But clearly the craziest part is how she advocates against Dewey:

“No Dewey decimal system?”

It was what labeled her a rebel in bibliophile circles. She was a heretic to some for her views on the archaic cataloging system. “I advocate shelving books in ‘neighborhoods’ based on subject matter. It makes more sense to patrons and is easier for them to use.”

Bryce seemed to like the idea. “You must be a very persuasive and busy woman.”

This is a romance novel, you guys. Click through for more excerpts. This one’s a winner.

Please, if you know what’s good for you, watch:

Maurice Sendak on the Colbert Report

and then listen to:

Jack Gantos on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.

The folks behind Jewsmas would like a different traditional Jewish Christmas, so everyone will “leave Chanukah the hell alone!” Traditions include The Refusal of the Ham and The Mumbling of the Carols. Sounds like not quite as much fun as The Airing of Grievances, but I’d give it a try.

Time for more Terrible Christmas Things! Erin McKeown, a wonderful singer-songwriter with whom I went to college, has an “anti-holiday album” entitled F*ck That! It’s not her best work, certainly; it’s a bit brittle and obvious, as you might guess from songs like “Go Tell It on the Mountain (That Karl Rove Is Born)” and “Santa Is an Asshole.” But I am in exactly the right mood to appreciate that sort of thing, and have been humming “You wish us happy holidays / But you really mean merry Christmas” for days.

I’ve had Rare Exports, a Finnish horror comedy about “the real Santa Claus,” recommended to me several times recently. I have a pretty limited appetite for horror, but the trailer was entertaining, anyway.

But I’ve saved the best for last: Coping With Christmas Carol Fatigue, complete with Raptor Christmas Carols:

Do you have a Terrible Christmas Thing you’d like to share? I mean, nothing’s going to top “Said the raptor to another one / Do you smell what I smell?” But I’ll appreciate your attempt.

Anthony Bourdain made a Krampus video. It’s a pretty good overview of the story, in case you still haven’t read the Wikipedia page and have no idea what I’m on about:

Here’s a traditional Krampuslauf (Krampus run) in a town in Austria a couple of years ago. These days they’re tourist attractions all over the country in December. (The metal soundtrack might be less traditional, though they are Austrian, so who knows?)

Philadelphia rocked their own Krampuslauf this year. If you want to help me make Krampuslauf Boston happen next year, stop whatever you’re doing and email me right now.

If you still want more Krampus (and why wouldn’t you?) allow me to recommend the Krampus YouTube channel and “official” website.

Really? Isn’t this kind of like selling fake Dalmatian-fur coats to girls who want to be glamorous like Cruella deVille?

(The thing that pleases me most about this ad, though, is the butterfly cut-out eyelashes. When these came out awhile ago, I predicted that they would be worn on the covers of YA dystopias and/or paranormal romances within the year. I think an ad for a YA dystopia movie tie-in is close enough!)

1. In less than a month now, I am taking this test: Middle School Humanities MTEL. If I pass it, I will be well on my way to becoming a certified teacher of middle school English and social studies in the state of MA. This may or may not be a thing I ever want to do, but a girl likes to have options.

I have many many feelings about this test. Mostly I’m really cranky about it. I’m also semi-panicked about my ability to re-learn all of human history in a month, plus British and American literature. Without, you know, any sample tests so I have any idea whether I’m learning the right things. (Panic, panic.)

The upshot is that I haven’t read anything fun in a month and don’t foresee doing so until Thanksgiving. I could review history textbooks, or I could… never mind.

2. Remember how I posted that question about whether you use RSS readers? And you were all about the RSS? Well, too bad for us. In case you haven’t heard, Google is relegating Reader to even further third-class status, removing all the social features my friends and I rely on, and folding them into Google+, which doesn’t do the same things at all. (I can go into greater detail about this if you care.)

Basically, though, when I haven’t been reading history textbooks, I’ve been attending this sort of multi-week wake with my friends on Reader. I spend very little time on Facebook and almost none on Google+, which I didn’t like even before this announcement (good lord the whitespace! the scrolling!), so Google Reader is 95% of my online social life. My Reader Party has much to mourn.

Hopefully I’ll be back in the blogging swing after Thanksgiving. Until then, read some fiction for me; I miss it.

“I can never decide which book I want, and I hate buying a book and then realizing halfway through that I hate it. I can’t just return it and I’ve wasted money. I wish there were a way I could just borrow a book instead.”

You can borrow books and return them if you would just GO THE FUCK TO THE LIBRARY.

This website is pretty entertaining. I don’t feel like commenting on it seriously, because just about everything that makes me laugh right now is rooted in something that pisses me off. It’s that kind of month.

At least I finally feel like a bunch of people are sharing my anger and doing something with it.

For instance, this. Or oh god, this.

Sometimes they’re zombie novels.

Yeesh.

But she quotes data (which may not be valid; I didn’t look into it) that says “only six percent of North American, Internet-using consumers use an RSS feed once per week or more.” Google apparently agrees; as much as my friends and I love it, Reader seems to be an ignored minor colony of the vast Google empire.

This fits with conventional blogger wisdom, which says that you need to post as often as possible and on as regular a schedule as possible, or people will ignore you. In other words, people are individually checking your blog rather than only looking when their RSS reader says you’ve posted something new.

To me this seems hilariously outdated. Eleven years ago, when I was in college, my friends already all had “web journals,” and we got tired of clicking through the list every couple of days to see who had written something new. So one friend wrote a handy early RSS reader. Now that everyone has a blog, wouldn’t this be an even bigger problem? Has everyone really managed to pick 3 or 4 sites that aggregate everything they could possibly want to know on the internet?

I have not. Not even close. In Reader I have 40 Must Read subscriptions and 35 Must Skim. Many are friends’ blogs who post rarely. Most of the rest are kidlit blogs, each of which are writing about different books. It is part of my job to have at least passing familiarity with as many YA novels as possible, and that would be harder without RSS gathering up all these reviews for me.

That said, when I look at my feeds, I am much more likely to click on the ones that have 1 or 2 new posts than the ones that have 35. With a small investment of time, I can check that blog off and shorten my feed list. It’s quite satisfying, if you are the sort of person who likes checking things off lists! This supports the way I post (sporadically) and flies in the face of that conventional blogger wisdom.

So I’m curious about my readership. Do you use an RSS reader? If so, do you clean out your whole list every day? Do you just click on a few blogs? How do you choose? Or do you think every so often, “Huh, I wonder if Parenthetical has posted anything new lately?” and go check? (Or are you reading this because you’re friends with me on Facebook and saw it there?)

I can’t say this is going to change how I post, because frankly if having a gazillion readers were that high a priority for me I’d be doing a lot of things differently (like not having any other hobbies?). But I’m terribly curious!