Parenthetical

From Awful Library Books: Runaway Bride Returns! This librarian is not a bunhead shusher. She’s a hottie in black knee-high boots who gets married in Vegas and ditches her new husband the morning after. Ooh, steamy! But clearly the craziest part is how she advocates against Dewey: “No Dewey decimal system?” It was what labeled [...]

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This video combines two of my favorite things: children reading library books and “Party in the USA.”

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This is the Librarian episode of Your Life Work, a series of vocational films for young people. This one was filmed in 1946: Aside from some mildly embarrassing sexism, I’m amazed at how little hilarity I could find in this. The media are different, but the job hasn’t changed much in 65 years. The funniest [...]

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If you care about literacy and learning, please sign this petition. Ensure all school libraries are properly staffed, open, and available for children every day. Any school receiving Federal funds should be required to have a credentialed School Librarian on staff full time with a library that contains a minimum of 18 books per student…. [...]

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Thanks to our ever-beloved local independent bookstore Wellesley Books, we hosted Laini Taylor last week on her book tour. (Laini, you will remember, is the author of Daughter of Smoke and Bone, about which I kvelled with an uncharacteristic lack of criticism in June.) She signed books (and, patiently, bookmarks), chatted to a group of [...]

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The ALA Youth Media Awards were announced yesterday, to the usual amount of fanfare. You can get a list of award winners just about anywhere, and lord knows the internet doesn’t need my commentary on every one. But I’d feel remiss as a YA lit blogger if I didn’t comment at least a bit. First [...]

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Teachers’ unions in the MA towns of Raynham and Bridgewater are fighting against volunteers keeping their middle school libraries open after the librarians were laid off to hire more teachers. You can probably see both sides of this: on the one hand, the library needs to stay open so kids can use it! What’s wrong [...]

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Remember when I asked you for summer reading list suggestions? I finished the list a long time ago, of course, but it’s finally on our website. (That link will open a PDF.) The middle school section at the beginning is the part you helped with. (And those yellow highlighted books, by the way? Are links [...]

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More apocalypsey goodness tonight, I promise. But in the meantime, Guys Lit Wire is running a fantastic book drive for Native American reservation school libraries. These schools don’t have much budget for new books, so their collections are looking a little sad. Help get some shiny new reading material into the hands of these kids! [...]

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Following up on last week’s post about books in libraries… the NYTimes Room for Debate blog posted some of the comments from students. Most didn’t say much new, but here are a couple of thoughts I liked: One signed just “a thought”: Also, books (or any other printed material) cannot be changed by any means [...]

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