wrapped up in books

May brought the end of the spring semester and the beginning of the summer semester, my birthday, my brother visiting from LA, my mom’s third round of surgery on her eye cancer, and lots of projects at work, so I was a little absent around here, but I hope to do a bit better in June. (We’ll see). Here’s what I did post.

I’ve also started posting more regularly on the food and lifestyle blog I have with my friend, molly plus morgan. I love blogging, but since books and libraries are so much a part of my day already, it’s been nice to shift gears in my downtime this month. So if you’re interested in mostly vegetarian cooking, you can find me there, too.

Book Reviews

I may have been in a mild reading slump? I’ve been slogging through the emotional roller coaster of Dreams of Gods and Monsters all month and haven’t really hit my stride with any other book I’ve picked up.

I didn’t really love Great by Sara Benincasa, but thought it was worth sharing 5 under-appreciated contemporary YA novels.

At the Library

I spent a lot of time putting together this presentation on using Tumblr for Readers’ Advisory for a MidAmerica Library Association workshop, which was a lot of fun. having 4 hours to talk about social media with 20 people is so much more productive than a whirlwind 45 minutes and a packed room. In the future, I really want to put together an unconference style workshop like the one in Darien Library.  Because that would be AWESOME.

I also put together this post on using online tools and mobile apps to create images for blogs or to share on social media. I’ve learned a lot over the past couple years, but have never found a comprehensive post that pulls together how-to posts and sites to use.

Spike was also appointed to the Library Board to serve as a spokescat for the library. So there have been all of those important meetings to attend. We can’t have a cat who lives in the building, unfortunately, so we decided to have a board cat would be the next best thing. Plus, Spike wants to become a famous internet cat, and figured this wouldn’t look bad on his resume, so he’s lending his adorable image to promote the library.

I got his bowtie collection from Business Catual, an Etsy shop based out of Portland (obviously).

Don’t Miss

I am so inspired by the Library as Incubator Project as a whole, and love watching their collaboration with Madison Bubbler unfold.

What do writers owe their influences?

We need to talk more about how adults sexualize young girls and why it’s so problematic.

We’ve been talking about how #weneeddiversebooks for weeks now, and School Library Journal brought the conversation to comics and graphic novels, asking how diverse they are. What a great collection development tool!

I thought this was a really interesting conversation on who is driving the YA book market. I notice that adults make up more than half of the holds on some popular titles at my library. Of course, they *could* be for their children, but my gut says no.

This month I’ll be gearing up for ALA and the library’s move to our beautiful renovated building and our grand reopening, but I’m still going to try and get some reading done. What were you up to this month? What are you excited for this summer?