Best Books of 2008

A publishing newsletter I subscribe to (for fun) asked the question, what are the top 10 best books you read in 2008? Since those people probably read more than I do, I'll narrow it down to my top 5:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (a must-read for everyone!)
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Amazon Canada

I just ordered my first book from Amazon Canada. I have enjoyed re-reading the first four Harry Potter books in French, and I've been wanting to buy Twilight in French. I'm just a little annoyed that I couldn't buy a used copy. I think they weren't willing to ship the used book outside of Canada. If I'm willing to pay the extra shipping, I don't understand why this is problematic. But I got a new paperback copy for $17 with shipping, which isn't bad.

I love the titles of the books in French: Fascination, Tentation (temptation), Hesitation, and Revelation. Sorry to those who speak French and realize some accent marks are missing here.

I stopped in a French bookstore in NYC on Saturday and was going to buy the last Harry Potter book (the only one I don't have in French), and they wanted $75 for a paperback!!! We were speaking in English but I still had to repeat it twice to make sure I understood. They said they were going out of business. With Amazon Canada available, I don't understand how they stayed in business in the first place.

Serialized Stories

I seem to get strange cravings when I work on Wednesday nights...

Many books and short stories used to come out in serialized form in journals. Sweeney Todd was originally published that way, and I have an aunt who published her first horor novel that way back in the 70's (and got a lot of money for it, too). The anticipation of each part must have been like a print soap opera or hit TV drama. There are probably some magazines that still do this, though their popularity is obviously questionable.

It seems to me that there must be some good creative writers out there using blogs to serialize stories. I really want to find one, but can't think of any good keywords. It seems like a blog would be a good place to share stories with the world, though difficult to find. I'm sure plenty of fan fic writers do this, but I'm not too interested in that...

Though I think this all stems from having just finished the last Twilight book and being disappointed in the silly ending. Actually, the whole last book was incredibly silly, even in comparison with the first three. I wanted a happy ending, but expected something to happen first. Maybe online fan fiction is just what I need, someone must have written a better ending somewhere.

I'm Back!

I'm back! I feel like I haven't written in forever. We hosted a regional workshop on Friday on Web 2.0. Here's the program's Web site. Jody Fagan was incredible. I was lucky enough to get to go to dinner and breakfast with her. I was so impressed by her online CV, and it's not even entirely up to date. It's 16 pages long, and she's only a few years older than I am (a.k.a. not close to old). Yet she's very personable and down-to-earth. Most importantly, she's easy-going, which was important because we kept having stuff pop up... our entire campus scheduled an emergency preparedness day for the same day as the workshop and it included sirens, fake shooters and hostages, police in full S.W.A.T. get-up... then two days before she was to arrive, Palin and Biden announced they would both be in little 'ol Williamsport on the same afternoon, and Biden was on campus!

I think my poster and panel session went well. I accidentally set off an audio file during my panel presentation... that was a little embarrassing, at first I though it had something to do with the emergency drills outside! I would have liked to walk around to see other peoples' posters more, but kept keeping an eye on my own poster (for any visitors), so didn't focus well on what they had to say. But I was so impressed with what I saw other people put together and hope to catch up with the handouts I collected and any electronic files they send me to post on the Web site.

One of my best friends from grad school drove 2 hours to present and help out. She is a great public speaker and her lovely personality comes out when she does public speaking. However, she got intimidated by a previous panel session and said in her introduction it made her "scared shitless"... I'm sure more than a few faces turned bright red. Jody thought it was bold, I thought it worked with the rest of her talk (though I'm biased as my husband swears like a sailor at home). She says she didn't notice it until she sat down at the end, then was quite embarrassed!

I'm so glad October is done. I still have a presentation in two weeks that I'm nervous about. Our campus has these "teaching effectiveness" workshops once a month where different faculty share things they're doing that have been successful. I have been involved in one in the past, where I presented a Flash tutorial on plagiarism. It was very well-received. I'm ganging up with the head of the Writing Center to present an interactive tutorial we've created on citation. Professors are so frustrated with students not knowing how to cite, so this is meant to help the utter citation newbie. The thing is, we haven't yet done much testing on students to see how effective it really is, though she will in her freshman comp classes in the next week or so, and I'm really hoping it's enough to be a real teaching effectiveness workshop. I did base it on lots of articles I found on teaching citation, so if I bring that stuff in...

But no matter what, now that this Web 2.0 workshop and Harry Potter Night are done, my life is becoming soo much easier. I have finished the third Twilight book (TEAM EDWARD!), and will soon go home and spend the rest of this Sunday afternoon working on the fourth. My wonderful husband cleaned the house for my friend's visit so I could read the books I've been obsessed with. Now if that isn't prince charming, I don't know what is.

Numbering a series

I really wish all publishers of series would follow the example of Harry Potter and clearly NUMBER THE DARN BOOKS. I hate having to go do research to find out which book to read next if I liked the first one. Artemis Foul does this, too, though I wasn't thrilled with the first enough to run out for the sequels.

I decided as a librarian, I wanted to find out what all the hype was about the Twilight series. So I picked up the first book at the local indie bookstore a few weeks ago, and when I finished the book I'd been working on for a while, I dug in. And wasted one of the last precious, beautiful days of the fall yesterday... wasted in that I didn't go out to enjoy the beautiful weather. I'm ashamed to admit I enjoyed the book, despite it's high cheese factor... I hate "cheesy" things, a phrase I taught my French host family who couldn't figure out why being full of cheese was such a bad thing. So I find the main character a little unbelievable. I'm going to ask some of our student workers if they use the words "blouse" and "slacks" because I attribute these words to people older than myself. But the author is certainly good at capturing sexy, seductive moments, and that is why I couldn't put the thing down.

So I'm going to run over to the public library tonight and see if they have the next one. If not, I'll go buy it. I'm hooked. I just wish I hadn't had to spend five minutes on the Internet trying to figure out which book was next. It's New Moon... I think. Oh, how I should not be publicly admitting to all of this.

Tintentod & cat update

I am anxiously awaiting the release of Cornelia Funk's latest book, Inkdeath. While she now lives in the U.S., she is originally German and I believe she writes in German. The book is scheduled to be released in the U.S. on October 7, one day after my birthday! When I was looking this up this morning, Wikipedia said the German edition of the book has actually been out for a year already. If it were French, I would order it now, but I think I am too lazy and awful at German (even if I majored in it), to tackle a 500+ page book. I guess I'll just have to be patient and pre-order it at my local indie bookstore. I hope these books become big after the movie comes out, they are so good and I can't find anyone over the age of 12 that has read them. But when I convinced a friend to read Inkheart, she couldn't put it down.

My younger cat spent Friday morning at the vet getting bladder x-rays. He does not have stones, but that makes his urinalysis results a complete enigma. They are now both on antibiotics, special food, and he's on an anti-anxiety medication to help relieve bladder inflammation (and reduce stress). He seems pretty doped-up to me, and that pill must taste awful because he will do just about anything to keep it from going down. He drools all over the place, spits it across the room (I'm not kidding), and foams at the mouth as if he had rabies. He gets so slobbery, his mouth is too slippery for me to pry open. I even tried coating it in peanut butter last night, and he was not fooled.

Book by Jessica Fletcher

I went to the public library during lunch to get a new book on tape. While I was browsing their audio book collection, I saw they had a book called "Murder She Wrote: A Vote for Murder." I used to love that show when I was little and it was a big treat to watch it with my grandma.

Anyway, it has Angela Lansbury on the cover, and then I noticed that the first author listed was Jessica Fletcher. For those of you who are too cool to have watched this show, that was Angela's character's name. Half of the people in her little town of Cabot Cove, Maine were murdered, and someone is murdered every time she travels anywhere. In the show, she is a mystery novelist for profession and amateur crime solver that no one ever believes. I read the author bio on the back, and they describe the fictional character! I have heard of pen names, but has anyone ever heard of a book supposedly being written by a fictional person? I am so confused.

Book Chaos & Sick Cat

Am I a bad librarian if book chaos in my personal collection only drives me crazy because I think it should? We're in the process of moving, and as soon as I had a book shelf, I shoved whatever books were closest onto it. Knowing my husband and me, that's probably as organized as it will get.

We've been finding things around the house that are soaked in cat pee. We couldn't tell if it was old or new. The current wave of heat and humidity really brings out the odors of the old house (beyond the cat pee). It finally became aparent that he's still sick when my husband found the suitcase he used last week now smells of eau de chat. I tried to get a pee sample last night, but he didn't cooperate. I'll try again tonight with both cats...

Who said nobody cares about books anymore?

My dad says all of these strange tornadoes and floods are God's way of saying He's *&%@ off at what we're doing to the environment. I don't doubt that it's global warming. But here's an encouraging story about the floods in Iowa, or at least the pictures. A very large number of volunteers showed up at the University of Iowa Main Library and formed human chains to get the lower books out of the special collections area of the basement. They were clearly working hard to save the books, and while there was a lot of flood damage to the building, it sounds like very little happened to the books.

So there to anyone who thinks no one cares about books anymore!

Book-Focused?

When libraries center "fun events" that focus on books, like painting clay pots based on a favorite book, do we perpetuate a bad stereotype of being all about "old-fashioned" books? It is important to come up with things students will think is fun, yet also somehow be related to the library. Can we have "fun events" that are more about information than books... and really be fun? What does that look like?

That is a lot of question marks in a single paragraph... that says something.

The Book Thief

I just finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak last night. All three of the people I get book recommendations from labeled this book as "life changing" and a "must read." Well, it is.

This is an unusual book with Death as the narrator. The style takes a few pages to get used to, every few pages he inserts a note in bold text, something that is incredibly insightful... inhumanly insightful into the characters or the time period. There are also some picture stories the Jew gives the main character that touch the reader beyond words.

So much was happening in Nazi Germany, and the average German was so ignorant of the whole picture. The main characters in this book are just trying to get by, just trying to love, just trying to live. This is a powerful book that everyone should read!

Books

I sometimes wish I worked at a public library just so that my obsessive reading habit could be put to some professional use. It is not very useful for academic librarianship.

Last night I finished a book that is going on my list of favorite books ever. It is called Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. It is about friendship and being a woman in a remote part of China during the 19th century. I do not want to say much more because I want people to find about it for themselves. I have liked the cover for a while and had planned to read it eventually. But when I heard my mother rave about it so much the last time I saw her, I had to push it to the top of my list. It is an incredibly beautiful story, and she clearly put a lot of effort into the research that was required. It feels incredibly genuine and true, and I can't wait to read the other books she has written.

After finishing this book last night, I wandered around my house wondering what to do with myself until bed time. I felt like starting a new book right away was being unfaithful to this incredible one I just finished. But I had bought a book called Inkheart (at a wonderful Indie bookstore in Ithaca) this past weekened, and I read the first 30 pages. I believe it is going to be really good as well. The two main characters are a bibliophile father and his bibliophile 12-year-old daughter. The lessons the father teaches his daughter to encourage her bibliophilia are beautiful, like "Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside of them." At another point, he tells his daughter, "If you take a book with you on a journey... an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it."

Of course this last passage made me set the book down for a moment and think about this. And I believe it is true. Whenever I see the cover of The Time Traveler's Wife, I think of reading it when I went camping by myself in Maine a few years ago. Daughter of Fortune makes me think of reading it in my empty apartment in Bloomington, Indiana, waiting for my stuff and boyfriend to arrive. The sunlight through the blinds is the strongest part of that memory. The last book I read in that apartment was Smilla's Sense of Snow, though I think I finished it just before the movers came to take the furniture away. The Little Prince was read sitting on the floor next to my bed in my third host family's house while living in France. The floor was really hard, but I was so delightfully surprised by how good this book was and how quickly I was reading it in French that I was too lazy to get up and sit on the comfortable bed. I read the entire Chronicles of Narnia over the telephone to an ex-boyfriend, and I remember after each chapter asking "one more?" Some nights we read until 11 or 12 o'clock, and I was delightfully exhausted during the next day, just to do the same thing all over again once 9 o'clock p.m. rolled around. I remember scrambling to finish Les Miserables for an 8th-grade book report while sitting under the tallest arch of the tallest roller-coaster in the world (at the time). We were staying at the campground at Cedar Point which was right next the fence of the park, and the Magnum was right under the fence. I believe I might have forgotten that memory if I hadn't been reading Les Miz at the picnic table, looking up as each new set of cars went over the top of the arch. I vividly remember picking up Indiana and Lucky at the Evanston library near my Chicago apartment. I haven't fallen in love with any of my libraries the way I fell in love with that one. And I took My Sister's Keeper with me to Seattle for spring break my last year of grad school. I remember how hungerly I was reading it in the airport as my flight kept getting delayed again and again due to bad weather.

Would I have remembered these tiny details if it hadn't been for these books? Certainly not all of them. They would have lost their significance. Perhaps that would have made room in my memory for more important things that I can't seem to remember, but I can't help feeling that books are as almost as important as anything else. They allow you to experience things you can't or don't have time to experience in life, or things you wouldn't really want to experience in life but are worth experiencing in a book. I believe they make you relate and empathize with others better, expand your horizons beyond the constraints of life.

Books

I have two things to write about today. The first is MSN Money just published an article on 10 ways to save money on books. She doesn't get to using the Public Library until #6, though admittedly she says it is the cornerstone of her plan. I buy very few books and either get mine from friends and family who pass things on, or from our wonderful public library. What is not available at the local library, you can get through Interlibrary Loan. I would like to reproach the article of this author on one thing: Why can't you check out just a few books at a time and return them in a timely manner? If you keep a book out for 6 months, that keeps other people from using it.

My other thing I wanted to mention today is this woman who has started a blog on the challenge she set for herself of reading 200 books in 2008... and she doesn't mean just those quick Young Adult books, she's reading thousand-page classics. All of this while raising a toddler, a newborn, and running a business. This is in response to a report on the dismal state of what Americans read. I thought my book-per-week goal was ambitious, and already drives my fiance to accuse me of finding books more important than he is.

Books and Keeping Up

I stumbled on a librarian's blog that was all about what she read for fun. At the beginning of the month, she tallied up her books for 2007 and compared them to the past few years. I strive for a novel a week, but wasn't sure how I did over the entire year. So I tallied them up (I keep a Shefari account and an old-fashioned book journal) and the total was 60 books. So that is 1.15 books per week. I'm currently stuck on the Three Musketeers, which is really good, but really long. I've got about 80 pages of very tiny type to go, then onto the original Sweeney Todd.

It is my Sunday to work today and I'm taking advantage of the quiet to catch up on my listservs. I had about 230 unread messages when I went in since I haven't been keeping up. I was upset to learn that LexisNexis had a roundtable discussion for instruction librarians at ALA Midwinter that I could have gone to. Their sales people have admitted the new interface is a disaster, but I would have liked to get my voice heard. I guess that is my punishment for not keeping up.

I got a book through Interlibrary Loan called "Blogging and RSS: A Librarians Guide." I don't remember why I requested it, it's very basic. I'm still hoping to find something useful in there for promoting my two blogs and RSS feeds, particularly among faculty. I also have a 1-inch pile of stuff to read and pass on that I should probably get done today.