RifRaf goes to Book Market

If one must do a talk in a shopping mall, one should be lucky enough to have intrepid members of RifRaf, Uni High's book club extraordinaire, there to take the stage as well. Collette, Rose, Batia, and Sara all came to play the part of "real" teenagers for my talk at the second annual Book Market @ the Square, held in conjunction with the Urbana Sweet Corn Festival.

Here they are, ahem, blending in with the audience:



And here is Batia, pretending to be an annoying teenager, as Collette and Rose look on shocked:

NEW new book list

Joy. The University Library is now supplying us with an RSS feed for our new book lists, which means we don't have to create them manually. To see the latest list, just click on the New Books link (on our main page) as before. But now it's continually updated to show the most recent 60 days worth of titles. Best of all, each title links to the online catalog, so you can see if the book is available to be checked out. You can customize this new book list, if you wish, by changing the search parameters. So, for example, you could create a list of new titles at the Music Library or new titles in certain Dewey Decimal call number ranges (e.g., 320 for political science, 620 for engineering). Fun. You can even add the feed to your RSS news aggregator and be informed every time new books arrive at the Uni High Library!

School!

And what a boatload of new books came in over the summer! I picked up a few that have a self-assessment, fix-your-life, fix-the-world kind of angle.

It's Your World -- If You Don't Like It, Change It: Activism for Teenagers by Mikki Halpin (371.81 H164i)

A Girl's Guide to Yoga: Over 30 Poses to Practice Anywhere by Jeanne Finestone (613.704608352 F494g)

The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence by Elliott Currie (305.23508692 C936r)

In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You by Shari Graydon (391.6 G795i)

Here's a cool photo from In Your Face. The caption reads "Appealing eyes come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and as the media include a greater diversity of actors and models, our appreciation of the beauty in difference grows, too."

My fifteen minutes

Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined having a moment of real estate on the University's main page. How cool is that?? But my minutes are ticking by quickly. Pretty soon, this lovely press release by Andrea Lynn will have to stand on its own. Anyway, all this takes the edge off the lightning-fast rejection I got for the article I wrote at the beginning of the summer. Sheesh, did they read it?

As my fame is fleeting, so is the summer. Last week we visited family in Denver (with a stop at the Denver Public Library's Central Library, of course). Next week it's a road trip to South Carolina's Fort Jackson to see son Simon graduate from basic training. Then it's back to school and regular blog updates!