Sarah the Librarian

A few things I've been reading lately that I didn't want to pass without comment: The suicide of Aaron Swartz made the regular news, but LJ  and Jessamyn West have a nice collection of information about the Internet activist who worked so hard for increased access to information online. His aggressive prosecution for intending to freely distribute JSTOR content online has been widely listed as a contributing factor to his untimely demise. Interestingly enough,  JSTOR recently announced that they're opening their collection to the public on a limited basis. So why was the government still pursuing such harsh sentencing for him? There's also been a lot of talk about feminism and the sneaky ways that's it's still hard to be successful as a woman at work. Hi Miss Julie had some interesting things to say about how big flashy things often championed by male librarians are what tend to get recognition in librarianship, while the less flashy, practical everyd...

Continuing my reading journey through a grandmother's collection primarily of romance novels, I'm writing about the first book I picked out of this pile. Married at Midnight  is another collection of stories, this time historical, all bearing the same title and about couples rushing to marry before a midnight deadline, most of them finding love only after they've become husband and wife. I like this one a little more than the Christmas collection I reviewed last, maybe because I can handle old-fashioned values in an old-fashioned setting better than in a modern one. Also, while the heroines in this collection still might not be very active participants in their relationships, they're all fairly brave at some point in their story. Jo Beverly's heroine searches out the father of her unborn child on a battlefield in Belgium so that she can marry him and ensure that the child won't be born a bastard. Samatha James tells of a heroine's attempt to end her fath...

Generally I do a really terrible job of reading books right after they come out, so I doubt that aside from Gone Girl  there are many books published in 2012 that I actually read in 2012. Instead this is a list of my favorite books read for the first time in 2012. Signing Their Rights Away  (2011) by Denise Kiernan - I was blown away by how fun, informative, and flat-out readable this collection of short biographies of the signers of the Constitution was. The chapter titles are clever, the stories pull out fun facts, yet still manage to tell the important history of the early years of this country, and the cover folds out to be a life-size replica of the Constitution. This is just a quality project all-around. Thirteen Reasons Why  (2007) by Jay Asher - I finally got to this recent YA classic about a girl who kills herself and then leaves tapes behind explaining her reasons why. You'll pick it up because it's about the important issues of suicide and bullying, but you'...