Lower East Side Librarian

I only got halfway through this book, but I spent so much time reading it, I wanted credit. I bet the beginning, Richard Stallman creating GNU and Linus Torvalds and the internet developing Linux are the best parts anyway. This is an informative read, and sometimes compelling, evidence that I eventually put it down to the contrary.

As you can imagine, this zine pretty much had me at the title. The contents are 20+ pages of colored-in stick-figure old women engaged in nefarious activities. Some of them are mild: “When I am an old woman I will throw things out of trees at people.” Some are gratuitous: “When I am an old woman I will use impractical implements of destruction for everyday purposes.” (Accompanied by an illustration of a crazy-haired lady taking a hatchet to a lone mushroom on a counter top. Some are what you might expect from an eccentric elderly lady: “When I am an old woman I will cheat rampantly at Bingo.” (I’m looking at you, Sister Loud Melissa.) And others are quite illegal: “When I am an old woman I will take vacations soley for the purposes of gambling and drug-smuggling.”

A.j.’s consumption zine this year contains short reviews of what she read, saw, and listened to, but details what she anti-consumed, i.e. gave away. A girl with a library degree, and a case of packratitude, she purged her book collection. Because she is a big old library geek, not to mention a comics geek and exhibits several other flavors of geekish predilections, she provides a helpful methodology for ridding herself of her books.

No one’s conscience escapes unscathed from war, not even a loving mother and shelterer of freedom fighters. I found Rehana’s story hard to get into at first, and I recommend other readers brief themselves on Bangladesh’s fight for liberation before digging in. With a little patience I did grow to care about Rehana, her son and daughter, and her various friends and neighbors.

So you don’t think I’m completely cold-hearted after reading the majority of my recent teen fiction reviews, A Time for Dancing really got me. I was drawn to it because it appeared to be about dancers, and while that’s kind of true, the dancing part wasn’t what I was hoping for. I was pretty much sucked in by the sob story, told in the voices of a pair of best friends, navigating cancer. Both points of view are credible and moving.