Shelf Discovery: the Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading: a Reading Memoir
Comprised of Skurnick and a few other writers’ Fine Lines columns from Jezebel, Shelf Discovery really brings a book-junkie adult back to her book-junkie youth.
At 17, I was learning that fiction was the primary way I’d understand and find meaning in life, that there were feelings I’d felt and experiences I’d had that I couldn’t comprehend until I read about them in books. That some kinds of love have many meanings, and the meanings change over time, the way a book changes each time you reread it. p.328 TRUE THAT.
re: mother’s library school project
Using knitting needles and index cards, she and a classmate created what can only be described as a non-computerized search engine. They notched the cards with a series of holes, some open at the top. The open holes corresponded to key search criteria--author, reading level, subject matter. With the help of a numeric code, you inserted the needles into the cards and lifted; the cards that fell out were the ones that matched your criteria. p. 352 For the love of dog, READERS ADVISORY BY KNITTING NEEDLE. I don’t know what could be more 21st century cool for teen librarians than that unless you could auto-tweet the results to a cross-stitch design generator.