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Loose Ends

I feel terrible that I, yet again, started but didn't finish a Library Day In the Life week. So I'm going to get back to the latest one and sum things up a little.

Health issues were still affecting both my husband and me, so I did more reading while sitting in waiting rooms, mainly G. Kim Dority's Rethinking Information Work, plus catching up on some blogs. I really do want to be a public library person until they drag me kicking and screaming from the library, but I've done a variety of things with my library education and so there's no reason to not keep my options open while job hunting. Sometimes I forget just how many skills I have and if nothing else, it's like getting a little pep talk.

I also checked out a couple webinars. Because it was Anti-Bullying Week, School Library Journal sponsored a Battling Bullying Webinar with popular children's author James Howe as the keynote. I was really surprised to hear about his fight against bullying on behalf of his daughter and also when he chose to come out as a homosexual as an adult. He spoke with real candor and while I loved his Bunnicula books in 2nd grade, I am now going to have to check out The Misfits and its sequels.

I also caught Library Journal's Libraries Are Essential webinar which, in my more cyncial moments I'd call a librarian pep rally, at the same time I really enjoyed and felt like it was a good refresher of all the awesome things we do and especially the important role that public libraries play in their communities.

Of course I also spent some time job searching, but I've done so much of that between then and now that what I focused on that week is a blur.

Another thing I've been meaning to do here is sort of an expanded version of #fridayreads on Twitter. A lot of times I'm reading more than one book at a time and I don't really have space to list them all in 140 characters, and since I used to write a blog dedicated to what I was reading, I think I'm going to revisit that concept here with Friday Reads Uncut.


  • This week I'm reading two Billie Holiday biographies that I've had laying around forever. She's been my favorite jazz singer ever since I heard her sing "Stars Fell on Alabama" my freshman year of high school. 
  • In work-related non-fiction I'm still working on the Dority book I mentioned above.
  • The audiobook I'm listening to is Librivox's production of Madame Bovary, which is a classic I've taken way too long to start reading.
  • And then in a pleasant surprise I received a copy of The Dream Team of 1947 by Arno Niemand, which I helped research, about the only college to win both the NCAA & AAU wrestling championships in the same season (which also happens to be my alma mater). Because of my involvement in the project I started reading it immediately and will probably finish it tonight. If you're into high school/college wrestling or really just like a good underdog sports story, it's worth checking out.
One last thing related to my old book blog that I've been meaning to do is name my five favorite books read in 2010. Since I kept track of what I read partly in my old blog and partly on Goodreads, this list may leave out a deserving candidate.

  1. Scott Pilgrim [series] by Bryan Lee O'Malley - Scott Pilgrim the character is such a loser and yet he and the world he inhabits feel so familiar to me. He's of the same generation as me so not only do I love the killer video game references, but I get his journey to figure out what being a grownup is all about. 
  2. Atonement by Ian McEwan - Tragic love stories are like crack to me; set it in England around WWII and leave the storytelling emotionally restrained and you've got gold.
  3. Walking Dead [series] by Robert Kirkman - Ever since reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies I've been all about campy zombies, but this frightening graphic novel series about the zombie apocalypse was something just a little different and terrifyingly wonderful.
  4. Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot - If you haven't read a rave review of this story about the woman whose immortal cells created the first successful cell culture, than you were living under a rock in 2010. If you enjoy narrative non-fiction, you must check it out.
  5. The Blind Side by Michael Lewis - I picked this up because I love football, but really it's a lot like Skloot's book - narrative non-fiction that brings in pieces from several unexpected places to tell a surprisingly complete story.

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