We Drink With Characters: Special Guest Alex London on THE ADVIL CALENDAR 2014

One of the nice things about taking a more laissez-faire approach to the holidays this year is that we've spent our after-kid-bedtime hours at leisure, and not wrapping or baking or cleaning or shopping online. Although I'll admit to a bitty little studio6 fetish this year. Everybody's getting a t-shirt for Christmas even though we're not really doing presents.

Some of our leisure time has been spent watching TV. It's pretty weird how, in the past year or two or three, TV has become something that people are not ashamed about. But people are very particular. Everyone has their own preferred cocktail of drama and humor and hot people, and we quiz our friends to learn where any recommended show falls on that scatter plot. Arrow? Not funny enough, I'm told. Downton? Hardly anybody gets their shirt off. So let's do it...

YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD LIBRARIAN MAKES LIFE LOOK LIKE ART

Drinking by the book: Advil Calendar 2014 BLACK VODKA HELICOPTERS Edition with SPECIAL GUEST Blythe Woolston

This is my autograph book. Yes I know nobody has an autograph book anymore, but just call me Anne Shirley, and shut up. Or don't. Don't call me Anne Shirley. In fact, I'll kill anyone who calls me Anne Shirley. I've never even read Anne of Green Gables and I would never wear my hair like that.

But as atavistic as it is, it's mine, and I love it, and it is packed with stories. The first story being of course, "Why do you use a 1904 drinks manual as an autograph book?"

This little book was a gift from my friend Paula, who knows that How We Used to Drink is almost as interesting to me as When Am I Going to Get My Next Drink. She gave it to me as we were on our way to a book festival. I admired the book and thanked her for the thoughtful gift and slipped it in my blazer pocket, on its way to a place of honor on my shelf of bartending books.

Next evening, wearing the same jacket, I traveled to Washington D.C.'s Politics and Prose to see a bunch of picture book authors talk about their work. There was a signing line, but since this was a bookstore event, you were supposed to buy the books you wanted signed, and...um...I'm kind of a brat and I'm cheap and besides I already owned copies of most of those books at home.

So I pulled "How to Mix Drinks" out of my pocket and asked the authors to sign that. It was fun! Children's book authors are cheeky:

"Drink more." Mac Barnett

"Drink often!" Laura Vaccaro Seeger

At the NCTE convention this year, Jory John (All My Friends Are Dead) added "Drink hard!"

Advil Calendar 2014 EXCITING GUEST WEEK Telekinetic Teenager Edition with David Lubar

Stalking out of Target today at 9:23 a.m., my bag full of oxycodone, sunscreen, MAD Magazine, and "concert attire," I realized what had so far been missing from my holiday.

Rage. Barely contained, dry-eyed, crackling, hair-on-end rage.

I mean, I had this year pretty much wired. I hadn't overcommitted to writing assignments, everyone had already been sick and gotten over it, and best of all, I had booked - and paid for - a trip to TROPICAL PARADISE for my family and my parents, hoping to escape the traditional drama and anxiety that is part and festively-wrapped fucking parcel of this season of gifts.

I don't mean to show off, but look:

This is the house we rented in Curacao. That couch is crying out for me, a cocktail, and a book.

No wonder my customary December slow burn was barely at a simmer. I was cool - I have been lazing through December devoid of the usual stress. Not anymore, baby. It's happened:

YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD LIBRARIAN IS FEELING THE SEASON

You're Invited to a Cocktail Party On the Pirate Ship Revenge: Advil Calendar Year IV EXCITING GUEST WEEK Day III: Caroline Carlson!

I love looking out the window this time of year. The pissing-down rain, the 100% cloud cover hovering just above the chimneys... it's 2:30 in the afternoon and already the streetlights are on. Some poor schlub just passed by on a bicycle. It's like Dickens out there.

#paradise #tattoo #shin. AKA OW.

No wonder the British were in such a sweat to run and go colonize Trinidad or collect beetles in Sri Lanka. I'm taking off for sunnier climes myself. Conned my whole family into swapping wrapping and baking for lounging and collecting shells this year.

The joy I feel at not having to rearrange the whole house to accommodate a dead tree cannot be expressed in mere words. You must imagine a physical explosion of elation that incorporates the entire A to Z of Dance punctuated by frozen moments of Broadway weeping. Clasped hands and all.

But until then, it's still streaming ashwater gray outside. We gotta get out of here. Let's make like Baronet Joseph Banks ("Father of Australia," breadfruit enthusiast) and get on a damn boat to anywhere else. Welcome to...

YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD LIBRARIAN DRINKS WITH PIRATES (and pirate-adjacent personnel)

Getting Lit in KidLit: ADVIL CALENDAR 2014 - Sydney Taylor Edition with Exciting Guest Laurel Snyder!

It's important to me, as a bloody bloody atheist, to honor holiday claptrap in all its varied flavors and denominations. Claptrap all around! I love claptrap! Livens up the place. If all of us were nonbelievers like me, life would be so dull! We'd have no SantaCon, no fabulous book-themed bat mitvahs. The market for candles would dwindle to those people who want their powder room to smell like cookies. Well. The market for candles would dwindle to those people who put a toilet in a closet and then call it a "powder room."

And my drive home from work would become a whole lot less jaw-dropping. Never change, Parkville.

In the past, Your Neighborhood Librarian has celebrated the Festival of Lights (which started yesterday) with as many Hanukkah-themed schnepsels as I could find. There aren't many.

Laurel Snyder, author of imaginative, heartfelt middle grade novels and more picture books than you were quite aware of, tried to help me with that Hanukkah post but eventually threw up her hands and suggested we just pass around a bottle of Scotch. So this year I asked her an easier question, "Which character of YOURS would you want to drink with?

Return to Litte Tavern on the Prairie: The Advil Calendar 2014 WEEK TWO - Week of EXCITING GUESTS! Day One: Adam Rex

Hi there. It's Monday! We're halfway through December and true to rum-soaked form, Your Neighborhood Librarian finally has her crap together enough to start posting the Advil Calendar with some regularity. You're going to want to tune in to this, because I have a whole week of Exciting Guests to help us get squishy for the holidays. Exciting Guests!

What kind of Exciting Guests could Your Neighborhood Librarian possibly drum up? Will we hear from celebrity chefs turned novelists? Rock stars turned novelists? NASA techs turned novelists?

NO. EVEN BETTER: find a barstool and buckle up, because ain't nobody drink like an author of books for children drinks. I have authors of YA sci-fi, picture books, time travel adventure (time travel is SO HOT right now take my word for it), pirate adventure, and whatever you'd call that dizzying unquantifiable marvelousness that Blythe Woolston writes. That's right. Its...

ADVIL CALENDAR YEAR FOUR: THE EXCITING GUEST FIGHTS BACK.

The Advil Calendar 2013: NANCY DREW II: RETURN TO LITTLE TAVERN ON THE PRAIRIE

What's Jack Donaghy doing here? He's having a Nancy Drew (white
rum, diet ginger ale, lime). "For men, it's called a Hardy Boy," says Jack.

Last week I got to wondering, in a post I titled "Nancy Drew Turns 21," what some of my favorite children's book characters would drink once they were old enough to drink. I made fancy cognac cocktails for Maddie and Verity from Code Name Verity, took Claudia Kincaid drinking at a swanky joint in Manhattan's financial district, and shared a chamomile toddy with Mrs. Frisby.

But there are more. MORE.

I put the question to a few friends: "What children's book character would you most like to have a drink with once he or she has grown up?" And EVERYBODY - er, just about everybody - answered "Matilda" right away. Let's go get squiffy with Matilda!

The Advil Calendar 2013 Day WHAT?: NANCY DREW TURNS 21 EDITION

"Are ya cold, Raylan?"

I was going to putz out on this day, I swear I was. I've written over 16 thousand words in the past week, including a longish post on my most memorable reading experiences of the past 12 months and a REALLY long set of notes for a radio segment about Great Holiday Gift Book Ideas For Children and I was fried.

Good for nothing but watching the episodes of Justified where Raylan gets his shirt off.

But then I posted an announcement of the radio segment (listen for me on WYPR 88.1 FM, Marylands NPR station, somewhere between 9:30 and 10am today) on Facebook, mentioning that I would be doing pairings of children's fiction with nonfiction and... something else, god I'm so tired, and my friend Leslie commented that she was glad I'd said what I'd be pairing the novels with, otherwise she'd have thought I was pairing like Harriet the Spy with Jack and Coke.

Paraphrasing.

BUT THAT'S A GREAT IDEA.

Thanks, neighbor! I'll save you a pig cheek just for that!

The Advil Calendar Year 3 Day 5: A BOOK AND A DRINK EDITION

I'm a librarian, right? So I am kind of a sucker for books.

It's not the best reason to go into librarianing, by the way. The books are maybe about 20% of the job. The rest is website troubleshooting ("Well, it looks like if you hit 'Next' here..."), putting holds on DVDs, and helping people buy nutritional supplements for their cats over the phone.

Fortunately for me, I had worked in a law library as a youngster and knew what I was getting into by the time I enrolled in library school. (And someday I will teach a class: How To Learn To Hate Books and Also Graduate Students 101, and it will involve a one-hour field trip to a law library. One hour. One and done. What a bunch of assholes those kids were. Making a xerox copy of something - or better yet getting a workstudy minion to xerox 250 pages out of a law manual - does not replace just fucking reading it and taking notes.)

YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD LIBRARIAN READS A GODDAMN BOOK

All librarians get Hermione
when they do that FB quiz.

No, you go into librarianship because you are a know-it-all brownnosing snot who loves having all the answers. Heh heh. Ahem. Or because you believe that democracy is knowledge. It's about 50/50.

There's also a subset of librarians who chose the field as a drastic form of overcompensation - those are the types who never know where their keys or their glasses are, but god damn it they can find you the NOLO forms book on tenant/landlord law in twelve seconds flat, and that means THEY WIN. They may not be able to get into their car to go home tonight, but still. One in the W column.

Yeah, in fact, librarians have to be people people. It's a public service job in the truest sense of the phrase. But that doesn't mean we don't, y'know, like books.

Me, I collect old cookbooks and mixer's manuals. Old bartending books are particularly bizarre - Prohibition caused a lot of mixology malarkey as people tried to mask the taste of the illegally distilled poison that passed for booze in those days. And we got to like it!

My friend Paula knows my illness, and gave me this dear little pocket-size drinks manual originally published in 1904. I happened to have it in my bag one night at a panel discussion featuring some of my favorite picture book authors, so on a whim I asked them to sign it instead of their books.

"Jack in a glass!"

This autograph book now has about 50 signatures. Jon Scieszka gave it 5 stars! Chris Myers shared a recipe for a post-basketball ginger drink. Melissa Sweet drew a parade balloon and Jack Gantos drew a glass of applejack. It's one of my most prized possessions.

I also collect new cookbooks and mixer's manuals. Not a lot of them. Most are exciting looking, with sexy sharp pictures or amusing descriptions, and sometimes that's enough -- but not everybody can be Kingsley Amis or Bernard DeVoto -- so most of those clever/gimmicky joints are merely disappointing from a maker's point of view. Here are my impressions - Maureen Kearney coined the word "reviewlet" and I think I'll use that - of some recent cocktail cookbooks:

The Advil Calendar 2013 Day 4: ALL AUXIER AND ALL OF THE NIGHT

What's going on, Wednesday? Wednesday is what Tuesday used to be, I swear. Doesn't Wednesday just make you go "HHhrhhghhh"? Wednesday is the day I most frequently find myself sounding like Marge Simpson.

So hey! How about I cop out today!

YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD LIBRARIAN BOOTS IT TO A PRO

Writer, not bartender. As soon as I realized I was going to do the Advil Calendar again this year, I started soliciting guest contributions. It's a lot of work, and one librarian can only drink so much.

Couple of years ago I found myself at a dinner table with the children's book author Jonathan Auxier. Jonathan's books are Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes and The Night Gardener (coming in May), neither of which I have read (OH! Some terrible friend I am!) because in both cases, my older son snatched up my advance reader copy, ran away to some squirrelly hidey-hole to read it, and then stuffed it under his bed.

No I'm serious about that last part. He's a remarkably un-neurotic kid (FOR NOW), but I think he hides his favorite books from me, probably so I won't con him into recording a video review for me to post on my other blog.

And I frickin' WORKED for that copy of The Night Gardener - Jonathan's publisher had sent two boxes of advance copies to a panel he was moderating at a conference I attended, and I offered to guard the books and then hand them out after the panel concluded. My friend Laura helped, and good thing she did. BLOODBATH. It was like the first day of the Missoni limited edition line at Target. You'd have thought we were giving out Cipro in the midst of a bird flu epidemic. I think I lost a chunk of hair!

Where was I? My hair. No, Auxier. At that dinner a couple years ago, Jonathan said something kind of odd when he ordered a drink. "This year I'm exploring beer," he said, and I was like, "If that's the case, this should probably also be the year you explore jogging. And... um?"