Lower East Side Librarian

It is the rare piece of literary fiction that I can get through these days, but I sailed through The Ghost Bride. It's literary, also historical and magical. The story takes place in 19th century Malaysia and in heavenly realms.

My menopause book club with Kate Haas is about as regular as a perimenopausal woman's period, since we're on our fourth book since February. This mostly non-fiction anthology is my favorite entry so far. I liked one of the novels quite a bit, but Off the Rag is the first to get into what menopause is like, which is what drove Kate and me to start our club.

On Friday I cataloged the first five issues of librarian Anne Hays' pretty gender and self-exploration zine. It started off as a compilation zine, focusing exclusively on gender. In number two, Anne shares a bunch of her friends' responses to questions about how they feel about bras, and the zine continues to evolve into a personal zine on multiple topics with each issue.

Cover image from Stranger Danger zine distro

In part two of Carlson's Blooded series, the only female werewolf in the world is on a mission to rescue her mate, a werecat (of an as yet unidentified genus) with barely a cameo role in this installment. She's fighting a powerful goddess and there are stakes beyond saving her dude, like preventing a war between supernatural sects.

Last year the note on Jessa's copy of my Winter Solstice Shout Out zine asked if she was going to make a dissertation procrastination zine. On the first page of Jessa's new zine she answers me, "Yes, Jenna. Yes, I am."

Rowell's first book is an adult romance novel. Yeah, a romance novel (set in Iowa), but for a geek set. Since I don't read many romance novels, outside of paranormal fiction, I don't know what they're like, but can they possibly be as smart and funny as this?

I was DEE-lighted to receive Delaine's book in the mail, a signed donation from the author to the Barnard Library. Somehow I had never read her zines, but I'd seen her always-adorable comics in A.j. Michel's compilations and maybe others. I always meant to… Well, her My Small Diary zines seem to be out of print, but you can still buy Not My Small Diary. Back to being delighted, the MSD collection is comprised of nearly a hundred one-page comics, similar to a daily comic. What's different, aside from the fact that the comics aren't dated to a single day (they're generally labeled with a season and year), is that the four to six images on each page aren't linear or even necessarily connected. They're more like a handful of illustrated Facebook status updates. (Forgive me for saying that.)

Note that the image above pictures page 45. If you're up on your memes know that the first sentence on that page describes your sex life. "What will YOUR fortune fish say?"

You may recall that I was enthusiastic about Min's first memoir, Red Azalea and her novel Wild Ginger. I expected to like Cooked Seed twice as hard. It starts more or less where Azalea leaves off--at Min's emigration to the US. Somehow, even after the stories of Cultural Revolution privations, cruelties and humiliations in the first part, Seed is harder to take. I guess because you can blame Min's problems on her, or maybe because you have to blame some of her problems on the United States.