My summer course started on Monday, which necessitated a trip to the bookstore yesterday to pick up my new textbooks. We have two: The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (7th ed.), edited by Richard Bausch, and Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, by Jane P. Tompkins. I went to the university bookstore and so was [...]
Posts from ‘May, 2008’
Weekly Geeks 3: Childhood Books
This week’s Weekly Geeks is supposed to be about childhood books, and I’ve been thinking about what to write since Saturday (but have not actually made it to posting until now). Partly this is because when I was thinking about it I mostly wasn’t in my bedroom, where most of the books I read as [...]
Tell Me
I’ve been thinking lately about why we read. You see, P is basically a non-reader, and so I sometimes find myself trying to explain why, exactly, books and words and such mean so much to me. How many different reasons do you think there are for people picking up books? Why do we read? Why [...]
BTT: Manual Labour
Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library? I took a look, and I have five of the above on the shelves in my room: Student’s Guide for Writing College Papers, by Kate L. [...]
Review: The Sweet Hereafter, by Russell Banks
Title: The Sweet Hereafter Author: Russell Banks Original Publication: HarperCollins, 1991. This Edition: Vintage Canada, 1997. ISBN:067697094X One snowy day, a school bus plunges through a guard rail in the small and poor town of Sam Dent, New York. Almost all of the children die. Half of the town’s children are gone. Many of the [...]
Review: Virus Games, by G. L. Sheerin
Title: Virus Games Author: G. L. Sheerin Original Publication: 2008 This Edition: 2008 ISBN: 9781934454046 / 1934454044 Ever since I posted about receiving this book to review, a number of weeks back, I’ve been receiving 3-6 search engine hits every day for the phrase “virus games book gl sheerin.” Perhaps there is an internet buzz [...]
April Books
Well, kiddaroos, here are the things I read in April, with some brief commentary occasionally appended. As usual, an asterisk denotes a first-time read. *A Place of Hiding, by Elizabeth George. I do like Elizabeth George books. I’m not sure how we’ll they’ll hold up on re-reading, because they are mysteries and because I haven’t [...]
Music Librarianship
I am a happy cataloguer — it’s true. It doesn’t even have to be books. I catalogue my books for fun, but I’ve also been working (both paid and volunteer) as a music librarian for about three years with my current choir, and for a year with a previous group. You might be wondering what [...]