One of my favorite librarian bloggers (no link because we are sort of kind of professionally connected, but email me if you want to read hers, which is great) did what is apparently an old-school meme that I've never seen before, and reading it was really fun. Basically, it's 15 things about you and books. Here goes:
1. Her last one will be my first one: When I realized that "collection development" meant buying books with other people's money and getting paid for it, I was very excited. When I realized that "readers' advisory" meant talking to people about what books they like and trying to help them find more and getting paid for it, I was very very excited, and I knew for sure I wanted to be a public librarian.
2. My parents like apocryphal stories about my reading proclivities as a very young child. I think the earliest one is about me hating to sleep at night and just wanting my dad to stay up and read to me in his brown fuzzy recliner (later nicknamed, creatively, "Brown Fuzzy"). Anything would do -- newspaper articles, his students' papers that he had to grade, etc. I was not discriminating.
3. Apparently, if an adult was finished reading me a book and didn't intend to read it again, I would pick up the book and smack them with it, demanding, "Weed. Weed. Weed."
4. When I was around three and a half, my parents left me alone for a weekend with my grandmother and my aunt. When they came back, my grandmother (a kindergarten teacher) insisted to my mother (a first-grade teacher) that I could read on my own. My mother disagreed and thought that I'd just memorized all the books, so I sat down and proved it with some book I'd never seen before.
5. My first memory of my public library is the Clifford-colored carpet in the children's room on the second floor. I remember going there for storytime, sitting crosslegged on the floor with the other kids, and watching the librarian turn the book about an elephant outward and read upside down so we could see the pictures. I remember the sound of the crinkly cover in her hands. (I am still obsessed with those crinkly covers and one of my secret goals as a librarian is to get a job in which I have an excuse to touch a lot of them every single day, germs be damned.)
6. That library had an interesting division in its children and young adult materials that, looking back, I don't fully understand. The kids' room on the second floor had three black wire racks of paperbacks, set in the far left corner under the windows, that were YA books (including one warning about the evils of drinking that I saw when I was way too young for it, maybe 7 or 8. it described kids "getting wasted" and "being loaded" and somehow winding up in a room alone, half-dead and covered in vomit. i think one or more of the kids wound up fully dead, and the whole thing terrified me so much that it's probably responsible for my completely non-alcoholic high school career. very effective propaganda, that book.) but the real YA section was downstairs, closer to the adult fiction. I felt like it was the best day of my life when I graduated to the downstairs section -- suggested by one of the librarians! -- and I think I may have actually read every book in it.
7. The D.C. public library was one of the first places I went when I moved there. It was 1999, and the tiny branch closest to my apartment had one (1) computer (nonfunctional). I wonder if I would like to work in an urban setting like that. I could do an entire list on public libraries. I will stop.
8. No, I totally won't. Until last year, I had four different public library cards in three different states/nonvoting areas: D.C.; Montgomery County, Maryland; Arlington, Virginia; and the Library of Congress. The reading room at the Library of Congress is 17 kinds of awesome, but you aren't allowed to check out books. I once accidentally returned a D.C. book to a Montgomery County Library and had to ask the librarian to fish it out of the bookdrop for me. She did not approve.
9. Last one, I swear: I love the public library here, and I am now on its board of trustees. I hope I do not screw it up. I plan to use my immense power for good and not evil.
10. I loved those SRAs in elementary school. What did SRA stand for? No idea, but they were these sort of individual mini-book pamphlet things, each with a different story and questions at the end. They were always kept in big boxes in the back of the classroom, color-coded to tell you which series to use. The reading-comprehension questions never interested me particularly, but I couldn't wait to get to the next story.
11. My parents both allowed and enabled me to read anything I wanted, whenever I wanted. (Eight-year-old Gwen was a little young for that BOOZE WILL KILL YOU AND THEN YOU WILL DIE brainwasher for sure, but look how many sleepless nights it probably saved them!) They seriously never censored a thing. I read 40000 fluffy teen series; Jackie Collins novels; The Great Gatsby; whatever. They never said a word and they plunked down cash and they drove to the library 80 zillion times without complaining. So awesome.
12. My family members give each other eight books each for the last night of Chanukah. I didn't do it this year and felt really lame, and this is my official reminder to do it next year.
13. In college, as part of a dictate from my very intense and somewhat psychotic thesis adviser, I read everything Virginia Woolf has ever written, in chronological order, over the course of 10 days. I basically majored in reading, and one week, we were supposed to read The Iliad for Tuesday's class and The Odyssey for Thursday's. The professors did not so much approve of skimming, either.
13. I am surprising myself by sort of wanting a Kindle or other e-reader and also sort of not wanting one, but in any case, I'm glad we live in a world where we don't have to limit ourselves to one format.
14. Literary fiction is my true love, but I am trying to read outside my genre. I've been reading more science fiction and magical realism, and I would love to love nonfiction, too.
15. Here are the books on my bedside table right now: Uglies, Pretties, All Other Nights, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, Digitizing Collections: Strategic Issues for the Information Manager, The Yarn Girls' Guide to Beyond the Basics.
This was long and crazy, but I would love to hear your things about books, on your own blog or in the comments or whatever. Tell me one or two or 15, yes?
2 comments:
Is your memory of the Clifford-colored carpet from the Lanc library? I have clear memories of that library, too. My dad always took me there at night, and we always parked in the small lot at the back of the library. I can still clearly picture the fish tank, Bert and Ernie, the water fountain, the circle of seats with bins of books around the edges, and the rows of study desks that the "big kids" supposedly used on the other end. I also remember what the library smelled like. And I remembered that after I picked out my books, we would go to the basement where my dad would search for his own books and I would sit at a round table in the hallway next to the elevator and start reading the books I selected before we even got out of the library.
I also remember when the librarian gave me my own library card, in a little paper holder.
On the way home we would always try to see how many green lights in a row we could get before we had to stop. I don't remember what road we took home, but it was one of the Prince/King/Queen streets.
I can taste that water from that fountain and I can picture the entire children's/YA sections.
awesome memories.
grg, your writing gets even better all the time. you sound fresh off of having written a novel.
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