Tales from a Loud Librarian

Hurricane Isaac downs a tree in my neighborhood in uptown New Orleans School begins early in southern Louisiana. The teachers' first day was August 6th, and the students entered the building with their smiling faces on August 9th. After August 9th, I was in full-on school mode. In other words, I was incredibly busy. Teachers were scheduling classes, the high school book group was selecting the new ARCs to read, I was soliciting members for the middle school book group, and I needed to do a lot of cleaning and editing of all my electronic resources. Then we hit a snag when Isaac decided to pay a visit. When we left school on Friday the 24th, we had no clue that we would not return for a week. I think that I left my printer and speakers on, though I know that I turned off all the desktop computers. I had reading material at home, but I left a stack of books that I really wanted to read sitting on the circulation desk. The time off did give me a chance to finish the novel, The Te...

Tuesday was the last day of school, and I scheduled a skype session with an author with the middle school book group, BRiMS , during their last lunch period for the school year. The timing was not very good, but I felt that I had no choice. The week before was BRiMS last meeting for the year, and the kids needed time to get Airborn read for that discussion. I wanted as many kids as possible to read Ice Island in anticipation of the skype with author, Sherry Shahan . So I needed to have some distance between the regular meeting and the skype session, to give the students an opportunity to read both books. Every day for a week I reminded the students of the skype in the daily school announcements. I emailed all the students several reminders. Then on Monday, all the students had to get their end of the year check off sheets signed. I made a point to tell each of the members of BRiMS individually that the skype event was for Tuesday at lunch, and they all assured me th...

On Wednesday, BRiMS , the middle school book group, enjoyed pizza while discussing Kenneth Oppel's book Airborn . I have been so busy reading books with deadlines for reviews that I did not finish the book until Tuesday night. If I had finished the book sooner, I would have known that serving mangoes would have been a more appropriate snack. However, none of the kids complained about the pizza. We discussed what time period we thought the book came from. The students all felt there were elements of the past and the future. Someone mentioned that the book reminded them of steampunk, and I was surprised that the 6th graders knew that term. I agreed this book definitely has steampunk elements. They also felt that they would want to follow the captain's orders that were given to Matt, but Kate was very persuasive, and they probably would have succumbed to her determination to go back to the forest to find the strange winged mammal. All agreed it was a good story.  T...

I started a book on April 19th. I know this because I logged it in on Good Reads . I just finished it on Sunday. Whew! I was off for a week during that time. You would think that I could read a young adult book faster than that. I liked the book, but my life got in the way. I will spend lots of my free time reading, but when visitors come in to town, and the festival season starts in New Orleans; it is hard to curl up with a book. When I attended the AASL conference in October, a member of the YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults committee told me that she reads a book a day. I love to read, but I want to savor a book, so racing through it in a day will not allow me to enjoy or internalize it at all. I can never remember character names now. If I read a book a day, then reading the book would be useless to me because I would not remember how the book made me feel or allowed the book to get under my skin and change how I think. Right now I have some reading deadlines looming over me....