comp lit and mediaphilia
Today I’m happy to be part of the blog tour for Super Pop!: Pop Culture Top Ten Lists to Help You Win at Trivia, Survive in the Wild, and Make It Through the Holidays , out now from Zest Books. I had forgotten how much I liked books like this. Sometimes it’s good to have a book around that isn’t a narrative but instead is fun to pick up and put down and pick up again. And obviously by the title of my blog, pop culture is one of my favorite things, because it’s media. And I just took a pop culture class as my final (eep!) class for my MSLIS. So it’s perfect and fitting and fantastic.
I feel like approaching the reading of this book from a librarian’s perspective is the best thing, since that’s probably how I will look at it. It’s like a reference book that’s not boring and that’s up to date, and it’s like reader’s advisory the Hannah way, since it has themes like “Adopt a more outlandish childhood” and “Stop being such a philistine.” Win! If you’re a librarian and you do reader’s advisory, likely you want to purchase this book. Or if you like pop culture, and you do, because you’re a human living in the developed world reading this blog. No excuses.
Top 10 Things About This Book That Are Relevant to You, I Hope (In No Particular Order) Continue reading →
Posted in books
Tagged blog tour , books , culture , giveaway , librarianship , pop culture
Jun · 23
With all of my hesitation, complaining, and frustration with many aspects of library and information science, I think it’s important to note that there is one part of it that I completely love and that I would happily do ALL DAY LONG if I could find a job that allowed me to.
It’s actually two things that are sort of the same: booklists and libguides. Before I knew what these were, they were basically all I wanted to do, except I thought I would own an awesome bookstore and call them treasure maps or something, and they would be thematic and clever, because instead of “if you liked Twilight, try these,” they would be things like “nobody does angst like Winona Ryder” and “I paint with words,” which are simultaneously meaningless and yet more interesting and telling than readalikes for popular things. I suppose I have been doing these for awhile, since that’s basically what I do at AllExperts.com, which I joined before I had ever heard the phrase “reader’s advisory.” And sometimes family friends will ask me for a list of titles for their reluctant 12-year-old daughter or whatever, and I assume they are at least somewhat helpful. Continue reading →
Posted in librarianship
Tagged books , librarianship , libraries , library school
Apr · 12
(Part of this post cross-posted at PLG@Simmons Blog .
I had a friend in elementary school who, like me, was creative and entrepreneurial (where did that go? I want that back). In fourth grade, we started a trading card company where we created proprietary characters, made up attributes, created supplemental merchandise, and sold them. I think we made about $10 before our parents found out that we were taking money from our friends, and there was something about that that they didn’t like. Whatever.
They had less of a problem with it when we started a zine in sixth grade. Again, whatever. My point is that we made a zine together, and we consistently published issues for about a year and a half. And it was great. We had an outlet where we could tell people what books we liked, who inspired us, what we liked to cook, whatever. We had an outlet where I was forced to do something I did not like to do – draw – because we wanted the zine to look good, and that meant I had to stretch myself. Zines were really good for me. Continue reading →
Posted in adventures
Tagged authors , job search , librarianship , LIS , zines
Mar · 10
This book! It’s a good one, folks. I fully admit I am like two thirds of the way through and already writing this review, just because I think the book is cool.
So I started reading The Learning Brain: Memory and Brain Development in Children by Torkel Klingberg all the way back in August, which is both good and bad. The good: I need lots of time to absorb neuroscience, since science is not my field. Bad: reading over a long time means you have time to keep forgetting things. I recommend that you pick this book up when you have a longish period of vacation so that you can give it the attention it deserves but also put it down from time to time in favor of some lighter fiction, assuming you are like me and not a scientist. Continue reading →
Tagged books , education , learning , librarianship , neuroscience , review
Dec · 18
So now that I’m subscribing to more librarian listservs, I get to participate in tons of conversations about books and reading issues and library issues related to cataloging and collection development. It’s sweet. I’m learning a lot, and even if I end up working somewhere more suited to me than a library, it will all be useful and relevant and interesting, I’m sure.
BUT. No matter how well-meaning people are, I am sick sick sick of seeing requests for “multicultural books.” Sick of it. My experience at the YALSA symposium last month taught me that talking about issues surrounding those books with librarians is the epitome of preaching to the choir, and quite frankly, it’s well past time that the choir got evangelical. Librarians need to bring this discussion out to the people they serve, and they also need to change their language internally and police each other.
“Multi” is a prefix meaning “many.” That means more than one. If your book is only about white people, it is monocultural. But here’s the thing – if your book is only about black people, it is still monocultural. That’s just words. I think we can all understand that using words properly is kind of important. A bird is not a fish. A book is not a banana. One group of people is not multicultural just because they’re not white folks. Continue reading →
Tagged books , children's literature , diversity , librarianship , libraries , race
Dec · 09
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