Library Mascot Cage Match

Posted on October 10, 2007 by Katy K.

Library Mascot Cage Match: an Unshelved Collection by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
Unshelved is a library comic strip, featuring the librarians of Mallville going about their daily work. My internet librarian likes to post strips at the bottom of our intranet page, but only one every couple of weeks. Now you, too, can get to know Buddy the Beaver who shelves books; Tamara, the idealistic vegetarian children’s librarian, Ned, the nudist libertarian patron, and our hero, Dewey, a 20-something slacker librarian who’d rather be reading comics than helping you. The humor and situations will be very familiar to librarians, but geeks and gamers and, well, anyone with a sense of humor will appreciate it as well. and I were both laughing out loud, and having trouble sharing the book. Even if you can’t find the book, you can still read the whole series online at http://www.unshelved.com/ , and even have the daily strip emailed to you.

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The 4-Hour Workweek

Posted on October 10, 2007 by Katy K.

I know, I know, another bestseller… this one recommended by my good friend M.

The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss Ferriss undertakes, quite ambitiously, to show how just about anyone can go, as he did, from making $40K a year to making $40K a month, with spending much, much less time working. Everyone I’ve told this to has thought that it’s a joke. It’s not. .Ferriss says that life is too short to spend our best years doing things we hate; that a comfortable retirement is an illusion in this day and age, and that living dreams now costs less than most people think. To get the ball rolling, Ferriss starts with “dreamlines”, breaking dreams down into realistic steps and figuring out how much they would really cost. He walks through making your work 80% more efficient (realizing that 80% of results typically come from 20% of our efforts, so focusing on that productive 20%), making it less stressful, outsourcing and delegating, and how to negotiate a distance working arrangement with your current job. All of these solutions make sense and would make work take less time with more satisfaction for most people with office jobs. Also, it frees up time for the final step. Every chapter includes exercises to get you on your way, starting with confidence-building and moving on to things directly related to the chapter. The most radical middle chunk helps you develop and market a product which will finance your “new rich” life. Once that is in place, you can either continue your traditional job with greatly reduced hours, or have the financial freedom to quit. But Ferriss doesn’t leave you rich and unoccupied. He talks about how to travel – really, live abroad – for less: where it’s safe and affordable, how to do it with children, suggestions for things to learn, how to build a social life once the work social life is taken away, and how to get used to living without feeling a need to run from one thing to the next.

It sounds wonderful. Do I think I can do it myself? Well, I’d have to want to give up my job, which I actually love. But – for my love, and for any number of people I know who either don’t like what they do, would like it much better if it took up much less of their time, or just need to get away, this book has some great ideas. The two key points are having enough chutzpah to try to do it in the first place, and coming up with the idea for your break-through product. Though he offers plenty of coaching for every step, it’s still not going to happen without some serious effort on your part. Try it anyway. Isn’t your life worth it?

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The 4-Hour Workweek

Posted on October 10, 2007 by Katy K.

I know, I know, another bestseller… this one recommended by my good friend M.

The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss Ferriss undertakes, quite ambitiously, to show how just about anyone can go, as he did, from making $40K a year to making $40K a month, with spending much, much less time working. Everyone I’ve told this to has thought that it’s a joke. It’s not. .Ferriss says that life is too short to spend our best years doing things we hate; that a comfortable retirement is an illusion in this day and age, and that living dreams now costs less than most people think. To get the ball rolling, Ferriss starts with “dreamlines”, breaking dreams down into realistic steps and figuring out how much they would really cost. He walks through making your work 80% more efficient (realizing that 80% of results typically come from 20% of our efforts, so focusing on that productive 20%), making it less stressful, outsourcing and delegating, and how to negotiate a distance working arrangement with your current job. All of these solutions make sense and would make work take less time with more satisfaction for most people with office jobs. Also, it frees up time for the final step. Every chapter includes exercises to get you on your way, starting with confidence-building and moving on to things directly related to the chapter. The most radical middle chunk helps you develop and market a product which will finance your “new rich” life. Once that is in place, you can either continue your traditional job with greatly reduced hours, or have the financial freedom to quit. But Ferriss doesn’t leave you rich and unoccupied. He talks about how to travel – really, live abroad – for less: where it’s safe and affordable, how to do it with children, suggestions for things to learn, how to build a social life once the work social life is taken away, and how to get used to living without feeling a need to run from one thing to the next.

It sounds wonderful. Do I think I can do it myself? Well, I’d have to want to give up my job, which I actually love. But – for my love, and for any number of people I know who either don’t like what they do, would like it much better if it took up much less of their time, or just need to get away, this book has some great ideas. The two key points are having enough chutzpah to try to do it in the first place, and coming up with the idea for your break-through product. Though he offers plenty of coaching for every step, it’s still not going to happen without some serious effort on your part. Try it anyway. Isn’t your life worth it?

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Posted on October 8, 2007 by Katy K.

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Austenland

Posted on October 6, 2007 by Katy K.

Here’s the dedication of the book:
For Colin Firth
You’re a really great guy, but I’m married,
so I think we should just be friends.


Austenland by Shannon Hale If you are an Austen fan, get this book and read it right now. I mean it. I have yet to read a Shannon Hale book that I didn’t like, but this is her first for adults, as well as her first (at least that I’ve read) realistic fiction. It falls squarely into the chick lit genre, as it features a single woman in search of contentment, with or without men. Jane, our heroine, is a graphic designer and very closeted Austen fan – so bad that she hides her BBC “Pride and Prejudice” dvds behind a plant pot. A great-aunt who found the buried dvds leaves Jane with an all-expenses-paid vacation to Austenland, where female guests live in manor houses in a life straight out of an Austen novel, complete with male actors playing eligible bachelors. It seems like the vacation of her dreams, something sure to cure her of her unhealthy Mr. Darcy obsession once and for all. But when Jane arrives, she’s not so sure. The clothes feel strange and she misses her forbidden cell phone, but most of all, what can she believe in a place where everyone is pretending to be something they’re not? And even if she’s just flirting, should she concentrate on the off-limits but very friendly gardener, or brooding and Darcy-like Mr. Nobley? It’s not clear, right up to the very end. Hale is Mormon, and I was very impressed at just how sexy a book with no sex in it could be. This is real treat.

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Families

Posted on October 3, 2007 by Katy K.

Families by Susan Kuklin This beautiful nonfiction book is just the ticket for children curious about families. Kuklin interviews New York children ages 4 to 14 from a multitude of backgrounds and photographs their families. The children tell us in their own words what they don’t like but mostly like about their family and their siblings. The families are lots of different colors and mixed; different religions; with straight, gay, divorced and single parents, and adopted, only, and multiple siblinged children. The kids are charmingly passionate about their families, and the pictures (staged by the kids) tell a lot about the families. They’ve included meaningful pictures from family photo albums, too, of grandparents or parents when they were young. Each family is a double spread, with large pictures and a fair amount of text. This is the only thing I could consider a drawback – I am still on the lookout for something like this on a preschool level. With my non-English teacher viewpoint, I’d think a third or fourth grader could read it independently, and a couple years younger would enjoy it as a read-aloud. Still, for pictures of real families from the kids’ point of view, this is amazing.

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The Secrets of Droon

Posted on September 30, 2007 by Katy K.

The Secrets of Droon. Book 1: The Hidden Stairs and the Magic Carpet. Book 2: Journey to the Volcano Palace. by Tony Abbott. Read by Oliver Wyman
This occupies the small but growing niche of long series of short chapter books for the higher level of emergent reader. The chapters are short, with lots of cliffhangers. The action or scenery is first described in the narration, and then commented on by the characters. This series is about three children who find a magic stairway to the land of Droon in Eric’s basement. In the first book, Eric is rescued by and then helps to rescue the beautiful Princess Keeah from the evil Lord Sparr, who steals from Keeah the magical Red Eye of Dawn. In the second book, the three children go back to retrieve the Red Eye of Dawn from Lord Sparr’s volcano fortress. I’m not really an action fan, and the constant cliffhangers were a little irritating for me, and too scary for Mr. FP. I found the fantasy world derivative and the characters are just not the point of the story. However, the series is really popular. It’s not a series that’s going to win adult fans, but what it’s aiming to do, it does well – introduce beginning readers to fantasy and keep them coming back to the library for more.

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A Kiss of Fate

Posted on September 28, 2007 by Katy K.

Well, the cover sure cued me in even if the title hadn’t… I picked up this book not for a romance, but because the series was in a short list in Booklist called, “Heroines Who Kick Butt.” And how could I resist that?

A Kiss of Fate by Mary Jo Putney Great Britain, early 18th century. Gwynne Owens is a young member of the secret magical group called the Guardians, who use their magic to preserve the peace as much as possible. She herself doesn’t have any sign of power, but is a librarian and a serious student of Guardian lore. When the action begins to heat up, she is a young and wealthy widow, living with her much older Guardian sister-in-law. Then she meets Duncan Macrae, a powerful Scottish weather mage. Their attraction is both powerful and frightening to Gwynne (nothing like a few lightening bolts to heat things up), and an early kiss leaves her with vivid visions of violent destruction. She wants to run the other way as fast as she can, but the Guardian Council senses that she will be crucial to balancing Duncan’s power during the gathering uprising in Scotland. After a hasty wedding, the pair is off on a short wedding tour on the way to the Macrae manor in the lowlands of Scotland. And now Gwynne’s power is awakened – truly high levels of seduction, charm, and persuasiveness, with some pretty good future reading to boot. Just quiet female powers, really, she thinks – will they be enough to keep Duncan from adding his power to the uprising and causing the rivers of blood in her visions? Though the Guardian premise seems promising to me, magic in Scotland during the ‘45 says Outlander to me. That series really sets the bar as far as combining adventure, romance and magic, even getting kudos for appealing to both genders, and this one can’t quite meet it. Kiss of Fate a fine book, a little heavier on the romance than the adventure, and a lot more sex than your average romance, due to the heroine’s special powers. It still has a scholarly and adventurous seductress, and a kilt-wearing man whose kisses cause storms. If these are up your alley, give it a try.

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The Rumpelstiltskin Problem

Posted on September 26, 2007 by Katy K.

Did I mention a weakness for fairy tales? This book, in its lovely purple handmade paper binding, was just lying on the shelf begging me to pick it up. So I did.

The Rumpelstiltskin Problem by Vivian VandeVelde Vande Velde is a well-known writer of fantasy and horror for the young, so this is a little out of her usual sphere. The problem with Rumpelstiltskin, she writes in the introduction, is that it just doesn’t make sense. For example, what father would lie to a king about his daughter’s abilities? What king would believe that an obviously poor girl had the ability to spin straw into gold? Why would anybody want to marry someone on a three day acquaintance, on every one of which she’s been threatened with death? In this collection, she sets out to make the familiar story make sense. She puts a different spin on each of half a dozen stories, so that in each one, a different character is to blame, and for different reasons. The language is contemporary, the stories funny, the concept fascinating. Enjoy!

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Protected: Not Dead

Posted on September 25, 2007 by Katy K.

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