All posts by Abby

Etc., Summer reading

Sign of the times

Yesterday I went from store to store, asking very nicely for donations for our summer reading raffles.  I know times are tough, and so all I did at each store was present a donation request letter on the library letterhead; if there was any hesitation on the part of the store manager, I said, “I can just leave the letter, and if you decide you’d like to contact me, my phone number is at the bottom.”  Basically, I go into this project not really expecting anything, and am very happy if a store donates an item or gift certificate to the library.

Why do I ask for donations from local businesses?  Two reasons:  library budgets are small, and donations are one way to provide prizes for summer readers; and as a former small business manager, I am a firm supporter of local small businesses, and view this as a good way for local stores to promote themselves and expand their customer base.  If a store donates a $5.00 gift certificate, and the winner of that certificate comes to the store for the first time, that person just might decide that this is a store they want to visit again, and a new recurring customer is born.

In my travels yesterday, I did notice that there was a lot of fear and pain in the eyes of the store managers and owners.  Clearly, business is not good.  Clearly, the economy is taking its toll on small businesses.  By the end of the day, I was feeling rather crummy about having asked for donations, and very depressed about the state of our economy.  Things do not look good.

And then this morning I came into work to find a voicemail from a business owner who had donated last year.  It was a pretty angry, borderline combative message, saying something along the lines of, “Mailing a letter to my business isn’t enough.  You need to prove to me that you shop here.”  Ironically, I didn’t mail the letter, I came by in person.  And I do shop at the store.  I’m not on their mailing list, but I have shopped there.

In short, asking for summer reading donations was a pretty negative and depressing experience this year.  A true sign of the times; I’m frightened for what the future will be bringing to our country.

Summer reading

Summer reading…

It always amazes me how summer reading consumes my every waking (and sometimes sleeping) moment starting at the end of May.  The events have been planned and scheduled since December, but the nitty-gritty back-breaking preparatory work happens now.  And it never seems as though there’s enough time to accomplish all that needs to be done.

On the docket for today:

  • making the final 300 copies of the summer calendar (bringing the total copies made to 1000) and 200 more copies of the summer letter to parents (for a total of 800 of those)
  • folding the calendars
  • desperately trying to drum up more volunteers to help at the Ice Cream Social – seven wonderful volunteers is great, but no where near enough
  • typing up all of my “begging letters” to take around to local businesses on Thursday…to get items and gift certificates to use for summer raffles
  • following up on the food donation requests that I sent out two weeks ago
  • a million other little things that I can’t think of at this moment
  • and, of course, putting through this month’s book orders

Yikes.  I just might be freaking out right now….

Etc., Spare time - Culture

Vacation

It’s been an odd vacation, but a good one.  Jim spent most of this past week painting the exterior of his mom’s house (I joined him in painting on two days), and today Jim and I worked with his brother to install a new floor in his mom’s sunroom.  And I ran a book group, tutored three lessons, and worked on some storytime planning. 

Even though we both worked – a lot – during this vacation, it was still a nice break from the daily grind, and I’ll be going back on Monday with fresh enthusiasm.  Just in time for summer reading…

Etc.

Sometimes, it’s all about the shoes

Before I start, let me just state the obvious: shoes have absolutely NOTHING to do with children’s literature, being a children’s librarian, or education.  But I’m on vacation, so I’m going to write about shoes, gosh darn it!

Two years ago, when Liz and Jean were visiting, the three of us went to a great sale at a local tack shop (Pegasus Farm).  Liz and I don’t have horses, and were a bit bored, so we looked at the shoes.  And I found the best pair of sandals ever, which I’ve worn almost every day for the past two summers.  Only one problem, really – they’re tan, and I wear a lot of black, even in the summer.  But Ariat had discontinued the item, so that was that.

And then today, on the Ariat website, I saw the sandals.  In black.  Wouldn’t you know, though, Ariat has already sold out of my size in black, with no plans to make any more.  Jeepers, guys.  Don’t you realize these are the best sandals ever and that you should make them forever??? 

I don’t give up easily, though, and managed to track down a pair on some obscure Western wear website, and phoned in the order to guarantee I’d get a pair.  I think the nice lady on the other end of the line thought I was a bit odd, being so excited about scoring a pair of rather ordinary-looking sandals.  I don’t care.  After the call was over, I did a little dance in the kitchen.

Because sometimes, it’s all about the shoes.

Book groups, Children's book reviews, Children's literature

Time Stops for No Mouse

After it was highly, highly recommended to me by a young lady and her sister, I decided to schedule Time Stops for No Mouse by Michael Hoeye as the May book for the sixth grade book group.  The young lady in question is an intelligent and discerning eighth grader, and her sister, equally intelligent and discerning, is a junior in high school.  Both raved about how much they loved the book, and got a bit misty eyed as they told me about it.  And then a few days after these girls sold me on the book, the father of another young library patron thanked me profusely for adding the book’s sequels to the collection.  He told me how much he and his daughter adore the series, and how happy he was to see it in its entirety in our library.

The sixth grade book group met this past Tuesday to discuss this book, and the meeting revealed some positives and some negatives regarding Hoeye’s book.  On the plus side:  all attending book group members actually finished reading the book, which hasn’t happened much lately with this group.  Also on the plus side: once I was able to insist that we talk about the book and not sports, we had a productive discussion.  On the negative side: no one, including me, loved the book.  Also on the negative side: we discovered this isn’t the most fertile book for a group discussion.

I was truly surprised by how little I liked Time Stops for No Mouse; I hated Hoeye’s choice of names (sorry, I know he works hard to create his characters’ names, but they just frustrated me, since they are hard to pronounce and hold no meaning for me), I was a bit bored by the story, and the whole package of the plot, the characters, and the names feels a bit too contrived for me. 

As for the kids in the book group, they were primarily bothered by the fact that mice are the main characters in the story.  Several kids had the same reaction: why make the characters mice, if they are living in a world that seems exactly like the human world?  Where are the differences between how mice live and humans live?  And where are humans in this invented world – do they exist, or not?  And then there were the expected grievances: not enough action, not enough violence, not enough fantasy (animal fantasy clearly doesn’t count as fantasy to this group).

I’m left feeling a bit puzzled by Hoeye’s book.  Would I have liked it better if I hadn’t gone into it with such high expectations?  Would the book work better with a different group of readers, perhaps younger readers?  Would I appreciate the book more if I were to read the three sequels?  And is the kids’ reaction colored by their bias towards Alex Rider and Harry Potter?

If I have time this summer, I think I’ll read at least one of the sequels and see if I’m swayed by that.  But first I have a stack of books on my coffee table, waiting to be read:  The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd, The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry, The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan, The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, The Titan’s Curse by Rick Riordan, and Tunnels by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams.  Isn’t it lovely that there’s always something new to read?

Book groups, Children's literature

For Jean ~ A Wrinkle in Time

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When I told Jean that the library’s fifth grade book group was going to be discussing Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, she mentioned that she vividly remembered the scene with the little boy bouncing a ball.  Since we couldn’t locate the scene in the book at that moment, I made sure to mark it as I read the book for book group.  There are actually two scenes that Jean might be remembering, so I thought I’d quote them below (both are quoted from the Farrar, Straus and Giroux reprint of the 1962 Crosswicks edition):

Below them the town was laid out in harsh angular patterns.  The houses in the outskirts were all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray.  Each had a small, rectangular plot of lawn in front, with a straight line of dull-looking flowers edging the path to the door.  Meg had a feeling that if she could count the flowers there would be exactly the same number for each house.  In front of all the houses children were playing.  Some were skipping rope, some were bouncing balls.  Meg felt vaguely that something was wrong with their play.  It seemed exactly like children playing around any housing development at home, and yet there was something different about it.  She looked at Calvin, and saw that he, too, was puzzled.

“Look!” Charles Wallace said suddenly.  “They’re skipping and bouncing in rhythm!  Everyone’s doing it at exactly the same moment.”

This was so.  As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball.  As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball.  Down came the ropes.  Down came the balls.  Over and over again.  Up.  Down.  All in rhythm.  All identical.  Like the houses.  Like the paths.  Like the flowers.  (pp. 98- 99)

 Second quote, from when Charles Wallace has fallen under the control of IT:

“Now see this,” he [Charles Wallace] said.  He raised his hand and suddenly they could see through one of the walls into a small room.  In the room a little boy was bouncing a ball.  He was bouncing it in rhythm, and the walls of his little cell seemed to pulse with the rhythm of the ball.  And each time the ball bounced he screamed as though he were in pain. 

“That’s the little boy we saw this afternoon,” Calvin said sharply, “the little boy who wasn’t bouncing the ball like the others.”

Charles Wallace giggled again.  “Yes.  Every once in a while there’s a little trouble with cooperation, but it’s easily taken care of.  After today he’ll never desire to deviate again.”  (pp. 136 – 137)

A Wrinkle in Time is one of my all-time favorite books, but I hadn’t read it for a few years and had forgotten just how masterful it is.  And I was very gratified to find out that every child in the fifth grade book group loved it as much as I do; some have even read it multiple times.  We had a great conversation about the book, focusing primarily on the dark thing and what the dark thing means and does.  It was great to have such an in-depth discussion with this group of kids, where we zeroed in on one aspect of the book and studied it in detail. 

And, in rereading the book, I realized that a book I recently discussed on this blog, The Sky Inside, owes much to L’Engle’s novel (for instance, the quote above that describes the sameness of the houses and the children is very much reproduced in the concentric suburb of The Sky Inside), though the newer book doesn’t really even begin to compare with L’Engle’s masterpiece.

Etc.

Dream

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This is the dream I had last night:

I was having lunch with some people (the sort of blurred face, nameless people who sometimes inhabit dreams) at a restaurant.  I sat down at the table with these people, and was shocked to realize that the back wall of the  second-story restaurant was all glass, and looked out over a field that was the front line of a war.

You could see bunkers and trenches, and as I watched several soldiers on both sides were shot and killed in a flurry of exchanged bullets.

I gasped for breath and tried to scream, and looked desperately at the three people sitting at the table with me – but they were happily chatting together and eating their meals, totally oblivious to the war and death happening just outside the window.  Not one other person in the dining room noticed the war, or cared that soldiers were dying right in front of them as they dined.  I tried to scream again.

And then I woke up.

Storytime

Felt creations

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I’ve been a little preoccupied with building up my library of felt pieces for storytime.  The three most recent highlights are:  felt pieces for Eric Hill’s Where’s Spot, which proved to be quite a challenge, but turned out very well; pieces for Robert Kalan’s Moving Day, which were a hit; and pieces for Margaret Wise Brown’s Big Red Barn, which took a looooong time to make.   All those farm animals!!!

The deeper I get into creating flannelboard stories, the more complex my creations become, and the more time I spend each weekend making them.  It’s a vicious, though rewarding, cycle, and a cycle which has taken away from my blog writing time over the past several weeks.  On the bright side, though, there are only three more storytimes left in this school year, and then my library will be complete except for a tweaking here and there.  (Though I suspect my tweakings will be time-consuming, too, since my standards are a lot higher now than they were in September when I began this project.  Sigh.)

Children

Overheard…

The bathroom in the children’s room is right next to my desk, and so I get to overhear a lot of amusing things.  Most recently heard from my desk:

A pair of four year old twins were in the bathroom with their mother, when I quite clearly heard one of the boys say, “That’s ok – it matches the floor!”

The bathroom floor is yellow.

Say no more.

Etc., Storytime

A felt moment

I bought a huge stack of felt rectangles at the West Concord 5 & 10 on Saturday (39 of them, at 39 cents each), and as the cashier checked me out he asked if I needed a bag.  “No,” I said, “that’s ok – I can carry them this way.  You guys are the only ones in town who carry felt anyway, right?”

“I wouldn’t know,” the cashier replied, “I don’t buy felt.”

I guess buying 39 rectangles of felt is a bit odd.