Oops. I accidentally skipped Week 16 of the Library of Congress Subject Headings lists
This week on LCSH Watch:
Four books into the Sookie Stackhouse series, I'm finally willing to admit I'm getting hooked. That's not entirely stubbornness or snobbery talking; only with this one and it's predecessor, Club Dead did I read the books in a hurry. Plus, I liked that Harris thanked a librarian, Doris Ann Norris, in her acknowledgments page.
Because I've been reading such crap lately, I sort of forced myself to finish this literary novel even though I wasn't enjoying it so much. It's actually quite poetically written; it just didn't grab me. The narrator is a pre-teen with an angry older sister, a fucked up veteran father, and a mother who doesn't have much of a presence in their lives. They've also got a dog that keeps getting knocked up and a bunny with no tail. That's all I've got to say about the book. Sorry.
This week on LCSH Watch, we examine
...and I agitate for INFOSHOPS and PUNK PARENTING, per my latest mailing from the notorious Sandy Berman.
I couldn't remember the name of a teen vampire series I saw the last time I was at the Tompkins Square branch of the New York Public Library. They didn't have the first book in the series, so I told myself I'd remember it. Ha! So I typed {ya fiction vampires} into a search engine and came up with Vampire Fiction for Young Adults as the first result. I immediately recognized Blue Bloods as the series I was after, and I'll be able to mine the site for more teen vamp books as soon as I'm done with the Blue Bloods. Just thought I'd share. (Maybe all y'all teen librarians know about Monster Librarian, but us ignorant academics aren't quite as well-informed.)
Because I was a little busy and stressed when the latest Library Journal zine reviews column came out on May 7, I didn't get around to mentioning it. The May 2009 column, contributed by Jerianne Thompson, Zines from a Tennessee Public Library: Or, Stop Being a Wuss and Start a Collection Already! reviews zines held at the Linebaugh Public Library in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. In choosing the theme for this issue, I wanted to show that zines aren't just for Yankee liberals, that they can and do serve the public in all types of libraries and geographic locations.
In case you didn't know, Jerianne is Wonder Woman.
And here's why...
I want to point my fellow New Yorkers to this article by Steve Wishnia in The Indypendent. The conceipt of the piece is that since Bloomberg is going to buy the Mayoral election anyway, then we shouldn't let him have it for the mere $80 million he's likely to spend on advertisement, but that we should demand the full $11.5 billion he has earned since becoming NYC mayor in 2001. (His "worth" then was $4.5 billion; now it's 16.) Wishnia portions out the 11.5 B on the MTA, housing, education, jobs, alternative energy, health, etc.
The Long Way Home, which I got from the Miami-Dade Public Library via Columbia interlibrary loan, takes up where the tv show leaves off, more or less. So far having read the first and third installment, I haven't really learned much about what happened immediately after the destruction of the hellmouth and Sunnydale, just that Buffy, the surviving Scoobies, and the potentials have relocated to Europe. And that somehow along the way, Dawn got turned into a giant, which is possibly some kind of mystical STD.
Library of Congress Subject Headings Weekly List 15 (April 15, 2009)
I know, I know, I'm sick of reading all this paranormal fiction. I really need something a little meatier right now. But it also has to be compelling. I've been in a bad way for all of 2009, literarily speaking, I think. Suggestions welcome for literary fiction (along the lines of A Map of Home or Peony in Love, for example) and Twilight readalikes!