New "Reviews" page

Note: I've recently resumed reviewing books for Public Libraries magazine, after a hiatus of several years. In order to toot my own horn, I've added a new "Reviews" page to this blog. What follows is the introductory text.

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I've always believed in continuing education.

Even the best degree program for any career only points your attention in the right direction. Any step along the way may turn corners no curriculum could anticipate. Why stop with what you already know?

Besides, I've always joked that my real profession is being a student. My morale and my performance decline when I'm not learning new stuff.

Hence, once I graduated from the University of South Carolina's School of Library and Information Science (August, 2000) and joined Jacksonville (FL) Public Library, I jumped at the chance to review books for Public Libraries Magazine.

If nothing else, I thought, I could fill in the gaps in my MLIS preparation—I was horrified during my last term when I suddenly realized (Duh!) that I could only take twelve courses and had to skip all those electives I'd been looking forward to.

Plus, I would get all these free books!

The result has been a long series of reviews, published over the years in the "By the Book" column of that magazine. Some of these reviews I'm content with, others, perhaps not, yet the books—with one or two exceptions—were well worth reading.

Librarianship is a lifestyle, a way of looking at and interacting with the world. Our tools are our brains, our imaginations and our love of learning. Books and buildings and the Web are just the infrastructure for what we do with the people we meet.

Keep reading.

"Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine"

Since the late 1980s, my spouse Jim and I have been book people, in the Fahrenheit 451 sense of the term. We have both always been bookworms, but when we moved in together we decided to go a step further and NOT have a television. Still don't have one.

You may recall, from the 1966 François Truffaut
film version, a woman on the street trying to explain to the book-burning fireman, Guy Montag, why Mrs. Hudson's house is so different.

The woman points from housetop to housetop, indicating the TV antennas. "See? There and there?"

Then she points at Mrs. Hudson's roof. No antenna.

When we moved to Jacksonville in 2000, we were disoriented in more ways than one would expect. Among other things, we couldn't find an independently owned bookstore anywhere near us.

Fortunately, our neighbors saved us by directing us to Chamblin Bookmine.

Image from a post about Chamblin Bookmine by the Wayfaring Wander

This place is a lifesaver for book people...though you may want to bring food and a sleeping bag, in case you get lost in the miles of "New, Used & Nonexistent" books.

Better still for us librarian type people who work downtown, Ron Chamblin has now opened Chamblin's Uptown, which also features a cafe with excellent food and coffee. That's where my colleagues and I often head for lunch.

As I trek the half block back and forth between the place where I can sit and read and the place where I have to let other people do that, I pass an interesting, grungy space between two buildings.

The scene holds me, because the blooming Shepherd's Needle (or whatever the plant is) is like so many urban plants. A seed found a crack where no one intended life to grow, and it stays on, as hardy as the "urban outdoorsmen" who populate downtown and fill our periodicals reading room for much of the day.

Why my weird mind finds a connection between this so-called weed and book people, I don't know...though I suppose it's really sort of obvious.

Blessings,
Mike

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Note: "Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine" is a line from Alexander Smith's essay Dreamthorp.

Here is the scene in which Montag discovers Mrs. Hudson's cache of illegal books:

11 Elm. Suspect books in the attic of a Mrs. Hudson.

She made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust of guilt that was sucked in their nostrils as they plunged about. It was neither cricket nor correct. Montag felt an immense irritation. She shouldn't be here, on top of everything!

Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim, wavering light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, the words delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervor, Montag had only an instant to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if stamped there with fiery steel. 'Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.' He dropped the book. Immediately, another fell into his arms. ...

Montag had done nothing. His hand had done it all, his hand, with a brain of its own, with a conscience and a curiosity in each trembling finger, had turned thief. Now it plunged the book back under his arm, pressed it tight to sweating armpit, rushed out empty, with a magician's flourish! Look here! Innocent! Look!

He gazed, shaken, at that white hand. He held it way out, as if he were farsighted. He held it close, as if he were blind.

See The Big Read | Fahrenheit 451, a transcript of a National Endowment for the Arts radio discussion of the novel between author Ray Bradbury and Orson Scott Card, John Crowley, Paquito D'Rivera, Hector Elizondo, Dana Gioia, Nat Hentoff, Ursula K. Le Guin, Azar Nafisi, Luis Alberto Urrea and Sam Weller.

"Awful Library Books"

Thanks to Brian Herzog on Swiss Army Librarian, I've just learned about the neat blog of Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, Awful Library Books.

This site is a collection of library holdings that we find amusing and maybe questionable for libraries trying to maintain a current and relevant collection. Contained in this site are actual library holdings.

No libraries are specifically mentioned to protect our submitters who might disagree with a particular collection policy. (A good librarian would probably be able to track down the holding libraries without too much trouble anyway…)

Among the features of this blog is a Will Weed for Food page. I encourage you to explore the site and, if you wish, to submit entries.

We would love submissions. Feel free to email us any scans of covers: submit@awfullibrarybooks.net. JPGs preferred, PDFs welcome but least-preferred.

Here's the entry for December 6th: "Ham Shack, Baby." [Extra points for getting the allusion in the post title.]

:-)

"Why does a library cost more than a bomber?"

Remember the classic bumper sticker:

Wouldn't it be great if schools had money
and the Pentagon had to hold bake sales?
The title of this blog post is a somewhat fanciful paraphrase of the following chart, created originally by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and republished by the blog Shakesville and the New York Times Economix column.

The gist of that 2007 PCRM story was that

The Farm Bill...governs what children are fed in schools and what food assistance programs can distribute to recipients.

The bill provides billions of dollars in subsidies...to huge agribusinesses producing feed crops, such as corn and soy, which are then fed to animals. By funding these crops, the government supports the production of meat and dairy products—the same products that contribute to our growing rates of obesity and chronic disease.

Fruit and vegetable farmers, on the other hand, receive less than 1 percent of government subsidies.

I don't have the software to create a similar pyramid for Defense vs. Education, but how about this chart, Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities?

Three percent!!!

I've never understood why education is not a top national security priority.

Oh, well....

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See also the National Priorities Project: Bringing the Federal Budget Home.