Tales from a Loud Librarian

I am very proud that this year's president of Bookmarked (the high school book group), Destiny Burnett, is both a big reader and big writer. This summer she applied to be a guest teen blogger on the YALSA blog, The Hub , during Teen Read Week in October. We knew a while ago that she was selected as one of the bloggers, but just a few days ago ALA made it official. Open here to read all about it . I also want to share Destiny's book review blog . She doesn't post on a regular basis, but I find her book reviews extremely well thought out and insightful.

When Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian visited the PFTSTA Library, they sat down with two juniors for an interview before they moved on to their next school visit of the day. The students are real fans and were thrilled to have twenty minutes to spend on their own with the two authors. The students wrote an article for the October 2nd edition of  SLJTeen with highlights from the interview. You can read their article here . Here is a link to Destiny's review of Jenny Han's book, To All the Boys I Loved Before  that was published April, 2014.

I have been writing forever, but I wasn't  a very good writer in high school and struggled to put every word on the page. To look back on it now, I never would have dreamed that some day I would be posting text on a blog for the world to see because I use to be so self-conscious about every word that I wrote.  One of the members of Bookmarked, the high school library book group, is an amazing writer. I am in awe of how well she organizes her thoughts and how beautifully she puts her words together. I sure hope that she can use this to her advantage when she selects a career. She recently submitted a blog post to The Hub , sponsored by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of ALA. Click here to open and read her post on school vs. recreational reading . 

The members of Bookmarked, the high school library book group, are at again. They have been reading and writing all summer long. Please open here to read their newest reviews of the young adult literature that resonates with them.  This group of teens will have reviews printed twice a month for the next year. You can find the archives of all the issues right here .

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....

The following article was written by a member of Bookmarked, the high school book group. It was published on Sunday, March 11, 2012 in the Westbank Picayune. This is a special section of the Times Picayune that is only published on the Westbank.    Area high school students are invited to be journalists for the year. They select a topic about their school that they want to share, and the articles are published monthly. This month Kayla writes about the PFTSTA Library. She did a wonderful job, but I didn't even know about it until I saw someone tacking a copy on the bulletin board outside the office. I put so much information on the library website that Kayla didn't need to interview me. I could not find an electronic copy of this article. If you click on it, you can view a  bigger size that is readable.  Way to go Kayla, thanks for making the PFTSTA Library look so good. I hope all the kids at Taylor feel like it is a great place to visit or hang out. 

I think that this was the best Teen Tech Week (TTW) ever. I enjoyed all the activities, and I think the kids did too. Let me give you a daily wrap up of each event.  MONDAY: I thought that I would start TTW with a movie and popcorn. That way if students forgot that it was TTW, they could visit the library for a special event that needed no preparation. I didn't ask anyone to sign up for the movie. I just held two showings so that every interested student would be able to view it. Below is a shot from the Oscar winning animated short, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore created by William Joyce The kids really were enamored with the movie. The theme is so pertinent to show in a library. It is all about the power of the story, and it begins in the French Quarter only a 15 minute drive from school.  TUESDAY: I had to convince them that it would be a good idea, but I got Jon and Pamela Voelkel to skype with us. They were reluctant because...

The above picture shows the table of contents of the January 18th edition of SLJ Teen Yesterday, I received an email from School Library Journal (SLJ) asking if Bookmarked , the high school library book group, would be interested in reviewing books for them. SLJ has several email/online newsletters. One of them is called SLJ Teen. In that bi-monthly newsletter, four to six teen reviews are posted in each issue.  The students in Bookmarked are already reviewing books for YALSA's Teen's Top Ten (TTT). I require each student to write at least one review every month to submit to the publishers. The student might nominate the book for TTT if they think that it is worthy. I think that the students could use the same review for TTT that they submit to the SLJ newsletter with some nominal additions. The teen reviews in SLJ Teen run about 200 words with half of the review describing plot and the other half describing why the reader liked or didn't like a particular book. I thi...

If you are ages 12-18 then click here to cast your vote for your favorite books. These are the books on the ballot:  Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson Iron Heart: The True Story of How I Came Back from the Dead by Brian Boyle Hate List by Jennifer Brown The Maze Runner by James Dashner Mare's War by Tanita Davis If I Stay by Gayle Forman Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia Ruined by Paula Morris Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater If I Grow Up by Todd Strasser

Open here to watch the video to find out which 10 books were selected as the teen's favorites for 2011.