What's on My Desk April 2008

Spiderwick Chronicles, volume 3, Lucinda's Secret by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. Children's Fiction. DONE. Action! Tension! Humor! I hope my hold request for volume 4 comes in soon because I don't like not knowing what will happen next in this series.
The Hungry Thing Returns by Ann Seidler, Jan Slepian, and Richard Martin. Children's Fiction. DONE. I have not read the original, but this sequel can stand alone. It has an animal who says almost the right thing, then people have to try to figure out what he is saying by thinking of rhyming words. Kids like figuring out the answers and the baby Hungry Thing elicits an "aah" response.
Riverworld, To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer. Adult Science Fiction. Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel of 1972. This has a unique plot, but is rather blasphemous. I can see this being a banned book and it made me a bit uneasy to read, since it seems to dismiss all world religions in one fell swoop. A number of times I thought of not finishing it because it made me feel dirty. I could relate to Alice, the poor Victorian era lady who is appalled that nudity, promiscuity, and violence are the norm without religious restraint. This was also made into a television movie, but based on the immorality of this book, I don't think I will watch it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Your_Scattered_Bodies_Go

The title is derived from the 7th of the "Holy Sonnets" by English poet John Donne:
At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go.

I liked Barnstormer in Oz by Farmer better. This shows my prejudice, since I generally like just about all Oz books. Now that I think of it, some scenes in Barnstormer made me uneasy as well...
Farmer is an effective author, but I would only recommend him to people who are not looking for a "gentle read". I definitely would not recommend him to conservative home-school type patrons. Personally, I probably won't read any more of his works, but as a librarian I would keep his books on the science fiction shelf with works by many other fine writers.

Kittens, Kittens, Kittens by Susan Meyers and David Walker. Children's fiction. DONE. I don't think I have to tell you what this is about. If you want a book on juvenile felines you know where to look. Not suprisingly, the duo also has a book called Puppies, Puppies, Puppies.

Three Little Kittens by Anna Alter. Children's fiction. DONE. There is a definite cuteness factor to this telling of the familiar nursery rhyme.

Kitten Red, Yellow, Blue by Peter Catalanotto. Children's fiction. DONE. The author goes through 16 colors of colors that a cat can have. I am not so sure that little children need to know the difference between brown, rust, and tan unless their parents work for Crayola.

Spiderwick Chronicles, volume 4, The Ironwood Tree by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. Children's Fiction. DONE. This is my favorite in the series so far. It is probably because it is most like my favorite series of books, the Oz books. The dwarves are definitely similar to Baum's Nomes as portrayed in a number of classic Oz books and the description of the dwarves' lair could come right out of Ozma of Oz or Tik-Tok of Oz. The end leaves us wondering how this series will end.

Julius by Syd Hoff. Children's fiction. DONE. This book is very similar to many other Syd Hoff books, so you will like it if you like Danny and the Dinosaur, et al .

Spiderwick Chronicles, volume 5, The Wrath of Mulgarath by Tony DeTerlizzi and Holly Black. Children's Fiction. DONE. So ends the saga. Somehow I doubt they will leave this series at only 5 books. Now to see the movie...

We're Going on a Lion Hunt by David Axtell. Children's Fiction. DONE. This familiar classic children's song is beautifully illustrated, but the plot is someone lacking.
"We're going on a lion hunt. We're going to catch a big one". Okay. So what do you need to catch a lion? You can capture him on film or capture his corporal body so you need at least one item from list A or list B:

A. Gun. Net. Trident. Spear. Bow. Knife. Bait. Rope.

B. Camera. Camcorder. Cell Phone. Telescope. Binoculars. Opera Glasses.

The children bring: one blue stuffed animal. Now, I can understand if an author doesn't want to have them bringing "my gun, bullets on the side" if he is anti-hunting. He is entitled to his opinions and artistic license is fine, but does he have to present the children as just plain stupid to go to catch a lion with no plan at all? It is too bad that the plot had this hole in it so big that someone could drive a Chevy through it, because the 4 and 5 year olds that I read this to enjoyed the pictures and the rhymes. I would recommend the illustrator as an illustrator, but not as an author, or maybe I should blame the editor for letting this book be published as is.

Great Adventure by Steven Curtis Chapman, Joni Eareckson Tada, Stephen Elkins, and Ellie Colton. Children's Fiction. DONE. The song is great. The pictures are decent. The book is a jumbled mess. They took the Dove Award winning Christian song and added pictures. Okay. That would work. Then they cut the song into pieces, added extra words to make a story and an explanation to go with it, that is supposed to be at about a 4-8 year old comprehension level. That did not work. The pages are arranged so there is a picture, the quote from the song, and the extra words. I didn't know how I was supposed to read this out loud. Maybe one person is supposed to read one part and another person is supposed to read the other part? Having asides like in a Shakespeare play is too sophisticated to spring on a 5 year old. The hopeful, forward-looking song comes across with preachy, overbearing tones. Only the heavily religious patron would find this attractive. Most would not. I wonder if all the books in this "Dove Award Signature Series" are this confusing, or if some are better integrated?

http://www.doveawards.com/

Lola at the Library by Anna McQuinn and Rosalind Beardshaw. Children's Fiction. DONE. This book is recommended for 2-3 year olds. A very young girl, maybe 1 1/2 - 2 1/2 years old, loves toddling to the library with mommy for storytime or just to get books. She obviously loves the library and it shows. The little girl is African-American (or maybe African-English, since the writers are British), and the librarian appears to be Hispanic. I am guessing that it is an urban library, since they walk and the library uses modern equipment. It is straightforward and clearly written. A child can know what to expect from a trip to the library with this book. This would be a good one to read on day one of a storytime or in daycare visits.

Ten Little Lambs by Alice B. McGinty and Melissa Sweet. Children's Fiction. DONE. My audience and I were a bit confused because on the first page it showed children going to bed and on the second page it showed that they were lambs instead. This is because the teacher or mother or camp counselor or whoever she is calls them "lambs". (Inside the front cover the description says it is a sleepover party, but the book itself does not say). Once we understood that, we caught on that the lambs/children were falling asleep one by one in this book that uses a classic count-down-from-ten-to-zero idea. It would be a good book to introduce the concept of subtraction or minus along with the "Ten Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed" song or "A Hundred Bottles of Coke on the Wall" song.

http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/lyrics/tenmonk.htm

http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/music.htm#copyright

Funny in Farsi, learning about Persian Culture

I am learning a number of things about Iran, not from reading the Big Read book (http://www.bigread.org/), but from preparing for the discussion and talking with my coworkers and patrons.

• Iranians consider themselves Persian, not Arabic. For example, Arabs would do belly dancing, whereas Persians do Persian dancing.


• From the book Persepolis I am learning about the Iranian revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq war.


• Persian food is not generally seen in America, and if it is, we lump it together with other Middle Eastern or Mediterranean foods. Most of the foods I have never seen or hear of, but the fruits, yes. Some are: plums, pomegranates, prunes, apricots, raisins, dates, and limes. I have also heard of cinnamon and feta cheese. Certainly I have tea before, too. Thank you to Nan Allen of the Germantown Public Library for this information.
  

April 15

I filed my income tax return, then promptly found out about some stock trades that I did not report, so now I have to file an amended return (using tax forms available at my local public library). I don't look forward to having to fill out the forms all over again, since I have already done the math and it is only going to be $7.00 difference in my federal rebate check and $2.00 difference in the state check.

I had never asked a question on Yahoo Answers before, although I had answered some questions during Slam the Boards day.

http://answerboards.wetpaint.com/page/Slam+the+Boards!?t=anon

http://answers.yahoo.com/

I asked if Yahoo users thought that I had to bother to file amended returns for such miniscule amounts. I was warned by some answerers that I had better re-file, even though it was a small amount because the IRS computers see that an amount has not been reported, but their software is not sophisticated enough to tell that it is such a small amount.

I was suprised at such a good answer. I did get a few screwball answers as well, which is what I expected from Yahoo.

So, I will be taking home those 1040x forms from the library's stacks and re-filing. Insert appropriate curse word here.

I also decided to check out this book:
Fair Tax by Neal Boortz. Adult nonfiction.
I checked out the 2005 edition because our library didn't have the 2008 edition processed yet.

I will update this post later to tell if the book had anything to say that was worth reading.

April 16, 2008 - I read some of it, but did not finish it. After all, it is a book on taxes and would only be interesting to a few accountant and politician types. I think I got the gist of what it had to say in the first two chapters, however: simplify the tax code and have taxes only be on final sales of goods and services.

Big Read Funny in Farsi

If You Liked Funny in Farsi, try

Books on Iran, Iraq, Pakistan
Azar Nafisi Reading Lolita in Tehran

Kite Runner Kahid Husseini

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Morgensen, Greg. Three Cups of Tea. A mountain climbing nurse wishes to repay the kindness of the Afghan and Pakistani people by building schools.

Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind

Books on First Generation Americans
Becoming American : personal essays by first generation immigrant women Meri Nana-Ama Danquah.
Babylon sisters : a novel / Pearl Cleage.
Growing up ethnic in America : contemporary fiction about learning to be American / edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.
Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha
Rain of gold / Victor Villaseñor.
Obama, Barack. Dreams from my Father.
Nonfiction B O121
Some Movies featuring life in Iran or Iraq
Children of Heaven
Cafe Setareh
Donya
Dokhtari ba kafsh-haye-katani = The girl in the sneakers
Dokhtaran khorshid [videorecording] = Daughters of the sun
Bānū-yi Urdībihisht [videorecording] = The May lady
One Night with the King – story of Esther/Hadassah and King Xerxes
Not without my daughter
Thief and the Cobbler – cartoon, an ancient tale retold. Extraordinary modern artwork nodding to the traditional art of the region.

Some Movies featuring immigrants to America
American Tale
West Side Story
Real Women Have Curves
Moscow on the Hudson
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
My Family
Coming to America

Big Read Funny in Farsi

If You Liked Funny in Farsi, try

Books on Iran, Iraq, Pakistan

Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi

*Kite Runner. Kahid Husseini

*Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Marjane Satrapi

*Three Cups of Tea. Greg Morgensen. A mountain climbing nurse wishes to repay the kindness of the Afghan and Pakistani people by building schools.

*Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind. Suzanne Fisher Staples

Books on First Generation Americans

Becoming American : Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah.

Babylon Sisters : a Novel. Pearl Cleage.

Growing up Ethnic in America : Contemporary Fiction about Learning to Be American. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.

*Memoirs of a Geisha. Arthur Golden.

Rain of Gold. Victor Villaseñor.

*Dreams from my Father. Barack Obama

Some Movies featuring life in Iran or Iraq
Children of Heaven

Cafe Setareh

Donya

Dokhtari ba kafsh-haye-katani = The Girl in the Sneakers

Dokhtaran khorshid [videorecording] = Daughters of the Sun

Bānū-yi Urdībihisht [videorecording] = The May Lady

One Night with the King – story of Esther/Hadassah and King Xerxes

*Not without My Daughter

*Thief and the Cobbler – cartoon, an ancient tale retold. Extraordinary modern artwork nodding to the traditional art of the region.

Some Movies featuring immigrants to America
*American Tale

*West Side Story

Real Women Have Curves

Moscow on the Hudson

*My Big Fat Greek Wedding

My Family

*Coming to America

I have not read or watched all of these. Those that I have are marked with a *.

Movie Nights: 25 Movies to Spark Spiritual Discussions with Your Teen

Smithhouser, Bob, editor. Tyndale books. Promoted on Focus on the Family.

I checked out this book because I thought it would be a list of family-friendly, Christian or secular movies to promote at the library and with other groups and a list of DVDs to add to our library collection in case we only have them on VHS.

I thought there would be films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flywheel, Left Behind, Scheindler's List, Hiding Place, Facing the Giants and others with blatantly Judeo-Christian beliefs.

I was suprised to see that almost all of them were secular and some I didn't even think were well written. In the introduction the author says that these are all PG or PG-13, almost all recent movies (recent as of the 2002 printing of the book). Each has at least one positive moral aspect to it, but not necessarily exclusively Christian. These morals are things like truthfulness, honor, patriotism, tolerance, and kindness.

There are discussion questions and Bible verses that can accompany viewing if someone wants to watch a movie with a youth group or a singles group. Some of them seem to me to be stretching it, but I guess that the point of the book is that anything can be used to teach moral lessons by examination. The author is encouraging people to be active and dynamic viewers of films, instead of being a passive audience and using the films as launching points for conversations.

He encourages parents to teach their children (especially teenagers who are going to have to make all their own decisions soon) DISCERNMENT. As librarians, this falls under the same kind of thinking as our code of ethics that calls for us to have a variety of materials available, and a level of cataloging and labelling that can help patrons to best discern what is appropriate for their particular families and what reflects the values of our particular communities.

Here is their list of movies:
Apollo 13
Chariots of Fire
Count of Monte Cristo (with James Caviezel)
Ever After
Fiddler on the Roof
Galaxy Quest
Groundhog Day
Hoosiers
It's a Wonderful Life
Knight's Tale
Life Iis Beautiful
Little Women (with Winona Ryder)
Mission (Jeremy Irons)
Mr. Holland's Opus
October Sky
Princess Bride
Quiz Show
Remember the Titans
Searching for Bobby Fischer
Sense and Sensibility (with Kate Winslet)
Sergeant York
Shadowlands
To Kill a Mockingbird *
Truman Show
Unbreakable
* I am glad this one is in there because a few years ago we showed it at the library as part of our Big Read. http://www.bigread.org/

These may be movies that libraries can consider showing for library movie nights, if your library has such events.

At last, some appreciation for Superman

For updates on the Summer of Superman see:
http://www.positivelycleveland.com/
On the schedule as of 7 March 2008
Maltz Museum exhibit
ZAP! POW! BAM!
The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950
September 16, 2008 - January 4, 2009
http://maltzjewishmuseum.org/pr/2008ExhibitionWinterPrograms.pdf
-----
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Cleveland considers how to celebrate Superman
City hopes to honor icon this summer
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Grant Segall
Plain Dealer Reporter

excerpts:
...Civic boosters hope to celebrate the "Summer of Superman" this year as part of the never-ending battle for truth, justice and the Cleveland way.
Nearly 20 community leaders met Thursday to talk about honoring the Man of Steel.

... And they hope someday for a permanent Superman museum.
... Glenville Development Corp. plans to place a plaque and paint the exterior walls of Siegel's home.

...To help with the Summer of Superman, contact Positively Cleveland, 216-871-6631,
cvb@positivelycleveland.com.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: gsegall@plaind.com, 216-999-4187

What's On My Desk February 2008

*New Cat by Yangsook Choi - children's book, DONE. The loyal factory cat must defeat his nemesis - a mouse that is chewing on the wires in a New York tofu factory. Cute.
*King Bidgood's in the Bathtub by Audrey and Don Good - children's book, DONE. The words are adequate, but the illustrations are magnificent, ornate, and rich.
*Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See - historical fiction book, DONE. This was rather a depressing book. I kept waiting for the happy, triumphant part that never came. It is a good look into China of yesteryear, but not so good to read if you are already in a bad mood. I think I would rather have been a "little daughter-in-law" or a servant, than have been "blessed" to be a wife whose feet were broken and of whom so much is expected. Thank God we are Americans in 21st century America!
*Quilters Newsletter, September, October, and November 2007 (periodical) includes a three part short story by Jennifer Chiaverini called the Fabric Diary. DONE. Cute.
*True Talents by David Lubar. YA fantasy. DONE. Sequel to Hidden Talents. It was fairly predictable, but a worthy successor to the original. There is one twist near the end that works well. I started reading it, then put it down for a while and when I came back I was confused because I forgot that in the original, Martin was the main character and in this sequel, Trash is the main character. It is written in first person, so "I" refers to Trash, not Martin, in book 2.

*Refuge by Detective Sgt. Donald Stewart. nonfiction. DONE .

This is a unique book, written by a long-time police officer and Christian it talks about the problem of domestic violence and offers hope from a Christian perspective and a practical, social services viewpoint. The cover says something like "someone you know needs to read this book" and it is probably true.

*One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens. Nonfiction. A mischieveous young woman takes jobs as household servants to see how the other half lives. Before there was Nickel and Dimed, there was this book.

*Apples to Oregon. See previous post for details. I re-read this book because it was so entertaining! I wonder if there is a "senior" version to this "junior" book? It is a wonderful tall tale and makes me want to know more about the events that inspired the book.

I wish I had time to read...

These books look like they would be good reads, but I haven't had time to read them yet:

March by Geraldine Brooks. Fiction. The previously untold Civil War story of Mr. March, the father of the girls in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.

Prince of the Clouds by Gianni Riotta. A shy scholar and his wife go to Sicily after WWII. Romance.

Disturbances in the Field by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Amazon.com and many other websites give this five out of five stars. Chamber musician Lydia Rowe's confidence and harmonious life are shattered by the accidental deaths of her two youngest children and she enters, inconsolable, a space where no one can reach her. Maybe I will recommend this to my MOPS book discussion group, but even though it has good reviews, it does not seem to be widely held.

Saul and Patsy by Charles Baxter.
From Publishers WeeklyDespite its title, this searching, reflective novel is less concerned with couplehood than it is with the fretful inner life of one half of the eponymous married pair. Saul Bernstein, a literary descendant of Bellow's Herzog, is a transplanted Baltimore Jew, observing his newfound hometown-the "dusty, luckless" fictional city of Five Oaks, Mich.-with an ill-at-ease hyperawareness. Young-marrieds Saul and Patsy move to Five Oaks from Evanston, Ill., when Saul is hired to teach at the local high school. They rent a farmhouse, where they make love in every room and even in the backyard, settling into the rhythms of domestic life. Patsy, a former modern dancer who finds work as a bank teller, gives birth to a daughter, and with infinite patience tolerates her "professional worrier" of a husband. The narrative is dense with quotidian detail, precisely charted shifts of consciousness and pitch-perfect moments of emotional truth, but Baxter (The Feast of Love; Believers, etc.) doesn't have full control of the novel's architecture. The narrative crests occasionally on signs and wonders (early on, Saul has a spiritual epiphany after sighting an albino deer), but turns on the inexplicable suicide of Saul's illiterate, inarticulate student, Gordy Himmelman. Blamed by some for the boy's death, Saul must struggle against real community hostility instead of imagined anti-Semitism. Resolutely, he refuses to give up on his adopted Midwestern hometown, bringing this luminously prosaic if sometimes meandering novel to a quietly triumphant conclusion.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc as presented on amazon.com


Recommended books on the Books-a-Million 2008 book lover's calendar. This calendar is becoming a problem - too many good, overlooked, books are listed!

Google Docs

Google docs are a fairly good way of sharing files between a librarian and volunteers, but there are limitations to the spreadsheet usage. I find that I am importing the spreadsheets into M.S. Excel to work with them, then adding them back to Google docs to share. In an ideal world, I could just use the Google docs as is, but the freezing column headings and other features aren't working right in Google.
Thank you, dedicated library volunteers! You make our jobs easier and enhance the library experience for everyone.