Lower East Side Librarian

Cody's writing is extremely clever, witty, and accessible. I was worried it was going to be too clever at first, but she calms down after the first couple of chapters. Not the over-the-top part, but the general feeling of it reminded me of Ayun Halliday's writing, so if you're an East Village Inky fan, you should like Candy Girl. The title pretty much says it all. Cody got it into her head, or heart really, to do some nude dancing and on-demand masturbating for a while in her mid-twenties. It happens.

I don't know if I've ever read a book that better or as unselfconsciously captures the intimacy and idiosyncrasies of a high school clique. (Note--when I say "clique" I do not mean to imply snobbery or exclusivity, merely the phenomenon where teens create their own family of close friends.) Wanda Lowell and Dora Nussbaum, editors of the school's literary magazine Galaxy which is at the heart of the group's identity, are best friends and the leaders of the clique. Wanda and Dora are called the Wandora Unit because of their intense friendship and solidarity, though sometimes the term is not a tribute. Until their senior year of high school they never disagreed about anything. The Galaxy crew have inside jokes, think they are the funniest and smartest people in the world, and they are doomed.

Sophie Mercer is a social outcast from a broken home who has finally been sentenced to the school you go to when you've been kicked out of all the others: Hecate Hall. Well, where witches, shape shifters, and faeries go anyway. Raised by a human mother and yet to meet her warlock father, Sophie doesn't know a lot about witchery (history and powers), which is kind of a drag when she gets to Hecate (Hex) Hall, because the other kids are steeped in it and even know more about her father than she does. Assigned to the school pariah as a roommate, a pink loving vampire named Jenna, Sophie is not off to a good start at her new school.

I'm wary of wildly popular Oprah-ish books, admittedly not because I'm afraid they'll be bad, but because I'm afraid they'll be good. It would be bad for my literary cred if I embraced every manipulative mass appeal tearjerker that came along! As it turns out, The Help is worthy of adulation. It's a brave book, written by a white author about the black servant/white employer relationship in 1960s Mississippi.

"I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person. I was afraid I would fail to describe a relationship that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history and literature." p.450

Library literotica--I had no idea! I discovered this book when I was invited to appear on a panel with the author and looked her up, as most any librarian would. I immediately checked NYPL and was pleased to see Mid-Manhattan had three copies of the micropublished book. The whole story of how the book got published is fascinating, but I'll leave it to you to get into it. To me the craziest thing about the book is that Weist began it as part of a sculptural installation project for Cooper Union, where she got her BA. It's a little slim at 141 pages, but it's good. Weist is a good writer. It's kind of unfair, really. She's an outrageously articulate speaker, an inspired artist, skilled techie (digital archivist), and super young.

The semi-autobiographical story is that of artist librarian Audrey Reed's sexual and bibliographic adventures in Rochester, Minnesota, where she goes to escape sexual, romantic and other demons in NYC. It's an erotic romance novel with enough true-to-life library details to make it doubly pornful to people of my persuasion. As erotica/romance the strongest elements aren't the plot or even highly believable character development, for me the compelling parts are the library details and deft language.