Summer reading

Our final display for the year is devoted to summer reading. Jenny posted some great annotated book lists on the bulletin board that's out in the hallway. The 2007 Printz Award winners, the 2008 Illinois Abraham Lincoln Award nominees, titles from Publishers Weekly "Hot Books for Summer" list, the 2007 Alex Award winners, and the Ultimate Teen Reading List from teenreads.com. Inside, books are on display and students have been posting their recommendations. One blank yellow page is filled up now, but a whole other one awaits adornment.



Oh, and now I have scouts out spotting earbud buddy photo ops. This picture of Abby and Rohun was taken by Mr. Garvey in the PC lab. Awwwww.

Big hair

My mother says that she missed the Golden Age of Television putting children to bed. Now I understand better what I missed while I was putting my own children to bed -- hair metal music. Our copy of American Hair Metal, by Steven Blush (781.66 B629am) arrived today. Page after page after page of guys with Big Hair. And not just big hair, but serious displays of androgyny too.



I'm thinking my mother got the worse end of the deal.

News and views

In the Legal News department, Senator Dan Kotowski (D-Mount Prospect) has proposed a more reasonable piece of legislation to help students deal with potential danger on the Internet. The Internet Safety Education Act would require school districts to provide education about Internet threats and risks. Imagine -- teaching, not blocking!

In the Fun Department, I've learned from Jessamyn about Archie McPhee's new temporary tattoos for librarians. Gotta get me some.
And for anyone who wants to know more about our visit from klezmer group Veretski Pass, you can stream the interview/performance they did for the WILL AM Focus 580 show. Hot music, amazing people!

In the I Can't Believe It Department, there's the incredible story of the hapless substitute teacher who may serve up to 40 years in prison for exposing children to pornography because she couldn't figure out how to shut off pop-up porn ads. Never mind that the computer she was using was a Microsoft Windows 98 machine running an outdated version of Internet Explorer, the school's license for its firewall program had expired, the machine's anti-virus software was expired and lacked any anti-spyware tools, or that the prosecution hadn't conducted a basic scan of the computer's hard drive with anti-spyware software.
Then there's the outcry over 2007 Newbery Medal winner The Higher Power of Lucky by librarian Susan Porter because she used the word "scrotum" on the first page of the book. The 10-year-old main character overhears the word being used when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog on the scrotum. Being 10, she naturally wants to know what it means. I wonder if this controversy plays out differently in rural areas where animal body parts are the stuff of everyday "normal" conversation.

Finally, in the Very Cool department, the Online Gargoyle has been named a finalist in the National Scholastic Press Association "Online Pacemaker" competition. Nice!

The weather did not permit

So, no Boston, at least not for now. Instead, an unprecedented second snow day with lots of shoveling, a fair amount of working online, and - yes - readinginsideallcozy. And what a wonderful book I had to read. The Book Thief (Fiction Z89b), by Markus Zuzak, is a 2007 Printz Honor Book. Set in Nazi Germany, the book is narrated by Death, who tells the story of young book thief Liesel Meminger. Death speaks with irony, sadness, even humor, and eloquently describes Liesel's life with her idiosyncratic foster parents, neighbors, friends, and with the Jew the family hides in the basement. I'd planned to insert a couple of excerpts here, but Annie heard me talking about the book and checked it out!

It was a dark and stormy night...

The folks who write book jacket blurbs have a daunting task. They have just a couple of paragraphs to convince potential readers that, yes, this is the book to buy/borrow/read. Maybe I'm a pushover but, based on their blurbs, I want to read several of the titles that are currently on our new book shelf. Here are a few excerpts:

It all starts the day Stephen Rose arrives in town. Thirteen-year old Davie and his best friend, Geordie, are altar boys at their Catholic church. They're full of mischief, stealing the sacramental wine and battling with the local toughs. But that all changes when Father O'Mahoney asks them to befriend Stephen.

Forty-seven is a young slave boy living under the watchful eye of a brutal slave master. His life seems doomed, until he meets a mysterious runaway slave, Tall John. The two become inseparable, and Forty-seven soon finds himself swept up in an otherworldly battle and a personal struggle for his own liberation.

Seventeen-year-old Phil has felt like an outsider as long as he can remember. All Phil has ever known about his father is that he was Number Three on his mother's long list -- third in a series of affairs that have set Phil's family even further apart from the critical townspeople across the river. As for his own sexuality, Phil doesn't care what the neighbors will think; he's just waiting for the right guy to come along.

Callum is a Naught, a second-class citizen in a society run by the ruling Crosses. Sephy is a Cross, and daughter of the man slated to become prime minister. In their world, white naughts and black Crosses simply don't mix -- and they certainly don't fall in love. But that's exactly what they've done.

See if you can match up the blurbs with their titles and authors (okay, okay, two of them are gimmes):

Clay, by David Almond (Fiction AL68c 2006)
Naughts & Crosses: A Thriller, by Marjorie Blackman (Fiction B565n 2005)
The Center of the World, by Andreas Steinhofel (Fiction St358m:E)
47, by Walter Mosley (Fiction M853f)

Prize-worthy book titles

The topic of this week's RifRaf book club meeting was "strange and interesting book titles." Jenny supplied a prize (candy, of course) for the person deemed to have brought the best example. Hands down, the collective mind chose Charley's Charlie's offering of The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen, by M. T. Anderson. That's not to say there weren't a number of other good suggestions. For example, Martin brought out Book Lust, by Nancy Pearl (011.73 P316b) and Joy was rooting for Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler (Fiction B972g2001). Join us for next week's meeting when we discuss books that should win prizes for book award competitions that don't exist. Best dog book, best book that makes you cry, best depiction of a dysfunctional family -- post your contributions here!

You never know who will see what you post online

And sometimes it works out in really cool ways. Several years ago, we had a group of girls (with one in particular) who were really wild about Orson Scott Card and his Ender's Game series. OSC is perennially popular here, but this was a case of hard core fandom. Luckily for us, he visited our fair city in both 1998 and 2000 while on book tours. Both times, several of us trucked over to the bookstore to see him, get books signed and, of course, get our pictures taken with the man. The photos were then posted on our photo gallery.

Here's where it gets interesting. Some time ago, I received an e-mail from the folks at Enslow Publishers. There were preparing a biography of OSC and wanted to know if they could use one of those photos. I said yes, with the proviso that they send us a copy of the book when it was out. Well, now we've got it in hand: Orson Scott Card: Architect of Alternate Worlds by Edward Willett. And there's the top photo from the photo gallery, in living color, on page 89.

This one's for you, Jocelyn -

Money is a funny thing

We've been receiving books from a series called American Popular Culture Through History. One of the cool things about it is that each decade-based volume has is an appendix showing the cost of products during the time period covered. I was quite struck by some of the prices I found in the 1960s volume:

• McDonald's "Big Mac," $.45 (1968)
• Milk, $.48 per half gallon (1964)
• Cotton denim jeans (Sears), $3.47 (1966)
• Interest on savings accounts, 5.25-5.75% (1966)
• Chevrolet Camaro (base price), $2,466 (1966)
• Look magazine, $.25 (1964)
• Paperback edition of Catch-22, $.95 (1969)
• 23-inch black-and-white television, $260 (1961)
• Zenith 20-inch color television, $399.95 (1968)
• Boeing 747 (new), $21,000,000 (1966)

Wonder how much a Boeing jet costs these days? Don't think it's followed the same trajectory as those TV sets.