lower east side librarian

I almost put The Mockingbirds down after the first clumsy page or two, but I stuck with it, and am glad I did. It's the story of date rape and students taking the law into their own hands because the school administration is too impressed with itself to acknowledge and address the school's imperfections. The rapist is a water polo player, for dog's sake!

The Southern California psychic from Shattered Moon is working with the post-Rodney King beating LAPD to find a missing child. Published in 1993, this installment isn't quite as New Agey as the first in the series. There are still a lot of protective white lights being imagined around people's hearts, and Theresa Fortunato is still attracted to boorish men, so things haven't changed too much.

The Encyclopedia of Doris is more than the sum of its Dorises. I'm often not crazy about zine collections because zines read better individually. They're complete unto themselves and are particular to the moment they're published. With the Encyclopedia Cindy edited together nine years of Doris content, plus articles and interviews from other zines and magazines, and so it reads like a complete work, rather than awkwardly connected episodes.

Marie Curie--what a smarty, except for the sleeping with a bottle of radium by her bed. This 28cm tall art biography might just rock your world.

This is one of those popular books that is so popular you don't want to read it, and then it turns out to be as good as the hype. It's a sort of biography/history/science story about the cancer cells of a poor, black mother-of-five who got cancer in a time when medical ethics were more highly evolved for animals than for humans.

One always has to get out of the way that most collections of essays, poems, stories etc. by different authors are uneven in quality and style. I think in this case, more than some others, one's preferences will vary widely. The chapters range from personal diaries to conference presentations, so readers will love some pieces and dislike others, depending on their literary tastes. As a perzine and fiction girl I expected the confessional stories to grab me the most, and some of them did, but I found that the most appealing pieces to me were those that rode the line between scholarly and personal.

Pretty much the same review as for City of Bones.

For the most part I found City of Bones absorbing, yet predictable. There's one surprise I didn't see coming but should have, though. The protagonist, Clary, turns 16 during the course of the novel. I hope she catches onto things quicker as the series progresses and she gets older.

It seems like no one remembers or gives credit to the For Beginners series. Gladstone acts like no one has done a graphic history/politics book before, like this was some crazy new idea she hatched. Clearly I'm a little annoyed at that, but I started off liking the book plenty. The first page I dog-eared to quote says this "The American media are not afraid of the government. They are afraid of their audiences and advertisers. The media do not control you. They pander to you."