Ten Favorite Public Libraries List

For those of us who are librarians in California, we should be asking ourselves why no California libraries made this list in USA Today:

10 Great Places to Find a Nook and Read a Book

It is the list of the ten favorite public libraries of NPR book commentator Nancy Pearl, author of Book Lust. While there are many reasons for why this might be, it does give me pause.

By the way, I saw an advertisement today for a position at this library that made the list.

Quote of the Week

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.


~~Barack Obama

Out with the new...

What's in that picture? Why, those are books. New or nearly new books that were thrown into a dumpster outside Intermediate School 73 in New York.

Now there could be any number of reasons for how they ended up in the dumpster. No good ones spring to mind, however.

The titles:

• Treasure Island
• Little Women
• Sarah, Plain and Tall
• The Witch of Blackbird Pond
• Kidnapped

Education officials are investigating how this could have happened. At this point, it appears that it was not done by the teacher librarian, but that is only my guess based on the reading of the article.

If the school needed to get rid of the books, at the very least, I would think that they could have been given to students. Yes, they are older titles that are not read as much as they once were, but at my school, I would have had quite a few students who would be happy to get them.

Library Limbo

Looks old, but is not. Kind of fun!

Vampires, round butts, and other oddities

I like to buy books that students actually want to read. I'm odd that way. Today I went to Amazon and purchased the first three books of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga:

• Twilight
• New Moon
• Eclipse

I have been getting a lot of requests for that lately. While we already owned one of them (the second in the series; how does that happen?), I decided to buy all three. Vampires and romance. How can you go wrong?

I also bought Carolyn Mackler's The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. This is actually the second time it has been purchased. It was stolen before it ever made it to the shelves. Note the title.

If it seems like we are a little behind the times at my school, it is because my students are late-adopters with books. They typically don't seem to hear about them until later than our north end of town schools. I am hoping to change that.

By the way, I went to Borders first, but they only had the last two books in the series in hardback. If at all possible, I don't buy paperback. We have too many of those on the shelves already. So I went to Amazon and bought it cheaper and with free shipping.

Since I know that some are not able to purchase from Amazon, I should mention that the only way that I can is through our book fines/lost books slush fund. I will submit the receipt and get reimbursed.