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Librarians Know How to Have Fun
Sep. 22nd, 2009 05:16 pmToday was fantastic. I love my job. The librarian one, I mean.
Instead of subbing at the library today like I was supposed to, I attended training at the service center. And by training I mean a lecture on the best children and young adult books of the year.
It was brilliant. The guy is very popular in the library circuit apparently. He helped choose the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards finalists and winners. So now I have his lists of books and I basically want to read everything on them. There are a handful that really stood out to me and my particular literary interests, so now I'm kind of antsy to get my hands on them.
We also got free books. I picked up Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia, which I read on a slow day subbing and loved. I think Tan's use of text and visual is wonderful.
I've also read his book The Arrival which is just brilliant. It's a book about the immigrant experience and the only text in it is that on signs or paperwork in the new land. But all of that is in an invented language, so the reader ends up in the same shoes as the main character. I love it.
The other book I picked up was The Eternal Smile by Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim. Yang also wrote American Born Chinese, which I read a few months ago. That was primarily why I picked this one up.
I love that we're seeing more and more "main-stream" graphic novels. It's a form of literature that gets overlooked or shot down a lot which is unfortunate because there are so many beautiful, challenging, insightful things you can do with them. The good ones anyway. I am a fan.
Instead of subbing at the library today like I was supposed to, I attended training at the service center. And by training I mean a lecture on the best children and young adult books of the year.
It was brilliant. The guy is very popular in the library circuit apparently. He helped choose the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards finalists and winners. So now I have his lists of books and I basically want to read everything on them. There are a handful that really stood out to me and my particular literary interests, so now I'm kind of antsy to get my hands on them.
We also got free books. I picked up Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia, which I read on a slow day subbing and loved. I think Tan's use of text and visual is wonderful.
I've also read his book The Arrival which is just brilliant. It's a book about the immigrant experience and the only text in it is that on signs or paperwork in the new land. But all of that is in an invented language, so the reader ends up in the same shoes as the main character. I love it.
The other book I picked up was The Eternal Smile by Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim. Yang also wrote American Born Chinese, which I read a few months ago. That was primarily why I picked this one up.
I love that we're seeing more and more "main-stream" graphic novels. It's a form of literature that gets overlooked or shot down a lot which is unfortunate because there are so many beautiful, challenging, insightful things you can do with them. The good ones anyway. I am a fan.
