I was saddened to read, a few moments ago, that Madeleine L’Engle has died, at the age of 88.
I’m not sad for her. I’m sure she’s gone on to a glorious adventure in heaven. I’m selfishly sad that there will be no more wonderful books coming from her pen. And sad that I never got to meet her–someone who has affected my life deeply with her wonderful words.
I’ve decided that people who write for children and young adults are an extremely intelligent bunch.
I’m reading my new issue of The Horn Book Magazine, and this month it’s got many short essays by children’s writers on gender issues. I’m struck afresh by how brilliant these people are.
There was an interview with Jon Scieszka. The man is wonderfully funny, and his books are full of boyish pranks (no surprise to learn he’s from a family of all boys). But how amazingly insightful he is as well. Part of why I love reading Horn Book Magazine is that big issues are dealt with in a thought-provoking, powerful way.
Then I realize it’s not the first time I’ve heard wisdom from children’s writers. Susan Patron’s Newbery Acceptance Speech. David Wiesner’s Caldecott Acceptance Speech. Okay, every single author I heard speak at ALA–and for the Printz Awards, even the Honor winners had to speak. Then there’s John and Hank Green’s Brotherhood 2.0 site–full of tremendously clever, tremendously funny, nerdy humor.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people who can express profound truths through fiction also turn out to be deep thinkers.
Okay, I just did the 12th “Thing” for my work’s 23 Things program: Create your own Search Roll.
I made two. One searches yarn shops. After all, if there’s a specific yarn I’m looking for, I like to see who has it (or the equivalent) for the lowest price. That’s at:
http://rollyo.com/sondysue/my_yarn_shops/
I also did a search for several blogs that cover children’s books. That search roll is: http://rollyo.com/sondysue/my_childrens_lit_blogs/
Could be useful, but usually I’ll just search the sites individually….
It was easier to have a kid in school when I wasn’t working.
Tonight I got the school schedule for my son starting 8th grade. In the first month, there are already four days where I will have to move around my work hours to accommodate school stuff. Urghh!
Math Counts is the only after school activity which I have the faintest hope of getting my son to participate in. Fortunately, this year the Math Counts coach knows about him–so I’m hoping she can keep him from skipping it and saying, “I forgot.” 🙂 He’s completed Geometry and is good at Math, so I think he could enjoy this. But they start September 19th–and the late buses don’t start until October–so there are 2 times I will need to reschedule my work hours.
Back to School Night is held at 7 pm, so working parents should be able to go. Unfortunately, they picked Thursday night, which is the one night per week that I work.
Then, the first Wednesday in October, they’ve scheduled a parent information meeting about the local magnet high school. It’s supposed to be strong in science and technology, and so might be just the thing for my Nerdfighter son. The meeting’s from 3 to 4:30, however.
Still, I only work half-time, and my boss is very supportive and accommodating.
And the truth is, when I think back to last year, even though I wasn’t working, things were a whole lot more stressful. We weren’t in our apartment yet and didn’t have our household goods, but were living in my friend’s basement–so we had to register as Homeless! We had to buy all new school supplies. I was trying to get my older son ready to start college in Florida. I was trying to get myself ready to start online graduate school.
Yeah, okay, I’d rather be settled in and working!
I’m back at work, continuing in the “23 Things” program.
For Thing 11, I tried out Library Thing. My account is at http://www.librarything.com/catalog/SondySue.
Library Thing is a site to catalog your library books. A fun idea! You can catalog 200 books for free–seems like a kind of piddly amount. Still, for $25 you can get a lifetime subscription and catalog as many as you want.
One fun thing about this–After cataloging five books, I decided to see what books Library Thing would recommend I should read next. Sure enough, most of the books listed are ones I already have–and love. But the first one was new to me–so I’m going to check it out and read it–the comments do make it sound like a book I’d like.
So, the question is: Is Library Thing worth it for someone who has a bad habit of buying books? Would I really even begin to get them entered? Would it maybe embarrass me and help me finally control my book-buying?
I do have my own system of keeping track of my books–and I review everything I read (Well, okay, I’m a year behind–but I try!) on www.sonderbooks.com. Library Thing could be interesting in “meeting” people who enjoy the same books, but I’m not sure I have time or interest in keeping it up…. Maybe I will enter some more books, or maybe enter books as I review them, and see what I think.
Today our branch manager mentioned that last month our juvenile circulation was up by 40%. She said she believed this was because a second children’s librarian and I have been added to the staff. When the library only had one person in the children’s department, she naturally wasn’t able to keep the children’s desk manned. Now we have someone sitting among the children’s books almost all the time.
It felt good to be told that my presence has made a difference. Sometimes I sit back there and feel like I’m only getting the opportunity to smile at babies, hear clever children read, and start the computer for kids. Fun for me, but is it helping anyone?
But yesterday I got to help a Dad find summer reading books for his first grader. I got to find more train books for our little friend Miles. And I even got to help my friend Darlene’s adorable children find books to check out.
(I know my former boss will wonder if the stats are up simply because I use that library now. However, I’ve been checking out more YA books than Juvenile ones, honest!)
And really, even if I don’t hand them a book, surely it’s a good thing to win the heart of a toddler, as I got the chance to do today, simply by smiling at him. The mother was one of our many, many immigrant patrons, and I think she felt a little more welcome when I obviously thought her son was adorable.
I do love libraries. You get to meet parents who care about their kids enough to read to them. You get to share amazing books with amazing kids. It was nice to be reminded today how privileged I am to work at a library. Also nice to hear that my having fun at the library might even be making a difference!
Here’s what I sent in an e-mail to my friends, just what’s going on in my life these days:
Thing 10 is to play around with image generators. I thought I’d make a sign in honor of the logo of http://www.rejoiceministries.org — God Heals Hurting Marriages.
The catch is that the image I generated on the site, http://www.letterjames.com/, is much bigger and easier to read than what I was able to save. A little bit frustrating.
However, on the site you can upload your own pictures and then make albums and calendars and things like that. Could be a lot of fun.
Now I’m on Thing 9 of the library’s 23 Things. If I do them all, I get an MP3 player!
For Thing 9, I’m supposed to add some RSS feeds to my bloglines account and blog about it.
I’m warming up to Bloglines. This try, I discovered the “Add” button, which makes it easier to add feeds.
The blogs I like best seem to all be found as links on my friend Akelda the Gleeful’s blog. She has some great links!
That’s how I recommend finding feeds. Start with a blog that you like, then look at the links they link to, and so on…. Real networking–because if you were to graph the links, you’d have an intricate network.
Today, I read all of Akelda’s “Children’s Books That Never Were”. Sooooo funny! Indeed, I don’t think that Marjorie Flack could have gotten Angus Lost published if the original idea was to present Angus as a platypus. So good she got direction…. 🙂
Bloglines also let me know about a bunch of knitting blogs–I’m looking forward to looking those over, too. Bloglines did NOT have a set of Kidlit blogs–so I’m delighted that Akelda has plenty of links to those.
I’m starting to like RSS feeds. It’s not as simple as messages in your e-mail inbox. I tend to prefer that–and some of my Sonderbooks subscribers do too, I can tell. However, once you have a place to go to see what’s new, it is a convenient form…. It’s probably better to keep the list from getting too long, so you can keep track of the ones you really follow.
I’m doing a series of 23 Things for Loudoun County Public Library’s Learning 2.0 program. We are supposed to be learning to use Web 2.0 technology. On each step, we’re to blog about our experiences.
Thing #8 was to set up a bloglines account and subscribe to some feeds.
So far, I’m not real happy with bloglines–I like My Yahoo much better, and wish we could have taken our pick. I probably won’t use Bloglines a lot in the future.
Besides, I set up my own personal feed reader at http://sondy.blogspot.com, the former site of my blog. (And there are archives there of my adventures in Europe.)
I believe that Thing #9 has us exploring Bloglines a bit further, so I will see if I grow any more fondness for it.
I tried to add Brotherhood 2.0 to my feeds at Bloglines, and it didn’t work real well. That’s the video blog my son and I are now hooked on. It’s library related, because John Green is a YA author, right?
My life now is busy, busy, busy, but I figure that since Learning 2.0 is a program sponsored by my employer, I can try to get a Thing done every week or two, and that’s fair. It’s a challenge doing that. Sharing an office, running story time, Babygarten, and Summer Reading programs, we don’t get a lot of time at our desks. So I’m seizing the day today….