Tagged with librarians

I have a soft spot for librarian fiction, but a distaste for Gale Cengage Learning, which in addition to the crime of being a library conglomerate responsible for some overpriced electronic resources with crappy interfaces, has published at least one other librarian penned title in its Five Star genre fiction imprint.

I’m sorry, but I don’t especially know what to make of this one. Librarian semi-accidentally kidnaps 10-year-old whose parents and pastor are trying to de-gay him. I probably would be more charitable towards the book if it depicted librarians and library work more accurately.

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.