8 done, 94 to go!

101. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.  This was a quick little read.  I enjoyed it but it's rather depressing and sad.  You can tell from very early in the book that it's not going to end very well.  George & Lennie have already been run out of several former jobs because of Lennie's inability to control his behavior.  I felt bad for Lennie because he's incapable of change but I also felt bad for George who felt the need to take care of Lennie.  Katie's review: 4.5 stars

64. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.  This was another quick read.  I didn't really expect to enjoy it because I'm not really interested in fishing stories but it was intriguing and I couldn't put it down. I felt bad that he didn't have anything left of the fish by the time he got back but that's part of the adventure I suppose.  Katie's review: 5 stars

50. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. This book was wonderful but jeez it's so long!! I had to take breaks and read other things just to keep going. I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere. But I really loved the story. It's beautifully told and sweet. I really fell in love with the characters. All the characters grew so much over the course of the 2 volumes. I grew quite attached to Laurie and was disappointed that Jo turned him away but Amy was a much better mate for him but Jo and Laurie were so fun together. Anyway, I loved this book. Definitely a must read. Katie's rating: 5 stars

87.   Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.  This was a hard book to read.  It took me forever to adjust to the vocabulary.  I kept having to re-read pages to make sure I understood what was happening.  It's really good feminist story, I enjoyed seeing Janie stand up for herself and grow stronger within.  She survived a lot of hardships and was a strong woman because of it.  Katie's rating: 3.75 stars

1.      The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes           Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

2.      The Alchemist     Paulo Coelho     

3.      Alice in Wonderland         Lewis Carroll      

4.      All the King's Men             Robert Penn Warren       

5.      All the Pretty Horses        Cormac McCarthy           

6.      The Ambassadors             Henry James      

7.      And Then There Were None          Agatha Christie

8.      Around the World in 80 Days        Jules Verne

9.      Atlas Shrugged   Ayn Rand

10.   Beloved               Toni Morrison   

11.   Brideshead Revisited       Evelyn Waugh   

12.   The Bridge of San Luis Rey            Thornton Wilder

13.   Bridget Jones’s Diary       Helen Fielding    

14.   The Call of the Wild         Jack London

15.   Cannery Row      John Steinbeck  

16.   Catch-22              Joseph Heller     

17.   A Clockwork Orange        Anthony Burgess

18.   Cloud Atlas          David Mitchel    

19.  A Confederacy of Dunces              John Kennedy Toole        

20.   Count of Monte Cristo    Alexandre Dumas            

21.   Crime and Punishment    Fyodor Dostoyevsky       

22.   Darkness at Noon             Arthur Koestler
23.  Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde         Robert Louis Stevenson

24.   Dracula                Bram Stoker       

25.   Dune      Frank Herbert    

26.   The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test     Tom Wolfe

27.   Emma    Jane Austen       

28.   A Fine Balance    Rohinton Mistry               

29.   Frankenstein       Mary Shelley

30.   Go Tell It on the Mountain            James Baldwin  

31.   The Golden Notebook     Doris Lessing     

32.   The Good Soldier              Ford Madox Ford             

33.   The Grapes of Wrath       John Steinbeck  

34.   Gravity's Rainbow            Thomas Pynchon             

35.   Gulliver's Travels               Jonathan Swift  

36.   The Handmaid’s Tale       Margaret Atwood           

37.   The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter        Carson McCullers            

38.   Heart of Darkness            Joseph Conrad  

39.   The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy         Douglas Adams

40.   Howard's End     E.M. Forster       

41.   The Hunt for Red October             Tom Clancy

42.    Invisible Man      Ralph Ellison 

43.  Jane Eyre             Charlotte Brontë   

44.    King Leopold's Ghost       

45.   The Kite Runner                Khaled Hosseini

46.   Les Miserables   Victor Hugo       

47.   Life of Pi              Yann Martel       

48.   The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe     C.S. Lewis           

49.   The Little Prince                Antoine De Saint-Exupery             

50.   Little Women     Louisa M Alcott

51.   Lolita     Vladimir Nabokov            

52.   War of the Worlds      H.G. Wells               

53.   The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring                J.R.R. Tolkien     

54.   Madame Bovary               Gustave Flaubert             

55.   Main Street         Sinclair Lewis     

56.   The Maltese Falcon          Dashiell Hammett            

57.   Memoirs of a Geisha       Arthur Golden    

58.   Middlemarch      George Eliot      

59.   Midnight’s Children          Salman Rushdie

60.   Moby Dick           Herman Melville              

61.   Naked Lunch       William S. Burroughs      

62.   Native Son          Richard Wright  

63.   Northern Lights (The Golden Compass)     Philip Pullman    

64.   The Old Man and the Sea               Ernest Hemingway          

65.   On The Road       Jack Kerouac     

66.   One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest              Ken Kesey

67.   One Hundred Years of Solitude    Gabriel Garcia Marquez

68.   A Passage to India            E.M. Forster       

69.   The Phantom Tollbooth  Norton Juster

70.   Pippi Longstocking           Astrid Lindgren

71.   A Prayer for Owen Meaney           John Irving         

72.   Pride and Prejudice          Jane Austen

73.   The Prince           Niccolò Machiavelli        

74.   The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro  

75.   The Scarlet Letter             Nathaniel Hawthorne     

76.   The Secret Garden            Frances Hodgson Burnett             

77.   The Secret History            Donna Tartt       

78.   The Shadow of the Wind               Carlos Ruiz Zafon             

79.   Sister Carrie        Theodore Dreiser            

80.   Slaughterhouse-Five        Kurt Vonnegut   

81.   Sons and Lovers                D.H. Lawrence  

82.   The Sound and the Fury   William Faulkner              

83.   Stranger in a Strange Land            Robert Heinlein

84.   Swallows and Amazons   Arthur Ransom  

85.   Swiss Family Robinson     Johann David Wyss

86.   A Tale of Two Cities         Charles Dickens

87.   Their Eyes Were Watching God    Zora Neale Hurston

88.   Things Fall Apart               Chinua Achebe

89.   To the Lighthouse            Virginia Woolf   

90.   A Town Like Alice             Nevil Shute         

91.   Tropic of Cancer               Henry Miller       

92.   Under the Volcano           Malcolm Lowry               

93.   Watership Down               Richard Adams  

94.   The Way of All Flesh        Samuel Butler    

95.   The Wind in the Willows                Kenneth Grahame           

96.   The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel        Haruki Murakami

97.   Winnie the Pooh               A.A. Milne

98.   The Wonderful Wizard of Oz        L. Frank Baum   

99.   The World According to Garp       John Irving

100.                    Wuthering Heights           Emily Bronte
101. Of Mice and Men

Things I read before this list that were on the original list plus 4 that I know I can't tackle:

1.      1984              George Orwell   

2.      Adventures of Huckleberry Finn           Mark Twain        

3.      Anne of Green Gables             L.M. Montgomery           

4.      Brave New World     Aldous Huxley    

5.      The Canterbury Tales              Geoffrey Chaucer            

6.      The Catcher in the Rye            J.D. Salinger       

7.      Charlie and the Chocolate Factory      Roald Dahl         

8.      Charlotte’s Web        E.B. White          

9.      The Color Purple       Alice Walker      

10.   Don Quixote                              Miguel De Cervantes

11.   Fahrenheit 451          Ray Bradbury     

12.   Gone With The Wind               Margaret Mitchell           

13.   Great Expectations   Charles Dickens

14.   The Great Gatsby      F. Scott Fitzgerald            

15.   Hamlet         William Shakespeare      

16.   Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone               J.K. Rowling
17. Lord of the Flies       William Golding

18.   A Separate Peace      John Knowles    

19.   The Time Traveler’s Wife       Audrey Niffenegger        

20.   To Kill a Mockingbird               Harper Lee         

21.   War and Peace          Leo Tolstoy
22. In Search of Lost Time

4 Down, 98 to go.

Flying right through the list.  Seriously, here are my reactions to my first 4 books.  I've also added the ones that were on the original list that I've already read.

72. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.  I really enjoyed this book, despite it's length.  I've never read the book or seen any of the P&P movies but I had an idea of what it was about.  The vocabulary took a little while to get used to but it's a beautifully written book.  Elizabeth is quite unlike any character I would expect from that time period.  She's a very honest and outspoken young lady, I rather liked it.  I think it's shocking to the reader to have her behave this way but I really liked Elizabeth & her outspoken behavior.  A friend of mine commented on how long the book was.  I was a bit daunted by it's length and it took me awhile to really get sucked in but once I reached the halfway point, I could not put it down.  I was reading constantly until it was done.  I love getting to that point in a book!  Katie's Rating: 5 stars

3. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.  What a weird book.  It took me about an hour to read it, mostly because of interruptions.  It feels like some sort of weird psychedelic trip without the drugs.  I mentioned to my 12 year old about it and said "well the movie is really weird, DUH Mom".  Gee thanks kid.  My friend Natalie adores Alice and I feel like I should have liked it more than I did but it just didn't do it for me.  It's a very well written book, it's just such an odd storyline.  Katie's rating: 3.5 stars

97. Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne.  It was hard to believe I've never read this book because I knew all of the stories within it.  We've watched multiple versions of Winnie the Pooh movies in my house over the years.  All of my girls had Winnie the Pooh bears as babies, as I love the silly old bear.  The main difference I noticed between the book and the movies is Eeyore.  Eeyore is rather snarky in the book whereas he just seems depressed in the movies.  I was a bit shocked by his snarkiness as I wasn't expecting it.  But it's a lovely book, I rather enjoyed reading the original book.  Many happy returns of the day!  Katie's rating: 4.5 stars.

38. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Meh.  That's about all I can say.  It wasn't horrible but I really had to stick to it to finish it.  Not something I would read again.  Katie's rating: 2.5 stars.

1.      The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes           Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

2.      The Alchemist     Paulo Coelho     

3.      Alice in Wonderland         Lewis Carroll      

4.      All the King's Men             Robert Penn Warren       

5.      All the Pretty Horses        Cormac McCarthy           

6.      The Ambassadors             Henry James      

7.      And Then There Were None          Agatha Christie

8.      Around the World in 80 Days        Jules Verne

9.      Atlas Shrugged   Ayn Rand

10.   Beloved               Toni Morrison   

11.   Brideshead Revisited       Evelyn Waugh   

12.   The Bridge of San Luis Rey            Thornton Wilder

13.   Bridget Jones’s Diary       Helen Fielding    

14.   The Call of the Wild         Jack London

15.   Cannery Row      John Steinbeck  

16.   Catch-22              Joseph Heller     

17.   A Clockwork Orange        Anthony Burgess

18.   Cloud Atlas          David Mitchel    

19.  A Confederacy of Dunces              John Kennedy Toole        

20.   Count of Monte Cristo    Alexandre Dumas            

21.   Crime and Punishment    Fyodor Dostoyevsky       

22.   Darkness at Noon             Arthur Koestler
23.  Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde         Robert Louis Stevenson

24.   Dracula                Bram Stoker       

25.   Dune      Frank Herbert    

26.   The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test     Tom Wolfe

27.   Emma    Jane Austen       

28.   A Fine Balance    Rohinton Mistry               

29.   Frankenstein       Mary Shelley

30.   Go Tell It on the Mountain            James Baldwin  

31.   The Golden Notebook     Doris Lessing     

32.   The Good Soldier              Ford Madox Ford             

33.   The Grapes of Wrath       John Steinbeck  

34.   Gravity's Rainbow            Thomas Pynchon             

35.   Gulliver's Travels               Jonathan Swift  

36.   The Handmaid’s Tale       Margaret Atwood           

37.   The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter        Carson McCullers            

38.   Heart of Darkness            Joseph Conrad  

39.   The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy         Douglas Adams

40.   Howard's End     E.M. Forster       

41.   The Hunt for Red October             Tom Clancy

42.    Invisible Man      Ralph Ellison 

43.  Jane Eyre             Charlotte Brontë   

44.    King Leopold's Ghost       

45.   The Kite Runner                Khaled Hosseini

46.   Les Miserables   Victor Hugo       

47.   Life of Pi              Yann Martel       

48.   The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe     C.S. Lewis           

49.   The Little Prince                Antoine De Saint-Exupery             

50.   Little Women     Louisa M Alcott

51.   Lolita     Vladimir Nabokov            

52.   War of the Worlds      H.G. Wells               

53.   The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring                J.R.R. Tolkien     

54.   Madame Bovary               Gustave Flaubert             

55.   Main Street         Sinclair Lewis     

56.   The Maltese Falcon          Dashiell Hammett            

57.   Memoirs of a Geisha       Arthur Golden    

58.   Middlemarch      George Eliot      

59.   Midnight’s Children          Salman Rushdie

60.   Moby Dick           Herman Melville              

61.   Naked Lunch       William S. Burroughs      

62.   Native Son          Richard Wright  

63.   Northern Lights (The Golden Compass)     Philip Pullman    

64.   The Old Man and the Sea               Ernest Hemingway          

65.   On The Road       Jack Kerouac     

66.   One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest              Ken Kesey

67.   One Hundred Years of Solitude    Gabriel Garcia Marquez

68.   A Passage to India            E.M. Forster       

69.   The Phantom Tollbooth  Norton Juster

70.   Pippi Longstocking           Astrid Lindgren

71.   A Prayer for Owen Meaney           John Irving         

72.   Pride and Prejudice          Jane Austen

73.   The Prince           Niccolò Machiavelli        

74.   The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro  

75.   The Scarlet Letter             Nathaniel Hawthorne     

76.   The Secret Garden            Frances Hodgson Burnett             

77.   The Secret History            Donna Tartt       

78.   The Shadow of the Wind               Carlos Ruiz Zafon             

79.   Sister Carrie        Theodore Dreiser            

80.   Slaughterhouse-Five        Kurt Vonnegut   

81.   Sons and Lovers                D.H. Lawrence  

82.   The Sound and the Fury   William Faulkner              

83.   Stranger in a Strange Land            Robert Heinlein

84.   Swallows and Amazons   Arthur Ransom  

85.   Swiss Family Robinson     Johann David Wyss

86.   A Tale of Two Cities         Charles Dickens

87.   Their Eyes Were Watching God    Zora Neale Hurston

88.   Things Fall Apart               Chinua Achebe

89.   To the Lighthouse            Virginia Woolf   

90.   A Town Like Alice             Nevil Shute         

91.   Tropic of Cancer               Henry Miller       

92.   Under the Volcano           Malcolm Lowry               

93.   Watership Down               Richard Adams  

94.   The Way of All Flesh        Samuel Butler    

95.   The Wind in the Willows                Kenneth Grahame           

96.   The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel        Haruki Murakami

97.   Winnie the Pooh               A.A. Milne

98.   The Wonderful Wizard of Oz        L. Frank Baum   

99.   The World According to Garp       John Irving

100.                    Wuthering Heights           Emily Bronte
101. Of Mice and Men

Things I read before this list that were on the original list plus 4 that I know I can't tackle:

1.      1984              George Orwell   

2.      Adventures of Huckleberry Finn           Mark Twain        

3.      Anne of Green Gables             L.M. Montgomery           

4.      Brave New World     Aldous Huxley    

5.      The Canterbury Tales              Geoffrey Chaucer            

6.      The Catcher in the Rye            J.D. Salinger       

7.      Charlie and the Chocolate Factory      Roald Dahl         

8.      Charlotte’s Web        E.B. White          

9.      The Color Purple       Alice Walker      

10.   Don Quixote                              Miguel De Cervantes

11.   Fahrenheit 451          Ray Bradbury     

12.   Gone With The Wind               Margaret Mitchell           

13.   Great Expectations   Charles Dickens

14.   The Great Gatsby      F. Scott Fitzgerald            

15.   Hamlet         William Shakespeare      

16.   Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone               J.K. Rowling  
17. Lord of the Flies       William Golding

18.   A Separate Peace      John Knowles    

19.   The Time Traveler’s Wife       Audrey Niffenegger        

20.   To Kill a Mockingbird               Harper Lee         

21.   War and Peace          Leo Tolstoy
22. In Search of Lost Time  

 

Katie's Project 100

I am determined to read more classic books. So I have taken a list I got from a quiz, took out what I had read and added new ones to replace the ones I took out.  I will review as I go along.  For now, here is my list:

1.      The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes           Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

2.      The Alchemist     Paulo Coelho     

3.      Alice in Wonderland         Lewis Carroll      

4.      All the King's Men             Robert Penn Warren       

5.      All the Pretty Horses        Cormac McCarthy           

6.      The Ambassadors             Henry James      

7.      And Then There Were None          Agatha Christie

8.      Around the World in 80 Days        Jules Verne

9.      Atlas Shrugged   Ayn Rand

10.   Beloved               Toni Morrison   

11.   Brideshead Revisited       Evelyn Waugh   

12.   The Bridge of San Luis Rey            Thornton Wilder

13.   Bridget Jones’s Diary       Helen Fielding    

14.   The Call of the Wild         Jack London

15.   Cannery Row      John Steinbeck  

16.   Catch-22              Joseph Heller     

17.   A Clockwork Orange        Anthony Burgess

18.   Cloud Atlas          David Mitchel    

19.  A Confederacy of Dunces              John Kennedy Toole        

20.   Count of Monte Cristo    Alexandre Dumas            

21.   Crime and Punishment    Fyodor Dostoyevsky       

22.   Darkness at Noon             Arthur Koestler
23.  Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde         Robert Louis Stevenson

24.   Dracula                Bram Stoker       

25.   Dune      Frank Herbert    

26.   The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test     Tom Wolfe

27.   Emma    Jane Austen       

28.   A Fine Balance    Rohinton Mistry               

29.   Frankenstein       Mary Shelley

30.   Go Tell It on the Mountain            James Baldwin  

31.   The Golden Notebook     Doris Lessing     

32.   The Good Soldier              Ford Madox Ford             

33.   The Grapes of Wrath       John Steinbeck  

34.   Gravity's Rainbow            Thomas Pynchon             

35.   Gulliver's Travels               Jonathan Swift  

36.   The Handmaid’s Tale       Margaret Atwood           

37.   The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter        Carson McCullers            

38.   Heart of Darkness            Joseph Conrad  

39.   The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy         Douglas Adams

40.   Howard's End     E.M. Forster       

41.   The Hunt for Red October             Tom Clancy

42.    Invisible Man      Ralph Ellison 

43.  Jane Eyre             Charlotte Brontë   

44.    King Leopold's Ghost       

45.   The Kite Runner                Khaled Hosseini

46.   Les Miserables   Victor Hugo       

47.   Life of Pi              Yann Martel       

48.   The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe     C.S. Lewis           

49.   The Little Prince                Antoine De Saint-Exupery             

50.   Little Women     Louisa M Alcott

51.   Lolita     Vladimir Nabokov            

52.   War of the Worlds      H.G. Wells               

53.   The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring                J.R.R. Tolkien     

54.   Madame Bovary               Gustave Flaubert             

55.   Main Street         Sinclair Lewis     

56.   The Maltese Falcon          Dashiell Hammett            

57.   Memoirs of a Geisha       Arthur Golden    

58.   Middlemarch      George Eliot      

59.   Midnight’s Children          Salman Rushdie

60.   Moby Dick           Herman Melville              

61.   Naked Lunch       William S. Burroughs      

62.   Native Son          Richard Wright  

63.   Northern Lights (The Golden Compass)     Philip Pullman    

64.   The Old Man and the Sea               Ernest Hemingway          

65.   On The Road       Jack Kerouac     

66.   One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest              Ken Kesey

67.   One Hundred Years of Solitude    Gabriel Garcia Marquez

68.   A Passage to India            E.M. Forster       

69.   The Phantom Tollbooth  Norton Juster

70.   Pippi Longstocking           Astrid Lindgren

71.   A Prayer for Owen Meaney           John Irving         

72.   Pride and Prejudice          Jane Austen

73.   The Prince           Niccolò Machiavelli        

74.   The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro  

75.   The Scarlet Letter             Nathaniel Hawthorne     

76.   The Secret Garden            Frances Hodgson Burnett             

77.   The Secret History            Donna Tartt       

78.   The Shadow of the Wind               Carlos Ruiz Zafon             

79.   Sister Carrie        Theodore Dreiser            

80.   Slaughterhouse-Five        Kurt Vonnegut   

81.   Sons and Lovers                D.H. Lawrence  

82.   The Sound and the Fury   William Faulkner              

83.   Stranger in a Strange Land            Robert Heinlein

84.   Swallows and Amazons   Arthur Ransom  

85.   Swiss Family Robinson     Johann David Wyss

86.   A Tale of Two Cities         Charles Dickens

87.   Their Eyes Were Watching God    Zora Neale Hurston

88.   Things Fall Apart               Chinua Achebe

89.   To the Lighthouse            Virginia Woolf   

90.   A Town Like Alice             Nevil Shute         

91.   Tropic of Cancer               Henry Miller       

92.   Under the Volcano           Malcolm Lowry               

93.   Watership Down               Richard Adams  

94.   The Way of All Flesh        Samuel Butler    

95.   The Wind in the Willows                Kenneth Grahame           

96.   The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel        Haruki Murakami

97.   Winnie the Pooh               A.A. Milne

98.   The Wonderful Wizard of Oz        L. Frank Baum   

99.   The World According to Garp       John Irving

100.                    Wuthering Heights           Emily Bronte
101. Of Mice and Men

Things I read before this list that were on the original list plus 4 that I know I can't tackle:

1.      1984              George Orwell   

2.      Adventures of Huckleberry Finn           Mark Twain        

3.      Anne of Green Gables             L.M. Montgomery           

4.      Brave New World     Aldous Huxley    

5.      The Canterbury Tales              Geoffrey Chaucer            

6.      The Catcher in the Rye            J.D. Salinger       

7.      Charlie and the Chocolate Factory      Roald Dahl         

8.      Charlotte’s Web        E.B. White          

9.      The Color Purple       Alice Walker      

10.   Don Quixote                              Miguel De Cervantes

11.   Fahrenheit 451          Ray Bradbury     

12.   Gone With The Wind               Margaret Mitchell           

13.   Great Expectations   Charles Dickens

14.   The Great Gatsby      F. Scott Fitzgerald            

15.   Hamlet         William Shakespeare      

16.   Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone               J.K. Rowling     
17. Lord of the Flies       William Golding

18.   A Separate Peace      John Knowles    

19.   The Time Traveler’s Wife       Audrey Niffenegger        

20.   To Kill a Mockingbird               Harper Lee         

21.   War and Peace          Leo Tolstoy  
22. In Search of Lost Time    

Basketball & Library Instruction

I knew it would be a challenge but I didn't realize how much I would have preferred herding cats to teaching library instruction for basketball students until it was done.  Seventeen basketball players in the classroom and I was the only adult.  Technically they are also adults but believe me, they do not behave like adults.

I made it fun.  We used basketball as our search topic.  It's something they all have an interest in so I knew I could keep them engaged in what we were doing.  We searched Google for our favorite basketball players, we searched EBSCO & Infotrac for full articles on basketball, we looked for books on basketball and even looked at NBC Learn for videos about basketball.  And I showed them how to find citations to make their lives easier.

Did they learn anything?  Who knows.  Did they take me seriously?  Not likely.  Did they have fun? I think so.  They did get all excited when we found a video on NBC Learn about a one armed basketball player.

It was an adventure for sure and it made me very happy to go home to my house full of girls.

Defending what we do

Sometimes libraries get threatened in little ways, usually by those who don't see the importance of what we do.  It's the library closures that get all the attention, not the little things that happen all the time.

A couple of years ago I was working in a public library.  The man who supervised the library was in charge of Parks & Recreation for the entire county.  He knew nothing of libraries or why we did things the way we did.  At the time I was the Collection Development Librarian.  I worked with all the other librarians to decide what books to buy and then I was in charge of ordering, receiving & processing all those books.  I loved my job. 

When our Director retired after 25 years, her supervisor (the P&R guy) came in and said we needed to restructure everything because we had 3 vacancies (2 in reference and the Director).  I get that, we weren't a huge library system with lots of librarians, and I was absolutely willing to do my part.  He looked at me and said "you need to do Young Adult services and Collection Development".  I had no experience with YA.  None.  I took 1 YA Lit class in library school and it had been 8 years before.  He looked at me and said "But you're a librarian, you should know how to be any type of librarian.  Just figure it out."

Fast forward two years.  I am now in a small technical college library.  Yesterday I got called to my VP's office where I was informed that our Computer Technology teachers need the library computer labs.  Their labs can't be modified the way they want them to be modified so they want the ones we have and we would not have access to them at all.  I seriously wanted to cry.  We have 15 computers on the floor of the library and we do have wireless but most of our students do not own a laptop or tablet.  In exchange for our two lovely labs, they want to give me 2 smaller labs on a different floor in the same building.  Our administrative side is itching to take these labs.  They've been calling my VP every day to see if they can take them over and start working on them.  They said that the old labs upstairs can't altered the way they want them to be altered because of the wiring in the walls.

So now I'm being asked to defend the value of our services and why it's important to have library services in the library.  It would be easier to defend why we exist at all.   

Why are libraries so easy to attack?  Librarians are typically seen as a passive group so those who like to intimidate find us to be easy targets.  Why on earth would libraries would need all those books and computers?  People have that stuff at home!  Just because you have an oven doesn't mean you know how to cook.  Why assume that because a person has a computer that they know how to use it?  Why assume the people have it at home at all?  People need us more than ever.  People are not information literate.  In fact, I know that I could teach every person on this campus something they don't already know about searching for information.  Does that mean they'll come and find out what I have to share?  Hmm...

USA Programming

Soon summer will be over (not soon enough for this summer hatin girl) and it will be time for a full set of classes to get started again so I need to get back to my Library Instruction ideas.

One of the few awesome things about summer is the programming on the USA Network.  I got addicted when Monk started.  I started to watch it because I like Tony Shalhoub, but I stayed because it was awesome tv.  Then Psych came along, still my absolute favorite show.  One of the only shows I will watch over and over and over.  Just can't get enough of Shawn & Gus.

Now USA has gone over the top with their offerings and I'm watching almost all of them.  Well last night it got me to thinking about Library Instruction.  It used to be that all over their programming was related to crime.  Most of it still is but now they've expanded.  So we have Burn Notice, Covert Affairs & In Plain Sight that look at the CIA & US Marshalls, Suits is all about lawyers, Necessary Roughness is a psychotherapist dealing mostly with a football player but other personalities too, Royal Pains is about a doctor, and I don't watch White Collar or Fairly Legal.  I'm sure they're good, I just couldn't get into those shows for some reason.

This is, I think, a good tie in for the library instruction that I do for a Sociology class that looks at social problems.  Different types of law enforcement, different types of help for different types of problems. 

If the Criminal Justice classes ever set foot in the door I could have all kinds of fun with them.  TV is full of law enforcement shows but the CJ instructors just don't see the use for library instruction for their students.  It's sad.  Maybe one day!

Summer in the library

This time of year I am a bit envious of my public library friends. They are all extremely busy on a daily basis with summer reading madness. I remember it well, it's only been two years since I was in a public library. The work day disappears and you feel like the only things you've done all day are pass out summer reading materials, tell people where the bathroom is, and suggest books to read to kids and teens.

These days I'm in an academic library and summer is not our busy season. I can go all day without a reference question. It doesn't mean I don't have things to do but there are times you feel like you could truly hear a pin drop. This will be at it's worst next week. It's July 4th week, we have no classes all week, and most of my staff will be on vacation so it will be even quieter than usual.

I will take the opportunity to begin the overdue weeding of our health collection. It's a great time to weed books because I don't feel bad about making noise while shifting things around.

Just think of me next week. Particularly if you are a public librarian, although I doubt you'll have time.