Do you remember when you first fell in love with reading? I mean the first time you truly, deeply felt that the world was not right unless you had a book in your hands? For me, I didn’t experience this kind of love until high school. My grandmother was an avid fan of Jill Churchill…
From the YA Shelf: Favorite Fall Reads
As the end of the year approaches, I find myself paging through books to meet my yearly reading goal before the looming deadline of December 31st. Thankfully, this fall has provided me with some great reading material. As I order for the library's teen collection, pretty much all I've been reading are young adult books…
5 things your friends might not know you can do with a library card
Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell the couple sitting across from you at Ladybird Diner: September is Library Card Sign-up Month! If you're reading this, it's likely you've already got a library card. Good on you. Now spread some library love and encourage everyone around you to get theirs too! To help you convince…
5 New-ish YA Books to Read for Pride Month
There are a number of ways to celebrate Pride Month, but the bookworm in me insists there's nothing like a good read! The Young Adult publishing industry has come a long way since my own teenage years when it comes to diverse and #OwnVoices titles. This month, I encourage you to check out one - or…
YA Backlist: The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle
As the library's selector for the teen collection, I read a lot of YA novels. As much as I love reading and sharing what's brand new, I also like shining a spotlight on some of the titles that have been hanging out on our shelves for a while. This month, I'm taking a a look…
Road Trip Idea: Haunted Locations in Kansas
Back when I worked in reference, the library received an envelope postmarked from Santa Rosa, California with our address scrawled across the lower left hand corner in untidy, barely legible print. Inside was a 20 page letter, written in the same hand, requesting information on the alleged paranormal activity at the Eldridge Hotel featured on…
Finding Pride in the Stacks
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel…is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” – Ursula K. Le Guin For me, the public library has always been place of possibility and self-discovery. As a gay…
What Would Alfred Read? A Failed Summer Reading Challenge
In the summer of 2011, I came up with the perfect challenge: read at least one title by each of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature since its first awarding in 1901 and blog about my thoughts and reflections. I had the best title for my blog too: What Would Alfred Read? (The…
Five Fictional Families Who Are Probably More Dysfunctional Than Yours
Ah, Thanksgiving. The perfect holiday to kick back with your closest of friends and family, stuff yourself to the gills with turkey and mashed potatoes, and pass out on the couch.If your family was anything like mine, though, Thanksgiving was always fraught with stress and tension. Whether it was balancing schedules with in-laws or remembering…
Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50 and the Books I Did Not Finish
It’s typically a rare case for me not to finish a book. At some point, I think I convinced myself that not finishing was giving up on an author or myself as a reader. But I have come to understand that neither of those is true at all. For whatever the reason, it’s okay to…
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