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Last week in review

Written on: November 30th, 2009 by: in Blog Posts

Gorging on turkey shouldn’t slow down one’s reading- all of that time laying groaning on the couch is an idea time to catch up on all of the books you’ve checked out of the library.
Over the break, I took in a couple of galleys and promotional copies that I had received from the publisher Harper Collins. The first- This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians can Save us All by Marilyn Johnson (whose previous book Dead Beat was about the peculiar pleasures of reading and writing obituaries).

This book, due in February 2010, documents in a vivid and witty style how libraries are changing (and struggling to change) to meet the demands and expectations of digital-age consumers. Johnson tours innovative libraries, interviews old-school and new-school information professionals both behind the scenes in technical services departments and behind-the-desk in reference services. It’s amazing to read about what some libraries are doing with technology, although chapter 3, with its description of a catalog integration project gone horribly awry in New York State, gave me a cold sweat, since we are currently in the end-stage of a similar (albeit much smaller) project with new libraries in Delaware.
You can read some other early reviews on the author’s website at this link. Copies are on order for the Delaware Library Catalog, so stay tuned for more details!

The second freebie was the recently released The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford. This is a coming-of-age novel set in 1950’s/60’s Long Island, with an eerie atmosphere that to me was reminiscent of both Ray Bradbury and Stephen King- a sinister tone bordering on fantastical but never quite becoming straight supernatural/horror, because seen through the eyes of a child, regulation human evil appears magical, even surreal, and Ford captures that vision perfectly. There’s a lot of balls in the air here, and the author (mostly) keeps them up, with a family drama, the casual brutality of children at school and at play, a wraithlike stalker- maybe a serial killer?- and the kind of suburban wilderness of woods and gullies where terrible things can happen within earshot of families at play on their decks and lawns. The writing is also superb, with this throwaway description of fall in particular grabbing my attention: “the wind of this in-between time always made me want to curl up inside a memory and sleep with my eyes open.”

My none-promotional reading this week was two books by Vendela Vida, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and Now You Can Go. Quick reads both, and similar in subject, featuring the impact of unsettling, sometime violent acts on unmoored women. In her books, Vida creates short evocative chapters, almost like long poems, in which the characters experience new events and self-realizations. I came across here after watching the movie “Away We Go” and noticing that Vida had collaborated on the screenplay with her husband, the novelist Dave Eggers- after reading the books, it’s easy to see Vida’s stamp on this movie- a nice example for adults of Kate DiCamillo’s point from last week of how movies and books can complement and fulfill each other. If this point needed any further example, after going to see New Moon Lucy asked for a copy of the book on Friday and after a couple of reading until midnight sessions, finished it on Sunday morning- probably after having spent seven hours or more reading solidly over less than two days. Still not sure how I’m going to tell her that she won’t be able to read Breaking Dawn until she’s old enough to bike over to the library and check it out with her own card.