Characters Stay With You

A strange thing happens when I watch Phillies Spring Training games this year: at some point during the game I start thinking about Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. It's not really that surprising, though, when one considers that the Phillies have an outfielder named Ender Inciarte and I just (some might say "finally") read Ender's Game in February.

This got me thinking about other fictional characters that stayed with me in weird ways. I used to smile whenever I saw the logo on the Sirius satellite radio antenna on my car because it made me think of Sirius Black (my favorite Harry Potter character). Sadly, it doesn't happen anymore because the antenna on my new radio is in a less visible place on my car.

In a lot of ways my new career in librarianship is due to Henry DeTamble, the time traveling librarian in The Time Traveler's Wife. It's not that Henry made me want to be a librarian, but the book made me consider librarianship as a viable career option; it made me realize that librarians have more options than working in a public library or a school.

I'm sure I have others that just aren't coming to me.

Fun With Obsolete Words

A good friend, who shares my fondness for fun vocabulary, sent me a link to this post at Death and Taxes about obsolete words. I didn't ask whether she agreed with the author's assertion that the words in question became obsolete before their time. I don't agree that we need all the words, but some of them are fantastic.

My favorite word on the list, and the one that I'd most like to start using, is resistentialism. My friend told me to check out resistentialism when she sent the link because she knows I have a habit of commanding inanimate objects to do things when they are being particularly spiteful; it would have been so great if we'd known there was a word for the spiteful behavior of inanimate objects when we were in college.

Another word on the list I really loved is Englishable, but I doubt I'll be able to use it much. It makes me wonder if there's a word for taking an English word that's one part of speech and turning it into another part of speech. My friends and I did that all the time in college, normally turning a noun into a verb (table and tea were the most commonly turned). Furthermore, I wonder if there's a word for using a proper noun as a verb (Google and Netflix spring to mind).

A Good Book Could Lift Sagging Spirits (article)

My mom passed along this article that appeared in the Tampa Bay Times last week. It discusses a "list of 27 books to make you feel better" (Tobar, 2013) that was released by the UK's Society of Chief Librarians.

I've used books as comfort food my whole life, so I was intrigued by the list. The funny thing is that I've only heard of one of the 27 books (Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani). The next time I'm feeling down I'll have to look for one of the books on the list to see if it helps. (Big Stone Gap is a strong contender for the role because I actually started reading it once upon a time.)


Tobar, H. (2013, March 8). A good book could lift sagging spirits. Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved from
http://www.tampabay.com/news/health/a-good-book-could-lift-sagging-spirits/2107403

The Ghost Writes Back (article)

I stumbled across a link to an article by a former Sweet Valley High ghostwriter on BuzzFeed the other day. (Yes, BuzzFeed; it's more than just jokes and cute animal GIFs.) I was never much of a Sweet Valley High fan (I preferred The Baby-sitters Club, but for some reason I had a Sweet Valley High board game), but the BuzzFeed post piqued my curiosity so I checked out the article.

Amy Boesky spent most of her twenties writing every other Sweet Valley High book while pursuing her PhD. Her article is extremely interesting and I highly recommend you head over to the Kenyon Review and read it for yourself.

There were two parts of the article that I found particularly fascinating. The first was the description of the writing process. Francine Pascal, the creator of the series, provided story plots: "eight or nine pages of single spaced directives that laid out exhilarating and implausible fables of duplicity, innovation, risk, and triumph" (Boesky, 2013, para. 25). Boesky first turned Pascal's "long, free-verse poems" (Boesky, 2013, para. 25) into chapter outlines, which she then sent to her editor for approval. After receiving the editor's approval she wrote the books.

The other part of the article I really noticed was her discussion of the arguments for and against series books at the time. "Librarians hated series books. They kept kids from reading 'real' literature" (Boesky, 2013, para. 27). The other side was argued by reading specialists who believed that the important thing was to get kids reading. "Lay down the habits, they [reading specialists] argued" (Boesky, 2013, para. 27). The discussion struck a chord with me because I rarely came across anyone who didn't share the reading specialists' view in my library science courses. Was adolescent literacy so much better in the 80s that librarians weren't desperate to get kids reading? I come down firmly on the side of "it doesn't matter what kids read as long as they are reading." Plus, I believe that reading "real" literature in another form, such as a graphic novel, can help some kids understand the story better than they would if they read the classic tome itself.

As an avowed fan of mass-market series books (not just The Baby-sitters Club, but also Nancy Drew), I really enjoyed this peek behind the curtain.

Boesky, A. (2013). The ghost writes back. Kenyon Review Online. Retrieved from http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2013-winter/selections/amy-boesky-656342/