I have planned a day that includes delicious homemade pasta, Mexican food, and general frolics.

I will also make sure I find time to do my homework.

Of course, “do my homework” also means “read YA genre fiction.” I’m clearly doing something right.

If you feel so inclined, please help me celebrate my birthday by leaving me a comment: a poem you like, a book you’d recommend, a link to a neat article I should read, odd facts, or anything else delightful.

Or tell me why you love your local library.

I get happy about the story and enthusiastic as a reader who wants to make sure other people are reading the same great book that is making me wave my arms and speak in exclamation points. The assigned reading for today is a perfect example. I couldn’t resist The Name of the Star, by Maureen Johnson, which I’d already read a month or two ago. (Read my review that is more of a gushfest.)
So the toughest part about this class is learning to talk like a librarian, to think about genre appeal and how to classify a mystery as a mystery, or a suspense as a suspense. There’s overlap, both between books and readers who like them, but class discussion centered on what are true examples of the genre. It’s all very grad school… Which feels weird, because it’s books that I would already love to read on my own.
I can’t remember a time that I didn’t love to read. I remember being too busy to read what I wanted to read, or resenting books I had to read for school. (Far from the Madding Crowd comes to mind.) Interviewing this teenager for class, I need to remember, it isn’t like meeting my younger self. I need to listen, and learn.
What was I like in seventh grade? I just started a new school, and I was confused and overwhelmed. (That sounds familiar…). They were taking Latin! In seventh grade! Mind-boggling. I especially remember feeling bewildered in history class, because I swear my elementary school history classes did units on the Revolutionary war and the first European settlers for three consecutive years, and never went near the battle of Gettysburg. I remember there was a lot of homework, but I still really liked reading, even the books we had to read for class. Though I think there was a shoebox diorama involving late-night homework, artistic attempts and my mom and Laura’s mom being just as perplexed by the assignment is we were. And during the summer, there was required reading. I wonder what required reading is for seventh graders now.

I knew I was going to love this nicely spooky mystery, with its carefully constructed atmosphere. I loved it on a reread for class, too!

It’s set at a modern British boarding school and involves Jack the Ripper style murders, 21st-century reactions to Jack the Ripper style murders (including the 24-hour news cycle) and London reacting… CCTV, police investigations, bar theme nights, and nervous school administration. It rings true to how people would react.

Also, ghosts. There are ghosts. I love this book.

The characters really make sense. Sarah, a classmate who was discussing the book with me, pointed out that the characters aren’t described physically in the huge amounts of detail in terms of their appearance. But there’s a lot of great physical detail that makes London easy to visualize through the eyes of Louisiana transplant Rory. Sliding over rainy cobblestones in her flip flops, always feeling cold. telling homesick stories about her extended family, her uncles and little details like parakeets and angels.

Claudia, the house mother, shouting about hockey and being all ruddy faced and sporty. Alastair in the library, Jerome getting fascinated and a little morbid with Ripper coverage. Jazza being too nice to gossip, and Boo being too unfocused and cheerful to study, talking in a London accent and somewhere between annoying and appealing. to comment on some of the other characters, would give away major plot points.
In other words, I was pretty much hugging the hardcover book and grinning like a loon. I can’t wait to read the sequel, which is totally set up to happen. Write faster, Maureen Johnson!

I think this counts as historical fiction because it builds in the idea of Jack the Ripper from 19th-century London, by mostly it’s about the mystery and the supernatural in the present. Trying to figure out what counts as a genre, as well as why a book is good, appears to be an occupational hazard of my library school class…

One of the questions our instructor asked the first day of class was: “what was your high school library like?” I… couldn’t entirely remember if we had a librarian in high school. I remember my elementary school library in more detail, with Mrs. Grogan, and Mr. Braunstein. But… high school library? Vague notions of doing homework there or a place to have study hall surrounded by books.

A point that came up in class and in our reading was about a sort of cutoff between middle school and high school, where reading for pleasure isn’t happening much. High school students are too busy reading assigned novels, juggling extracurriculars, squeezed for time. (A statement of the obvious, but one that gives me a nasty little sarcastic giggle every time. AP history. Urgh.) So, is it any wonder that there’s such a trend of adults reading YA? We’re catching up on what we didn’t have time to read… (also, there’s so much more out there!)

I asked friends on Facebook what they remembered reading as teens, and what they remembered about their high school libraries.  What a fun bunch of answers.

“At 14 or 15 I would have thought Young Adult books were for tweens. Would have been reading adult stuff. (Or Seventeen Magazine.) Angsty stuff was always good. And my friends and I got very into poetry – mostly our own though I had a few friends who were obsessed with e.e.cummings.”

“My friends were reading R.L. Stine while I battled my way through Don Quixote.”

” I read everything, from Young Adult fiction to biographies to swallowing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in a weekend even though we were told to read only to chapter 3. If you put a book in my hand, I read it. There were quite a few things above me but nothing beneath me. I just liked to read.”

“I read mostly adult books. I practically grew up in the Public Library, and I hardly ever used my school library. I was already reading above my grade level, anyway, so I liked to challenge myself with more mature material. My big guilty pleasure, though was romance novels, and I mean some of the more erotic stuff, and our library had plenty of it. Which I found odd at the time, but now, knowing the penchants of repressed, Southern suburbanites, doesn’t shock me at all. There was one series in particular, The Gunslinger, about, well, a western vigilante who bedded a lot of women in between shoot outs. So, you know, double entendre. All of that sultry reading even inspired my closest friend and me to start an erotica writing “competition”. We were sexually curious teenagers (both exploring what would eventually become gay identiies), and it was the nearest thing she and I had to pornography or sex.”

“At that age I read Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings, Dune, Dune, Dune, Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings, Les Miserables, Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings, Dune, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Lord of the Rings….

“Whatever I could get my hands on, which, given my mom, was generally fantasy and historical mysteries. but i’d also read the babysitters club books or something like charlotte’s web when I wanted to really hide from the world. Little Women. More fantasy. More Alcott. More fantasy.”

“I don’t remember for certain re: ages, but things I was reading young included: Scott O’Dell’s historical fiction, everything published by Louisa May Alcott that I could find, The Dragonriders of Pern by McCaffrey and the Heralds of Valdemar by Lackey, a disturbing amount of Piers Anthony, The Hitchhiker’s Guide series, humor books I took from my parents’ shelves, Dune, Sati by Christopher Pike (and also his teen horror novels). Ray Bradbury shorts and Isaac Asimov’s SF. Isaac Beshevis Singer’s stories by the boatload. Phantom of the Opera, The Scarlet Pimpernel. anything serialized in Cricket Magazine. dark historical fiction from wartime. things that made me cry. and I was probably just starting in on the family obsession with Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles.”

“At 14 and 15 I read books aimed at adults. It wasn’t until I was 17 or 18 that I started reading YA (and then never stopped). My high school library was a dismal collection of text books, assigned books, and some desks with computers. I remember the first time I ever saw it, and knew this was not the school for me. And yet I went anyway.

“At that age my brother was reading military biographies, Ayn Rand, the collected works of Alexandre Dumas, historical fiction, especially war stories and mysteries, also by the boatload. We overlap with humor, Hitchhikers Guide, Dune, classic SF. And comics. We read a few comics.”

“Enormous quantities of science fiction and fantasy novels. A frightening number of tie-in/franchise books (Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D). In retrospect, some of what I was reading was really dire stuff. There were a few gems though.”\

“I hardly remember there being such a thing as Young Adult Fiction. Am I too old and it hadn’t been invented yet? Or did I just ignore it? The only example I can think of is A Wrinkle in Time. Otherwise I mostly remembering reading adult science fiction and fantasy (somewhat obsessively – eg had a copy of The Silmarillion in which I had calligraphied my name in Elvish or whatever.) I also attempted a lot of serious literature – although I remember that a book by Kafka (I think The Castle?) was the first book I ever checked out from the library and didn’t finish, and I felt very guilty about it.”

“In eighth grade I read a lot of nineteenth and early twentieth century novels. The Brontes, Austen, Dickens, Wharton. I was particularly fond of Jane Eyre. I think I identified particularly with Jane’s angst at that age. I read Pride and Prejudice whenever I was depressed for its combination of humor and a happy ending. I read a lot of Agatha Christie novels. I liked the tamer romance novels that generally involved kissing and becoming engaged. I was particularly fond of Mary Stewart, whom my mother recommended to me. She is best known for her Merlin novels, I think, but I never actually read those. Her other books weren’t in print at the time, but I got them from second-hand stores. Another out-of-print recommendation from my mother that I absolutely adored was Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. It is hysterically funny. I liked his other books as well, but the ones that cover his early life are the best. He is actually Lawrence Durrell’s younger brother and his depiction of his pompous older brother is just delightful. I read a lot of Shakespeare’s comedies that year. My favorite was always As You Like It. Ack, I forgot the rest of the question. I didn’t read much new YA fiction at that age, though I did re-read old favorites. We had stopped reading it in school around sixth grade I think. I also read a lot of fairy tales, but was mostly unaware that there was fantasy meant for adults.”

“You know, I don’t really remember any of my school libraries, but I remember very systematically working through the “kids’ room” at my local branch, then the SFF shelves of the library downtown. Fun times.”

“My school library was all about what you needed to study. Fiction not on the curriculum was to be obtained elsewhere. But the best part of all was that it had rugs that allowed one to collect an electrostatic charge and shock the unsuspecting ( until one was caught).”

” Oh, but I do remember my Elementary School library. Vividly. I also remember the day the librarian handed me a copy of Little House in the Big Woods. And Island of the Blue Dolphins. Wow.’

“I suspect that at 14 or 15 ( 9th and 10 grades) I was reading a lot of sci fi ( Robert Heinlein,etc.”

“Young adult fantasy novels. Also, realistic fiction, but mostly fantasy. I was VERY into Tamora Pierce at that age.”

“I’ll contribute Choose Your Own Romance mass market paperbacks, along with V. C. Andrews, and then a classics phase that included lots of Dickens which I thought would make me literary. I feel like I’m airing dirty laundry!”

“A great age for reading: The C. S. Lewis Space Trilogy, John Christopher, William of Ockham, Le Morte de Arthur, Roger Zelanzny AND a bunch of authors who were popular in the ’70s but are not read so much now: Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, and Fritz Perls’ Be Here Now. Oh, and Dickens and R.L. Stevenson and Thomas Hardy. Truly a great age for reading.oooh, lest I forget the Bhagavad Gita. But that might have been a little later, 16? 17? PS. Never found this stuff at school, excellent local branch library, my parents had several thousand volumes before they went into dealing, and my sister was a literate hippie!”

“in my Catholic school library I got my hands on I Never Loved Your Mind in the 7th grade. Was almost too embarrassed to take it back.”

“Mercedes Lackey, Tanya Huff, Charles de Lint, Hawthorne (we went to Salem one weekend), Shakespeare, lots of bios on Elizabeth I and the rest of the Tudors. The Jr High library was small and I rarely spent time there.”

“I spent a lot of time in our neighborhood branch library and they had a really well-stocked YA section. My high school library was good too, but I mostly used it for research.”

First of all, what IS historical fiction… when does history start? 25 years in the past is a benchmark that came up in the readings.  Which would make… 1987 the start of historical fiction.  That’s weird on any number of levels. Including the fact that, as Jennifer, our instructor, pointed out, there hasn’t been enough change to make for a real shift in perspective,  between Then and Now, in creating a sense of place. Noting- part of that segment of the discussion was the fact that some books of the 80s are being released with updates, little things like a computer here, a cell phone there (what would the Babysitter’s Club become with cell phones???) which I think, at best, insults current teens’ intelligence, and at worst, does a number on their body image.

Historical fiction is about creating a sense of the place and the time- sometimes extending over a family saga, sometimes creating the background for what feels like mostly another genre- suspense, fantasy, romance. Interesting point that came up in the reading. Historical fiction can appeal because it has a sense of hope sort of permanently embedded in it. No matter how cold it was at Valley Forge, or how grim conditions were during the Holocaust… looking back, means we survived. No wonder I like it so much.

Now, loving to read historical fiction (YA or adult) is not the same as knowing what a librarian working with teens needs to know, about how the genre and its appeal fits together. So… I have emerged from class somewhere between giddy with delight as a reader (I might have had not-decaf before class by accident, for which I apologize to my classmates) and completely mind-blown at the intriguing puzzle of actually being a librarian with middle school kids or teenagers.

Some things that sound like common sense apply: paying attention to a person’s body language when you approach them to offer help, use constructive language rather than negative language. It surprises me how often the things I’m hearing in librarian classes mirror the things I was taught about being a good personal trainer. It comes down to customer service and listening. (I need to work on listening, I think, instead of just bursting at the seams with information and enthusiasm. Ongoing battle, that.)

Had a great discussion about what is and is not historical fiction, and where one genre ends and another begins.

I think time travel should count as historical fiction because the point is to explore the past. I do not think alternate history should count, because the point is it’s not the past. I’m clearly going to have to dig up some research

Touched on some more discussion of the State of YA today, including adults reading YA, and what that means for a teen library space, characters of color (absent or being whitewashed out, see all the nonsense about Rue in the Hunger Games) and finding good resources for book recommendations.

I need to think about how book reviewing is different when it’s for YA librarians, for teens themselves, etc. I’ve reviewed historical fiction on my blog at various points. Wonder if I’d go back and rewrite, knowing what I know.

All sorts of interesting teen reader tricks for fishing out information. Asking about movies, to get a barometer of how much sex and violence a young teen might be ready to handle in a book. Asking about books a teen hated, which sometimes gets a more definite response.

Also: I am going to read Lonesome Dove, when the semester is over. I promise. (I do not think I have ever read a Western!)

I saw this question earlier today, and daydreamed while I did my errands, and had entirely too much fun daydreaming some answers.

What made me laugh almost immediately, was that all my thoughts hinged on the idea of living in a fictional city. Whether it’s a fictional version of New York with more magic possible, like the city in Veronica, by Nicholas Christopher, or the New York where The Grimm Legacy housed its fairy tale library (imagine working there after I graduate library school!)… or a magic-infused town like the one where Sunshine works in a bakery and charms and hexes bestow luck. Or Charles DeLint’s Newford.

I clearly want to live in a fairy tale.

Also- I want to have access to a restaurant row, where all the chefs I’ve read about and drooled over, can set up their restaurants. from Comfort Food to The School of Essential Ingredients, to Sunshine’s bakery.

It’s apparently easier for me to imagine living in a world where magic is possible than a place that doesn’t have public transportation or sidewalks though.

That makes me laugh at myself.

There are five other people in my class.

Assignments include:

Giving book talks… 2 to 5 minute presentations about a book, including read-alikes, which is a fancy librarian term for “3 books you’ll like if you like this.”

Practicing reader advisory on an Actual Teenager about books they might like. Actual teenagers will be provided, courtesy of our instructor’s school. Because otherwise, I do not know where I would go find one.

Making a website about a genre of YA fiction, including a definition of the genre, subgenres, book recommendations, other resources.

I’m kicking around the idea of historical fiction.

Which leaves me wondering: where do I go to find out stats about how much historical fiction exists on any given time period? I have a suspicion, unconfirmed as yet, that there’s a ton of middle grade novels and YA about World War II, disproportionate to other times.

Job Search Books For College Graduates: a roundup of AMACOM books full of job hunting advice for new grads, and any job seekers.

A flight attendant tells all, from crazy passengers, to sharing an apartment in Queens with a rotating cast of coworkers, to explaining the convoluted intricacies of a flight attendant’s schedule. Poole’s chatty prose makes it easy to imagine the realities of her career. Ill-fitting polyester uniforms, flying to three cities in one day, dealing with needy business class passengers. It’s easy to imagine how hard it is to cope with cramped galleys and narrow aisles. Harder to imagine pulling that off with a smile, and succeeding as a career.

As you might imagine, Poole’s work puts her in contact with any number of eccentrics and oddballs. Only some of whom are flying as passengers. Although she changes names, and is coy about the identity of celebrities, Poole’s character sketches paint a picture of the strange antics and circumstances people get up to in midair.

A fast, fun vacation read- although I might feel self-conscious about flight attendants seeing me reading this on a plane. Best to save it for the final destination.

She’s not as steeped in Internet and social media culture as I am, (I think I managed to explain Twitter correctly, though she may not be sold on the idea.) I did my best to explain book memes and the like.

So here’s a question:

What book blogs do you like to read?

What makes them great? The books they review? Book news? The design?

If you have a blog, give me a link to a post that you’re really proud of.