Can you not dig it?

pea tendrils, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

On the topic of books not read, here is a list of post-apocalyptic grownup fiction, compiled by Keir Graff at Booklist, some of which I've read (Canticle for Leibowitz, Oryx and Crake, Riddley Walker) and some I mean to.

Also, this guy is really funny describing what he's not been up to promoting his book.

Not in my head
Two things that have been bugging the shit out of me ever since I noticed them:

1. "Elmo's World" on Sesame Street is to the same tune as the Budweiser beer jingle.

Elmo loves his goldfish (One taste will tell you)
His crayon too (So loud and clear)
That's Elmo's (When you say Bud you've said it)
WORLD! (ALL!)

1. That Josh Ritter "Right Moves" song (which, I mean, we already have a Nick Lowe, and he's great, so does that mean that two Nick Lowe's are even better?) sounds just like "Thank you for being a friend," the Golden Girls theme song.

Not encouraging it
I was talking to my friend Christine yesterday, when we heard Zhou burst out crying. He had tripped and scraped his hand. Now, Zhou is very into quantifying things: "This dinner is two hundred and forty-four delicious!" "I like Max a lot, but Joseph only medium." "If a baby was a hundred and one smaller than a mouse baby, then you might step on it."

Consequently, he needed to explain just exactly the extent of his pain. Through his tears, he blubbered "My hand hurts almost as much as hell!"

I managed to stutter out, "Oh, baby, that's a lot of hurt isn't it? But that's a grownup word..." before the effort of not laughing made speech impossible. Christine had to walk away, doubled over, and I had to hold my nose.

Speaking of scrota

Poppy bud, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

New fancy expensive camera and what do I do? Take dirty pictures.

Meemy-meme

That picture yesterday looks like the fruits of a weekend spent castrating clowns. Don't you think? Really they're juggling balls I made for the elementary school's juggling club. Balloons filled with millet. Anyway. Here's a meme that MotherReader tagged me with. I would do it on Pink Me, but then I couldn't talk about drugs and multicolored scrotums. Scrota?

What were you doing five years ago?
2003? That's easy. Unpacking boxes while WAITING for Zhou to be born. He was born June 3 - two weeks late and induced. We moved into this house May 7. I was large and psychotic. I mowed the entire lawn with the weedwhacker because we didn't have a lawnmower yet.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

1. Roast a chicken
2. Start taking pictures with my brand new long-awaited Nikon D40 as soon as the battery charges
3. Pick up Mao and Small Batch from school
4. Shower*
5. Score*

What are five snacks you enjoy?
Flaming Hot Cheetos
Pickled okra
Real licorice
Gummy bears
The other half the bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?
Buy the school a science teacher
Buy every school a science teacher
Live in Africa half the year
Not clean
Pitch in with George Soros

What are five of your bad habits?

Too much time on the computer
Being the last to get up in the morning
Getting all OCD on the dishwasher
Gossip
Driving with my eyes crossed just to see how long I can do it without crashing into something*

What are five places where you have lived?
Baltimore
Cleveland
New York City
Provincetown
Soledad*

What are five jobs you have had?
Dishwasher
Director of marketing at an insurance finance company
Artist's model
Assistant editor at a medical publishing company
Special Collections Manager at the American Museum of Natural History

What five people do you want to tag?
AH, who doesn't do these things
Heidi, who might
Lori, payback for those 106 books (which was actually pretty interesting)
mb, because I'm curious
and ACW, because I haven't had enough profanity in my day yet*

*that is a lie

Give me an issue, I'll give you a tissue

Balls, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Now, I don't review children's books on this blog anymore, after repeated complaints (Jaime, Juliet, some rude anonymous namecalling commenter) and after realizing I could maybe make a buck or two if I stuck all the reviews in the same place and cleaned up the language.

So I review all the little kiddie books, the bigger kiddie books, the books about sharing and the books about colors and numbers, over on Pink Me. I even review the books about how to deal with it when your big brother has autism. And I leave you Your Neighborhood Librarian readers to your hard drugs and your fetish behavior. You're welcome.

But this morning's crop of new books was, I thought, noteworthy even for you cynical glue-sniffing bastards. This morning's new book cart covered depression, head lice, physical handicap, cancer, and strabismus.

Strabismus! (No, it's not a new way to do anal - get your head out of... wherever... and go look it up.)

Mini-meme

Courtesy Compu-Diva, here's a little free-association meme:

1. Track ::
2. Snake ::
3. Assignment ::
4. Blockbuster ::
5. Bombastic ::
6. Adventure ::
7. First time ::
8. Aged ::
9. Grip ::
10. Shortcut::

1. Track :: shoe
2. Snake :: skin
3. Assignment :: desk
4. Blockbuster :: video
5. Bombastic :: Erma
6. Adventure :: Indiana Jones
7. First time :: out
8. Aged :: hippie
9. Grip :: death
10. Shortcut:: keyboard

Play along here.

Your guide to famous Chinese Communists

Yy is for yawn, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

I made an alphabet book for our youngest child, whose blog name is now Zhou. I never cared for "Mr. Four". "Mr. Three" was ok, but "Mr. Four" never made it for me, and now that he's about to be Mr. Five, yeah forget it.

So he's Zhou and the Big Man is now Mao. Deal.

I think the ABC book is pretty damn cute, if I do say so myself. You can see it for yourself on Flickr. A couple pictures will be off-limits to you because they involve underwear or real names. Deal.

No, but at least I'm not driving around with a severed head in my car

got Jesus and a severed head, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

There's a beauty school in our neighborhood - sometimes makes for some startling sights.

Fug the READ poster - wishful thinking

Now that we've had a good look at some of the worst of the American Library Association's celebrity READ posters, I think it's time to offer up some ideas for making them better. After all, it's fun to poke fun at something, but until you offer constructive criticism, you're just being a punk.

When I look at the READ posters, certain things jump out at me:


Location/occupation. The typical pose in a READ poster is: standing or seated in front of a bland, colored backdrop, or, even worse, an over-Photoshopped melange (poor Tony Hawk). Often the celeb is HOLDING the book, instead of reading it.



Personnel. Skanky Colin Farrell is meant to appeal to whom, exactly? Probably not teen girls, and if in fact that's the case, get those girls the HPV vaccine, stat. William H. Macy? Very few readers of Curious George are likely to recognize him. Obviously there's not a lot of choice here - ALA probably gets the celebrities who are either involved with literacy programs (Levar Burton) or currently promoting a movie (Salma Hayek). Speaking of Salma, her poster says "LEA," Spanish for "read". Why doesn't Aishwarya Rai's poster include the Hindi word for "read"?



Book choice. The worst are the movie promotions. Do I believe that Keira Knightley reads Jane Austen for pleasure? Just look at that face - she has less patience for carriage rides to the ha-ha than I do. I am considerably more convinced that Britney Spears has read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. And Swank probably chewed through The Freedom Writers Diary, but for work, not for fun.


Here are some of my ideas to make them better:


That's Jada Pinkett Smith reading to kids.

The celeb. My system had the opportunity recently to make some of our own READ posters, and I suggested a local band (Secret Crush Society was my nominee) or members of Baltimore's roller derby league, the Charm City Roller Girls, as literacy advocates. I also thought it would be great if we could get cast members from The Wire (especially Snoop - she has her own memoir out, Grace After Midnight) or Ogun, a hip hop star from Baltimore.

For ALA, how boss would it be to get the whole cast of Battlestar Galactica lounging around on set reading books of their choice? Or the American Idol judges reading books about performance and criticism (Paula Abdul could pick whatever she wanted though - I bet she'd surprise us by reading Derrida or something). You know what I mean? ALA needs to go pop. Lil Mama. Jay-Z and Beyonce. People that young people actually recognize - none of this Ethan Hawke stuff.



The setting. It's no crime to take advantage of a celeb's promo tour for a movie... but do it right. Costume is good, but setting is better (except for poor Elijah Wood). WAAAAY back in the day, Sting posed for a READ poster, in full costume and on location, with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Click through, it's a crappy cell phone photo, but it's worth it.

The Serena Williams poster is one of ALA's best, and it's because she's standing on a damn tennis court.

A cheap way to achieve this is with illustration. William H. Macy's Curious George poster is so much better than most because the blank background is replaced with H.A. Rey-style illustration.

The success of that particular poster makes me realize that ALA is missing a trick. Nowadays, big stars are voicing characters for animated TV series and movies. Brooke Shields did Miss Spider's voice. Jack Black is the Kung Fu Panda. You could insert Freddie Highmore into some Tony DiTerlizzi Spiderwick illustrations and bingo, you've got a poster. Jim Carrey and Steve Carell are in Horton Hears a Who, fer crap's sake. For the teens and grownups, get Marjane Satrapi to draw a panel of Persepolis with a book in it.



Next, tha book. Nice try, getting hot Eva Mendes to pose for a poster. But you let her choose Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic? Right. That's what she reads for fun. (Plus, they covered up her boobs with it - a crime in any context.)



Jennifer Love Hewitt

Here's my idea: as soon as the celebrity gets to the photo shoot, rifle through his or her bag. Go out to the car. Any reading material that you find - Thug-A-Licious, US Magazine, Three Cups of Tea, even a script - bring it in, shove it into his or her hands, and point his or her face at it. J Lo Hew is amused by what she's reading in OK! magazine in this picture (plus she looks great) - I have no idea what Kareem Abdul-Jabbar actually thinks about Huck Finn in his poster.



Roger Federer as Wart from The Sword in the Stone. Photo by Annie Liebowitz.

But in my wildest dreams, the ALA READ posters would be like the Annie Leibowitz Disney portraits. Styled to within an inch of life, featuring name-brand stars shot in the most flattering light, you could just dive into them.

Rachel Weisz as Snow White, lost in a deep forest? Find a way to incorporate a picture of the book, and that's a poster that makes someone want to read. Beyonce I'd say is a little... ripe as Alice in Wonderland, but who could argue with Baryshnikov as The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up? Do those tableaux make you think of the animated Disney movies? Not me. Those pictures make me want to revisit Alice and Peter on their home ground - in their books. [Oh, screw Disney. None of the picture links will work - you have to go to the site and click on each image.]

OR: since I'm wishing, I'll wish that ALA had the money for authentic location shots. Madonna - she even writes her own children's books (although they suck). Get her in bed at home reading to her kids. Find Miley Cyrus backstage getting her hair did, reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Shoot Lil Mama in the back of the tour bus, smoking a blunt, reading Estee: A Success Story.

I especially yearn for photos that show the book in use. Take a picture of Travolta referring to a pilot's manual as he checks out his plane pre-takeoff. Show us Angelina Jolie citing precedent from a book of case law about international adoptions in some dusty Lesotho courtroom. Jet Li with The Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook open on the counter as he fills his pastry bag with royal icing. Owen Wilson consulting a Chilton car repair manual as he tinkers under the hood of Lightning McQueen. Give me Seagal beating someone to death with a copy of Eat, Pray, Love.

Oh, and Johnny Depp you can shoot in my back yard, lounging in the grass reading The Once and Future King out loud to me and my kids.



Here's ALA's latest. At first glance, I'll say "better." But let's parse.
Personnel: Steve Carell - big star.
Setting: Location photo with illustration elements - good.
Movie tie-in: Get Smart - funny movie (probably). More kid interest than, say, Miss Potter, and may I say what a WASTE of Ewan McGregor!
Library tie-in: "GET SMART... @ your library" Well, not so much. Looks like a movie poster with superimposed library text. He's nowhere near a book. And he's talking into his shoe, which makes you think he hasn't learned a daggone thing since 1965. Sigh.

The Current 106 Most Pretendy Books

Via Lori at Holy Buck, Fatman!, I give you the 106 Most Pretentious Books of all time. That should really read "The 106 Books People Most Frequently Pretend They're Going To Read... Or Mean To Read Because They're Supposed To... Or Just Keep in Mind For Next Time They're Really Bored - As of Now", because it's actually a list of the 106 books most frequently tagged as "unread" on LibraryThing.

Books I've finished are italicized. Books I started and then put down because life is too motherfucking short are struck-out. Books I myself mean to read are bolded.


* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

* Anna Karenina

* Crime and Punishment


* Catch-22

* One Hundred Years of Solitude

* Wuthering Heights

* The Silmarillion

* Life of Pi

* The Name of the Rose

* Don Quixote. Maybe. Cannot remember. I saw Man of La Mancha in dinner theater, though, and I'm pretty sure that counts. "To dream... the imposs... ible dreammm!"

* Moby-Dick

* Ulysses. I haven't read it, although Cousin A Prime thinks I would like it. One of these days I'll tune in for Bloomsday, when leading lights read it on the radio. I think it's on WBAI.

* Madame Bovary. It's something about gloves, right? Or was that Mary Todd Lincoln?

* The Odyssey. In GREEK, motherfuckers!

* Pride and Prejudice


* Jane Eyre

* A Tale of Two Cities

* The Brothers Karamazov. No, I haven't read it, although I've seen The Flying Karamazov Brothers juggle a bowling ball, a chainsaw, and a squid, all the while making jokes about socialism, so, again, I think we should count that.

* Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Despite the fact that the subject is right up my alley, and despite the fact that the author, Jared Diamond, did much of his research in MY library, I have never gotten past Chapter Three of this book.

* War and Peace

* Vanity Fair. I swear half this list is titles people remember from playing Authors.

* The Time Traveler's Wife. No, I ain't read it. But somebody gave me a copy... if anyone wants one.

* The Iliad. ALSO in Greek, bitches.

* Emma


* The Blind Assassin. Love Margaret Atwood, except that one about the woman who had an abortion and consequently thought she was a bear. So maybe I'll read this.

* The Kite Runner

* Mrs. Dalloway

* Great Expectations

* American Gods: A Novel

* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

* Atlas Shrugged. Lori agrees with me that this book is a piece of shit, but I am semi-engaged in a war of words with a commenter over my characterization of The Fountainhead as "pretty close to evil," so I will decline to disparage this one. Er, any more than I just have. Fuck it. Your Neighborhood Librarian shrugged.

* Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

* Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel

* Middlesex: A Novel

* Quicksilver and The Confusion. Love the crap out of Neal Stephenson, from Zodiac through Snow Crash, but the Baroque Cycle just wasn't snappy enough for me.


* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West. Good politics, but the same cannot be said for his most recent book, What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy, reviewed over on Pink Me. Awful.

* The Canterbury Tales

* The Historian

* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

* Love in the Time of Cholera


* Brave New world

* The Fountainhead. Gave me the creeps but Christina Ricci totally recommends it.

* Foucault's Pendulum. Just couldn't make it through.

* Middlemarch

* Frankenstein

* The Count of Monte Cristo

* Dracula

* A Clockwork Orange. And everything else Anthony Burgess wrote.

* Anansi Boys. This list sure is loaded up with Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson, isn't it? You can tell that it's culled from the libraries of online social networkers.

* The Once and Future King


* The Grapes of Wrath

* The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel

* Nineteen Eighty-Four

* Angels & Demons. GOD. I forced myself to listen to The DaVinci Code just so I could help patrons who wanted something just like it. I decided that I'd rather force the citizenry to read Marina Warner than force myself to read anything else by Dan Brown.

* The Inferno. I'm assuming this refers to the Divine Comedy, and in that case, I'd say I've probably read it. I must have, right?

* The Satanic Verses: A Novel

* Sense and Sensibility

* The Picture of Dorian Gray

* Mansfield Park

* One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

* To the Lighthouse. I was going to say the only Virginia Woolf I've ever read was Orlando, and that about 10 times, but I think we had to read To The Lighthouse in my one and only college English class. I AP'ed out of English, and it wasn't until I needed a stray 6 credits to graduate that I opted for a class called "From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf". It was summer. It was reading.

* Tess of the D'Urbervilles

* Oliver Twist. And I was in the musical at the St. Mark's CYO. "Never before has a boy wanted more."

* Gulliver's Travels

* Les Miserables

* The Corrections. Got a copy of this one laying around too.



* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Here you go. THIS book I actually intend to read.

* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time


* Dune

* The Prince

* The Sound and the Fury. Never have read any Faulkner. Kind of strange, because I like a) Southern fiction, b) alcohol, and c) strong titles.

* Angela's Ashes

* The God of Small Things

* People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present. The graphic novel version (A People's History of American Empire) is sitting on my bed right this minute.

* Cryptonomicon. SO good.

* Neverwhere: A Novel

* A Confederacy of Dunces. HATED this book.

* A Short History of Nearly Everything

* Dubliners

* The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel

* Beloved. I am going to get this on audio one of these days.

* Slaughterhouse-Five

* The Scarlet Letter

* Eats, Shoots & Leaves

* The Mists of Avalon


* Oryx and Crake : a novel. On audio, read by Campbell Scott. Oooooh.

* Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. See above RE: Guns, Germs & Steel.

* Cloud Atlas: A Novel

* Lolita

* Persuasion

* Northanger Abbey

* The Catcher in the Rye



* On the Road. I always smile when a young person comes in looking for this book. I love the thought of reading it for the first time.

* The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

* Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. But god, it was laying on my college boyfriend's desk the entire time we lived together.

* The Aeneid. In English. Uh, pals. My Latin always sucked.

* Watership Down: A Novel

* Gravity's Rainbow. No, but Bob read it, and that should count. I read The Crying of Lot 49, and I loved it, but I never could get through anything else Pynchon wrote. Hm. Although it looks like there may be a graphic novel version of Gravity's Rainbow, with Frank Miller on board. I could read that.


* The Hobbit. My dad had a nice slipcased edition of this book, with the runes all around the title and the maps on the endpapers. I figured out how to read the runes, and for a while I wrote in my diary in those runes. Prefigured the punishing Greek translations I had to do for my undergrad Classics major by, oh, ten, twelve years.

* In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences

* White Teeth: A Novel


* Treasure Island. Listening to it on audio right now! Alfred Molina reads it, and his amazingly various pirate voices make me think that Gore Verbinsky could have saved a lotta money, just hired Molina to play Barbossa AND Davy Jones AND Bootstrap Bill AND possibly even Chow-Yun Fat. Gonna review it soon on Pink Me.

* David Copperfield

* The Three Musketeers


Unlike Lori, I did NOT take a Jane Austen class, ever ever ever. And I have never seen what people see in her. I can't even remember which ones I've started. I tried one a few years ago again. There was a carriage ride, and a ha-ha, and it was really important who rode in which carriage, and I just could not deal. In fact, I briefly considered naming this blog The Librarian Who Doesn't Like Jane Austen - I figured I would be the only one who fit that description.

Just not a classic literature type, really. All the classics on this list that I've read I read as a really young girl - like 8 or 9. After I finished all the Judy Blumes and Nancy Drews, I started in on my parents' bookshelves. Many other books that I read at the time for some reason DON'T make this list: Fear of Flying, for example. Tropic of Capricorn. The Complete Saki.

It's no wonder, is it.

The weekend at the college didn't turn out like you planned

“However nimbly they have adapted, modernised, lost books and gained technology, become determinedly ‘functional’ as invaluable resource centres rather than bookstores, the libraries are always needing to boost their profile. They need more borrowers and yet one of their biggest problems, in my experience, is that ‘borrowing’ is not a readily understood modern concept, however well-embedded it was in Carnegie’s day.”

—Julia Eccleshare, children’s books editor for The Guardian, in “Whatever Happened to Book Borrowers?” The Guardian Books Blog, Apr. 29.

This is the weirdest thing. I hear this sometimes as often as twice in a 4-hour shift - a patron who just doesn't get that at the LIBRARY, you BORROW books, not buy them. And I'm not talking about people who ask if a title is "in stock": the vocabulary of retail is perfectly understandable in the library setting.

No, I'm talking about the college kid, who, when informed that he could pick up the item in question at the city library right away if he drove over there, but that he would have to get his county library card registered with their system in order to borrow it, replied, "No, that's ok, when I get there I'll probably just buy it."

On a different but very slightly related note, when was the last time you listened to Loudon Wainwright III? "The Acid Song" alone should ensure his place in history.