adornetto	Paranormal romance
17. Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater	Magical realism/Romance
18. The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson	Romance
19. Stupid Fast by Geoff Herbach	Realism
20. The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan	Fantasy/Mythology
21. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs	Historical/Realism
22. Unwind by Neal Shusterman	Dystopian

 

Top Ten Books I'd Like to See On the Big Screen

The Broke and Bookish

Top Ten Books I’d like to see made into a movie

Though I often wish that books were never made into movies because then people stop reading the book and then only watch the movie (as evidenced by the two teens I talked to yesterday that told me that they have never read any of the Harry Potter books, but they love the movies.)

1. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford---a wonderful book about Japanese Internment and a multicultural love story between a Chinese-American boy and a Japanese-American girl. Jamie told the assembled group listening to his presentation for All-Pierce County Reads last month that he has been approached to have this book made into a movie by several different people but all want the main character to be white instead of Chinese-American.  This would totally wreck the story.  Way to go, Mr. Ford, on saying no to that proposal.
2. Divergent by Veronica Roth---this dystopian book is wildly popular in the library right now and many are comparing it to Hunger Games in terms of excitement.  Let’s allow the whole series to be written first, however.
3. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness--- Actually this book is being made into a movie.  The screen writer has been chosen.  I am very excited about this one.  If done right it will be GOOD.
4. The Maze Runner by James Dashner--- Another dystopian book that would make an extremely compelling movie.  Like the Hunger Games series, the third book in this series isn’t as good as the other two, but I still loved it.
5. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins--- I’m sure that this movie is already in the works.  I love the whole series and I was very pleased with the Hunger Games movie so I know Catching Fire will be good if they use the same producer.
6. Eragon by Christopher Paolini--- Every time I make one of these lists I add Eragon to it because the movie was so bad it doesn’t count.  Fortunately most students haven’t seen it and we have Inheritance Cycle devotees who love the whole series, as do I, and would happily go to a good movie made from the books.
7. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese--- this is one of my favorite books I read in the past few years.  I think it would make an excellent, almost epic movie if done right with all the historical and cultural material left intact.
8. Stiff: the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach--- I think a documentary on the chapters in this book would be a hoot, and very interesting.  Obviously, it would need to be tastefully handled.
9. In the Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan.  OK, so I’m not into zombies but this book could a really good movie, even if I didn’t go and see it.
10. Paper Towns by John Green.  This book is so zany and has a good, compelling mystery. I think it would be a blockbuster.