Reading response
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Technically, the term is over, but I didn’t get a chance to post my thoughts on the final week’s reading. I was…busy (cough-library management essay-cough). So here’s one last ‘official, course-related’ post. I read Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Story-wise, it was okay – I didn’t hate it, didn’t love it, either. The pacing felt uneven at…
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So this week’s topic is… “Conspicuous Consumption and Teen Markets” (dum dum DUUUM). This is like double weird timeliness, what with the Occupy movement appearing to be on its last legs and – oh, the irony – the Christmas consumergasm/shopping orgy beginning to strike us all with the temporary insanity of a European soccer riot. As I consider this thorny…
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This week, I watched the film It’s Kind of a Funny Story (stupid title). I was not amused (so, stupid and also misleading title). What a terribly mediocre movie. I haven’t read the book, by Ned Vizzini, but I’m sure it’s better than this adaptation was, or they wouldn’t have bothered. Even though, Craig is the kind of weak,…
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Interesting reading this week. Best quote: “Nonfiction remains the kitchen-bound Cinderella of young adult literature, while her stepsister—fiction—remains the belle of the ball” (p. 184). Oh how I laughed. Also hilarious: Cold War paranoia spurred the Man to give money to libraries to raise little astrophysicists so Russia wouldn’t plant a hammer & sickle flag in…
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Or not. Because there wasn’t a whole lot of innuendo in Anatomy of a Boyfriend by Daria Snadowsky. It was just all… out there. Should I have expected that? There’s a creepy naked Ken doll on the cover, so maybe that should have foreshadowed the creepy naked teen sex shenanigans that awaited. I will admit, I did NOT expect it. Holy…
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You know what I love about blogs? No, it’s not the false but liberating sense of anonymity (which is nice, even though everyone who reads this blog probably knows my name). It’s the rant factor. In person and in print, my rants always start out calm and logical, very professional. But things go downhill very quickly, and…
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This book was… interesting. It’s not your usual YA read. Unwanted teen pregnancy, abandoned babies, and the ensuing moral dilemmas–I’ll be honest, it caught me off guard. I’ll admit it, I picked this book from the library’s catalogue because I thought the cover looked spooky. (So so wrong). Let’s talk appeal factors. The novel’s pacing was excellent, fast enough to maintain…
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This week, I read Wondrous Strange by Lesley Livingston. It was… a struggle. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not the whole fairy–sorry, faerie–thing. Faeries are cool beans. I love faeries. Good faeries, bad faeries, pretty faeries, ugly faeries, faeries that bite your finger because appearances can be deceiving (duh, Hoggle)… love it all. Back to…
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Booth’s “Reader’s Advisory by Proxy” was a chin-strokingly interesting reading. I’ve never really thought about reader’s advisory by proxy, which is weird because now that I do think about it, I realize it is something that I did a a lot when I worked at Chapters. Especially during the insanely hectic Christmas season, when there were more…
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Snowball’s article (“Teenagers talking about reading and libraries,” 2008) was an interesting read. It was a detailed and insightful study of a selection of Australian teens, and even though the study was qualitative, as the author points out, the insight into the complex relationship that teens have with reading and with libraries is probably representative of a larger group…
The Reading Robyn 