Librarians are the secret masters of the world. They control information.
Don’t ever piss one off.
—Spider Robinson, The Callahan Touch, 1993

I read this quote when the book first came out.

And about a decade later… I’m in library school.

Fancy that.

I brought the quote up in a class discussion of the public image of librarians in class last night.

Tam Lin- Pamela Dean (bonus- one of my favorites ever) Faerie myth in college setting

Hex Hall- Rachel Hawkins. Student body includes vampires, werewolves, witches. 

Magic system in urban setting:

Diane Duane’s Young Wizard series. Start with So You Want To Be a Wizard

Sunshine- Robin McKinley. Because I like how she put magic charms into her world, sort of as taboo, but sort of as a given. Also bonus vampire.

Vampires who don’t, ahem, suck. Or sparkle.

The Historian- Elizabeth Kostova. Scared the pants off me in a very good Dracula sort of way.

A Discovery of Witches- Deborah Harkness. Vampires and witches in academia at the doctoral level. I disagree with one major plot point (a romance) but otherwise, love it.

Now I have five bookshelves in my living room! And they have sections:

Mysteries are separated into historical and modern! Poetry has its own shelves! So does science fiction! Cookbooks and foodie memoirs have their own shelf! Things are organized, people!

We will not be discussing the black hole that is the book shelves in my room.

Here are five adventuring women I see following Meg’s spirit of inquiry and bravery. Well, four, and one recommendation from a friend who’s read Ursula K. LeGuin. (I keep trying, and I can’t do it…)

1. A relative newcomer to the scene, Katniss Everdeen, of The Hunger Games series. We take her bow ad arrow fierce loyalty and pragmatism for granted today. But it was not always so easy to imagine a female character displaying so much strength and bravery.

2. I absolutely cannot pick just one strong female character from Spider Robinson’s Callahan series. There’s Lady Sally, commanding, wise, insightful, and earthy. Or her daughter Mary, a blacksmith. Even the extremely odd construct of Arethusa Quigley, a set of telepathic twins. Callahan’s universe is full of smart, empathetic female characters. I’m particularly impressed by the way they take ownership of, and delight in, loving and respectful sexuality.

3. Festina Ramos, first seen in Expendable, by James Alan Gardner. This is the first in a series, where the setup is sort of a riff on the Star Trek  redshirt trope. In this 25th century world, ugly or disfigured people are the first line of explorers to a new world– in case they die (it’s thought to be less wrenching for the crew to lose its ugly members first.) Festina Ramos is resourceful and has a wickedly caustic narrative voice. Raises all sorts of interesting feminist lines of thought, about beauty and agency. In a good adventure tale.

4. I have trouble picking just one example from Connie Willis’ novels, as well. Kivrin Engle in The Doomsday Book or Polly and Merope from Blackout and All Clear  Both are intense historical adventures that cast female characters in key adventuring roles.

5. Here’s a placeholder for Ursula K. LeGuin. ChrisL recommended adding The Tomb of Atuan to the list. And I have not read it. I keep almost-reading LeGuin. I know she’s a stunning writer. And I get a little extra buzz from the fact that she’s the daughter of an anthropologist, A.L. Kroeber. I’ve tried! but I haven’t gotten into her books, yet.

What other women of science fiction should be on this list?

Also, it’s been too long since I reread A Swiftly Tilting Planet, one of my favorites by Madeleine L’Engle.

I’m looking forward to all the discussion about databases and sources, and where to find all the information, because then I’ll be on my way to being awe-inspiring like a real librarian and I’ll know everything.

Last week, class discussion centered on ready reference (things you can look up right at the reference desk, because someone has a question) and how to handle the kinds of people who are likely to approach the desk. And roving reference, where librarians move through the library, offering help if it’s needed.

And about halfway through the class, it started to sound really familiar. Kind of like being a personal trainer.

Be approachable. Because someone who’s an expert can be kind of intimidating to a novice. Whether you’re behind a big old reference desk with your hair in a bun, or wearing a black uniform with the club logo on it, your appearance says Expert Who Knows Everything. Not knowing things, and having to ask, takes courage. So be friendly, so they’ll ask questions.

Keep an eye on body language, to monitor if someone is getting up the nerve to ask a question.

In the gym, I learned the sort of lost-look aimless wandering. Same in the library, a little wide eyed, a little bit hesitant.

Watch body language as you answer, to gauge how much information they really want... Even though you Know All The Neat Things, don’t go off on tangents if their eyes glaze! Yeaaah, totally guilty of this one on theories of Pilates and balance training. 

and whether they’re asking the question they really want to ask, or you need to guide them a little. “How do I use this machine?” or “Where do I find the history section?” could be the first in a series of questions that will hone down to what they really want to know about getting stronger or working on a research paper.

Encourage them- if they have a wrong idea, don’t snap, but guide them to something better. I think I heard this one in every personal training staff development seminar, and especially in yoga training classes: Use positive language, try not to say “no!” or “don’t do it that way,” but say “here’s a way to do it even faster/better/more effectively.” And a corollary to it is what one personal trainer called “Don’t kill their puppy.” You’ll get people who are attached to one way of doing things: they love their elliptical workout, or the hip adduction machine, and it’s not really the best exercise for them. Don’t look all stern and say WRONG!!! Instead, respect where they are, and what they like… then suggest an addition, instead of taking something away.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
Crown, Feb 2010 384 Pages

I first learned about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks through Women’s Voices For Change. Chris Lombardi reviewed the book, and interviewed the author. It piqued my curiosity: using the story of Henrietta and her family to tackle complex questions about medicine, scientific discovery and ethics.

In 1951, Johns Hopkins Medical Center was the only hospital in Baltimore that would treat black patients. Henrietta Lacks was treated there for aggressive cervical cancer. During her treatment, doctors took a biopsy of cells on her cervix. And took a few more tissue samples, for their own experimental use. Doctors didn’t tell Henrietta and her family they were doing this. One of the larger issues Skloot’s book addresses is the concept of informed consent. Ethical considerations between doctor and patient- confidentiality and communication that we might take for granted now, are relatively recent in standard medical practice.

Lacks’s cancer was aggressive- the tumors spread, and killed her. And that could have been the end of her story- a malignant disease, and a grieving family. But… scientists ran tests on the cells they’d biopsied. And they found that Henrietta Lacks’s cells would grow fast and much more easily than anything else they’d tried to culture in the lab before. HeLa cells became a focal point for all kinds of testing and medical advances, without the scientists knowing much about the woman they’d been taken from. And without Henrietta’s family knowing anything about the cells that had been taken.

When Lacks’ relatives found out, they were scared, outraged. Even as she explores the larger themes of scientific discovery and ethics that give Henrietta’s story greater context, Skloot focuses closely on the emotional impact on the Lacks family.  As bits of information filter from the scientific world to the Lacks family, science gets misinterpreted, twisted into frightening fictions. So, part of the work Skloot has to do in getting close to the personal story, is undo the damage done by decades of misinformation and no information at all.

I wish this book had been written 10 or 15 years ago. In college, I took a fascinating medical anthropology course. The focus was on medical practice in social context, especially with regard to women and class. This book would have been a perfect fit for class discussion. It’s exactly the kind of investigative science writing I find most fascinating: medicine in its cultural contexts, the way scientific assumptions get shaped by the assumptions we take for granted as a society. Skloot does a decently clear job explaining the ways biologists are working with HeLa cells.

But, for all my fascination with a complex medical narrative- there’s a certain degree of sheer masochism in reading  this. As interested as I am in the intersection of science and culture, reading about some of the treatments Henrietta went through, and the pain she was in was harrowing. I can be pretty squeamish about descriptions of medical procedures. So, reading some of what was done to Henrietta was harrowing. Obviously, both medical science and standards of ethics have improved since Henrietta was treated for cervical cancer- but those early chapters are not for the delicate sensibility. I might have stifled a few shrieks of disgust. They sewed vials of radioactive isotopes into her! They did procedures on her, in the name of treatment, that were painful and not all that well explained… and she was an obedient patient. Because she was a product of her time, she and her family never questioned the doctors’ edicts.

I wanted to scream for Henrietta the patient in pain. It was tough to read.

It was so viscerally scary for me to read about Henrietta’s hospitalizations that the things being done to her cells after the fact, felt much less harrowing. I was interested in the way the science worked, which Skloot did a good job of explaining. Some of the time spent with Lacks’s relatives was absolutely heartbreaking- that scientists could be putting HeLa cells to lucrative use, while her surviving family was barely scraping by between one personal tragedy and the next. Although making herself, a white, educated woman, a central perspective character in the story, makes for some uneasy power balances, Skloot treats the Lacks’ story with dignity and a certain amount of grace.

If you’re so inclined, address a haggis. 

Yesterday, at the Poets House, I went looking for Scottish poetry. It’s not all wee sleekit timorous beasties, you know. Here are some Scottish poets I’ve enjoyed.

Ron Butlin- my parents and I saw a performance of “Vivaldi and the Number 3″ in Edinburgh over the summer.  I have a collection of his poems, called “Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars” that I bought for the title, as much as for loving the poems inside. Read  ”A Recipe for Whisky“

Liz Lochhead- she’s currently the Scottish Makar, the rough equivalent of the poet laureate. Read “A Saturday Poem.” Or Trouble is not my middle name

And here’s a lovely trove of recent Scottish poetry from The Scottish Poetry Library. Just click on the years to read poems from each.

William McGonagall is largely regarded to have been the Worst Poet Ever. Wonder if he knew it at the time…

I find the procedures and mechanics fascinating- how to do shelf-checks, proper ways to answer reference questions, and on and on. I’ll be writing more about that here, of course.

And then there’s the sudden knowledge that… all kinds of places have corporate archives and libraries!

1. Newspapers! A librarian for the Ledger was lovely and encouraging as I applied to library science school. I wonder if newspaper libraries are still called the morgue….

2. The NFL!!! I started to wonder about this one on Sunday… their corporate headquarters is right here in NYC. I suspect their library has a lot of video footage, and a librarian on call during games to grab things for highlight reels and montages!

3. Publishing houses… though I know from the Poet’s House, how tempting it can be to walk the shelves full of interesting things to read. Not that this is a bad thing!

4. Special collections through the NYPL… Although I’m pretty sure a rare book archive isn’t where I’m interested in working, I love the idea of being able to go gawk and explore. 

5. The New York Historical Society. Then, maybe I’d finally learn about my city the way I’ve been promising myself I would, oh, forever.

And more… it’s a lovely daydream!

Jan: 12
U is for Undertow - Sue Grafton
Labyrinth - Kat Richardson
Finishing the Hat - Stephen Sondheim
Earth: the Book - Jon Stewart
America: the Book - Jon Stewart
The Scarlet Pimpernel- Baroness Orczy
Foiled - Jane Yolen
Superman: Red Son - Mark Miller
Muppet King Arthur - Joanna Stokes
The Lifecycle of Software Objects - Ted Chiang
Just Like the Ones We Used To Know - Connie Willis
Zits Supersized - Jerry Scott

Feb: 6 (18)
I read the following Russian books:
Tolstoy on the Brink
Princess Sartre
The Dostoevsky Diaries
Forever Nabokov

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith
Inside Job - Connie Willis

March: 8 (26)
The Wee Free Men - Terry Pratchett
A Hat Full of Sky - Terry Pratchett
Murder on Astor Place - Victoria Thompson
The Two Georges - Harry Turtledove
Summerland - Michael Chabon
Ball Four - Jim Boutan
Jellico Road - Melina Marchetta
10 short stories

April: 13 (39)
One of Our Thursdays is Missing - Jasper Fforde
Wintersmith - Terry Pratchett
Tea Time for the Traditionally Built - Alexander McCall Smith
Then Everything Changed - Jeff Greenfield
Valor's Choice - Tanya Huff
The Poe Shadow - Matthew Pearl (reread)
Narbonic 1-6
Jeremy & Dad: A ZITS Tribute-ish to Fathers and Sons

May: 10 (49)
WWW: Wonder - Robert Sawyer
The Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Double Comfort Safari Club - Alexander McCall Smith
Dead Reckoning - Charlaine Harris
Summon the Keeper - Tanya Huff
The Second Summoning - Tanya Huff
The Queen of Attolia - Megan Whalen Turner
I Shall Wear Midnight - Terry Pratchett
The Secret History of Elizabeth Tudor, Vampire Slayer
Jeremy and Mom - Jerry Scott

June: 8 (57)
Remake - Connie Willis (novella)
Jane Jones, Worst Vampire Ever - Caissie St. Onge
The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party - Alexander McCall Smith
The King of Attolia - Megan Turner Whalen
Akata Witch - Nnedi Okorafor
Long Hot Summoning - Tanya Huff
Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon
A Singular Woman - Janny Scott

July: 8 (65)
Heartless - Gail Carriger
Dead as a Doornail - Charlaine Harris
Definitely Dead - Charlaine Harris
Murder on Sisters' Row - Victoria Thaompson
Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris
The Better Part Of Valor - Tanya Huff
A Conspiracy of Kings - Megan Turner Whalen
Big Honkin' Zits - Jerry Scott

August: 11 (76)
Twilight - Stephanie Meyers
Bloodhound - Tamora Pierce
Ghost Story - Jim Butcher
Smokin' Seventeen - Janet Evanovich
Assassination Vacation - Sarah Vowell
From Dead to Worse - Charlaine Harris
Dead and Gone - Charlaine Harris
All Together Dead - Charlaine Harris
The Black Garden - Thomas de Waal
The Heart of Valor - Tanya Huff
10 short stories

September: 8 (84)
The Last Werewolf - Glen Duncan
The President and the Assassin - Scott Miller
Robopocalypse - Daniel Wilson
Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
Living Dead in Dallas - Charlaine Harris
Pyramids - Terry Pratchett
Nothing to Envy - Barbara Demick
Random Zits - Jerry Scott

October: 8 (92)
Raising Stony Mayhall - Daryl Gregory
Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
The Magicians - Les Grossman
Guards, Guards - Terry Pratchett
Nation - Terry Pratchett
Leviathan Wakes - James S.A. Corey
Snuff - Terry Pratchett
Alternative Zits - Jerry Scott

November: 6 (98)
Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
The Wild Ways - Tanya Huff
Zombie, Ohio - Scott Kenemore
Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders - Gyles Brandreth
10 short stories
Sunday Brunch - Jerry Scott

December: 5 (103)
Government Issue: Comics for the People - Richard Graham
V is for Vengeance - Sue Grafton
Without Hesitation - Hugh Shelton
Dearly, Departed - Lia Habel
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum/Eric Shanower