Sarah the Librarian

I turned thirty this month and, not surprisingly, it's given me pause. Last month I picked up a book on the importance of your twenties , and for the most part it was reassuring because I never approached my twenties with the mindset that they weren't important. In fact, I spent most of my twenties worrying that I had taken them too seriously. I married my college sweetheart and went straight to library school and found jobs in libraries or related fields to pay the bills until I landed my first professional librarian gig. I was conventional, responsible, and hard-working. But then what started as a few bumps in the road quickly became something much more serious. My husband started having health problems, which we finally realized were due to a toxic work environment. We decided not only on a job change, but a move to the city we'd been visiting nearly every month anyway. In the process of moving he managed to injure himself so badly that he was unable to work for mont...

At this point this is the winner by far for Granny Reads. Haviland's novel covers all the major tropes of a historical bodice ripper. Our heroine's name is Desire, and she was tragically orphaned during the latest plague. Despite her gentle upbringing, Desire finds herself at the mercy of a brothel owner who orders her to either become a whore or earn her keep as a thief. Obviously our virtuous heroine can't become a whore, so she tries to steal from a man who turns out to be a highwayman with a mysterious past, whom we eventually discover is the wrongly disinherited son of a late country gentleman. It all sounds so ridiculous, and yet the relationship between Desire and Morgan feels so real. As far as any old school conventions of the genre, Desire is nearly raped about a billion times in this book, typifying the (hopefully) outdated notion that attempted rape should be seen as a compliment and confirmation of your good looks. There's also a homely spinster who is,...

Over the winter, I read Redshirts  by John Scalzi, which was a really fun meta spoof on sci-fi TV shows, where the ensigns on board the ship theorize that the reason they have such a high mortality rate is because they're Redshirts on Start Trek -like show. The story was entertaining, but I only liked it, while my husband loved it. On the other hand, the story's three codas, which initially struck me as strange, eventually became my favorite part of the book. Normally this would just be a comment in a Goodreads review, but I thought the structure of the three codas - the first is told in first person, the second is told in second, the third in third - is a good excuse to have a conversation about point of view in fiction. Also, these codas were an excuse for a mostly comic novel to have a soul, and I love humor with a bit of heart.  If you want to read on, there will be broad spoilers since I'll be talking about where characters are at the end of the story. However, mos...

Elearning and Digital Cultures finished up about a month ago. However, before life got in the way of me finishing this class on time to get a completion certificate, I had most of my ideas in place for my final project, so I'm presenting it now, mostly for myself, to prove that I got something out of this new mode of learning. This MOOC has been quite the journey for me. I've been very hesitant of the whole MOOC phenomenon because of my own history with online education. About a decade ago, when I was an undergrad, I took a blended online and in person course on Medieval Latin. I was going to a small liberal arts and with it's block scheduling, our academic calendar didn't match up with the other schools in the course, so I had to rearrange my schedule to fit in the class. Our weekly lectures were streamed online with chat function embedded, but there was only one lab on campus where the computers had the software and headphones available to access these lectures wi...

I realize that #edcmooc finished up several weeks ago, but the last weekend of the course when I planned to finish up all my projects happened to be a perfect storm of excuses not to work on this class, which might be a great start to a conversation on completion rates for MOOCs and what that means in terms of how successful they are, but that's for another time. Before life got in the way, I had this blog post on Week 4's readings nearly ready to go, so I'll present it to you now. This week we talked about posthumanism, what happens when technology has enhanced the human form so much that we are no longer human, but something else. It seems like the central concern here is if at some point adding technological enhancements to the human form will become advanced to the point that accepting such enhancements will forfeit something essential to the human experience. Transhumanists argue that this is not the case, at least not right now. They argue that humanity has such...

While initially it was hard for me this week to transition from the class's first theme of "Dystopia/Utopia" to the second of "Being Human", now I have so many thoughts on the topic, I don't know where to start. I find the movie Wall-E coming to mind again, maybe because I haven't read Brave New World , which has been talked about a lot. I guess Wall-E  is my example of a world where technology has taken over subtly, lulling us into complacency by giving us everything we could ever want - except for the things that arguably make us human. Sometimes this is the way I feel about TV, especially Netflix. In theory this sounds like a great service. You can stream TV shows and movies you're interested in whenever you feel like it, so the convenience aspect is wonderful. But somehow it all gets flipped on it's head, and instead it becomes so important to not only watch what I want, but the idea of a queue makes watching feel like another thin...

This technically is not on my shelf of Granny Reads, but it was suggested to me by a coworker who also happens to be a grandmother and the story really fits the whole theme of Granny Reads, so I'm including it here. I can see why Morning Glory  was recommended so highly to me. I mostly started writing this series to highlight the way romance has changed over the last few decades, but this one was pretty timeless. There are certainly old-fashioned values at play here, but that's because the story is set in the early 1940s in a small town in Georgia. In a marriage of convenience, "crazy" widow Elly Dinsmore advertises for a husband to help her take care of her farm as the birth of her third child approaches, and only penniless ex-con Will Parker is desperate enough to take her up on her offer. While there's a fairly traditional division of labor on Elly and Will's farm, the reasons for this never feel dated. Elly knows house chores inside and out, plus she...