Opening Session with Madeleine Albright

(Crossposted from my LJ blog, with apologies to the very small group that may read both.)

- Michael Gorman, ALA President 2005-06, opened the session with a video showing the work librarians have done to rebuild Gulf Coast libraries and appealing to librarians to join the adopt-a-library program.

- Wynton Marsalis spoke via video (but didn’t play.)

- Mayor Ray Nagin spoke about the importance of libraries there and throughout the country during the diaspora of 2005.

- Lt. Gov Mitch Landrieu talked about why rebuilding New Orleans is so important, even outside of the region (primarily history and diversity reasons.)

- Madeleine Albright’s speech discussed the links between democracy and libraries. OK, most speeches at ALA toss around praises about libraries being the cornerstones of democracy or somesuch, but Dr. Albright went beyond the usual self-congratulatory clichés. She praised us for the work we have done to support privacy in the wake of the PATRIOT Act, but then questioned our lack of commitment to free speech in other countries. She rather daringly compared the arrest of underground librarians in Cuba to the battles being fought here over the PATRIOT Act. And while that got a knee-jerk cheer from the mostly liberal audience, it was more of a reprimand than a compliment. In fact, it was a call to arms. Her point was that while it is imperative that we continue to stand up and speak out on behalf of libraries and our patrons, we can not ignore the rights violations that occur in other countries. We must stand up for their rights as well and respect the dignity of every human being regardless of whether they have been lucky enough to be born in a place where those rights are codified by law. “Being born in the United States, or coming here through circumstances beyond your control, isn’t much of an accomplishment,” she reminded us. She cautioned us against allowing patriotic pride and a sense of God-given privilege to create a world in which we demand and closely protect our own rights while denying that other human beings deserve to have their rights protected at exactly the same level. Her point, well made, was that we do not have a monopoly on freedom, democracy and human rights. Iraq, she said towards the end of her speech, was after all the land of Hammurabi’s Code, which thousands of years ago codified that the strong must not oppress the weak.

- Fantastic speech and a great way to kick off the conference for me (after spending two days delayed by cancelled flights and layovers.)

Advance Reading Copies!

Get Your Review Copies Here!

Borzoi, an imprint of Alfred A Knopf publishers (which is itself a part of Random House) is offering 100 review copies a month to selected readers who sign up at their website. Don't know how slim the odds of being among that monthly hundred readers are, but it's worth a try, right?

Anything's got to be better than the traditional method of acquiring advance copies (that is, breaking one's arms trying to carry them around the exhibition hall at various Library Conferences/ Book Expos. )

Not Easy Being Green

In the past, I've tried to stick to reviewing books only if I'd finished them.

But, new year, new policy. I stopped reading Jim Merkel's Radical Simplicity after about 100 pages, and I'm going to write about it anyway. The full title is Radical Simplicity: small footprints on a finite Earth. As you may have guessed from my recent readings, I've been dancing around the environmental/ global sustainability question for some time. Maybe we all have. But dancing is the right term; I still have days where I long to throw my newspapers in the regular trash to save time and even avoiding the big bad American pork industry is a losing battle (to say nothing of actual vegetarianism.)

So, while Merkel is living a fascinating life on 5000 dollars or less a year, I couldn't help but feel that his lifestyle isn't much of a replicable model for most of us. Admirable, yeah, but not practical for the average working American. For one thing, most of us don't own houses that we can use as income, nor do we have large bank accounts from our corporate years to sustain us while we adjust to an unemployed lifestyle. To me, Merkel is food for thought, someone outlining an extreme version of what we need to do. Coming from that direction, I found the manifesto part (the first half of the book) interesting, but my interest waned rapidly when he moved into "quit your job, stop traveling by car and plane" mode. After twenty pages of reading through suggestions I had no intention of taking, I decided that my reading time could be better spent.

Bottom line: If you can get it through your library, I'd give it a shot. Maybe it will engage you in ways it failed to speak to me. Otherwise, I'd go with Green living : the E magazine handbook for living lightly on the earth. Green Living is a much simpler, much more mainstream book about making reasonable changes that help the environment.

YA and Liquor, Perfect Together

This past Sunday night, the KGB Bar (event calendar) on East 4th Street in Manhattan hosted its first Sunday night YA reading. It wasn’t as packed as the usual Sunday night readings, but there was certainly a nice sized crowd and the readings were well worth the trip. The bar itself is a nice hangout—one floor up and very cosy. It was probably an apartment at one time, and it still retains that casual, at-your-cool-college-revolutionary-friend’s-place feel. You know, the friend who hung pictures of Trotsky next to crudely framed Dead Kennedy’s albums and shifted to vegan after being a vegetarian became too mainstream—that friend. If I had been alone, I probably wouldn’t have felt cool enough to go in and take a seat at the bar.

I’m glad I did. Friendly bartender, nice crowd, even the owner asked us if we’d enjoyed the reading when he saw us walking down the street afterwards. I didn’t buy the YA books, since I rarely get time to read fiction, much less YA fic, but one of the reading coordinators was nice enough to go into the back room and get me the nonfic that the owner had written. The book, Attorney for the Damned by Denis Woychuk, is about his experiences as a lawyer for the criminally insane. I’m about fifteen pages in, and so far, it’s got me hooked.

As for the readers? The first two, Gabrielle Zevin and David Klass, were reading from their YA novels, Elsewhere and Dark Angel. Elsewhere reminded me of the sort of book I would have liked to read in high school. It starts off from the point of view of Liz’s pet pug, after fifteen year old Liz has died. Gabrielle read from the that first chapter, which walked a line between cute and sad. The rest of the novel is about Liz’s time in Elsewhere, the parallel universe where the dead wait to be reborn.

David Klass’ novel is decidedly darker and, honestly, more adult. His seventeen-year-old protagonist is trying to deal with the return of his older brother, Troy. Troy was in jail serving a life sentence for murder, but was released on a technicality. Now he’s rejoined his family in NJ, where they had gone to escape the past and start a new life. The chapter that David read had me on the edge of my seat, between horror and tears. Dark Angel just might be one of those rare YA fictions that make my reading list this year.

I wasn’t as crazy about the third author’s reading, which is a shame because I really wanted to like it. Robyn Schneider seems like an incredibly nice, cool person. Not only was she the one who posted the ad on our libraries LJ page, but she also brought cookies for the crowd. She read the first two chapters from her forthcoming YA novel, Better than Yesterday. It was well-written and funny in parts, but it wasn’t really to my taste. A sixteen-year-old girl, on the other hand, would probably flip over it. The characters are two girls and two boys attending a very exclusive boarding school and obsessing over grades, SATs, their reputations and each other.

We finished up the night down the block at one of my favorite NY Irish bars, Swifts. Good drinks, a very amiable bartender, and best of all—sausage rolls on the bar menu!

The Betty Crocker Within...

As I do every year, I set up my 2006 budget with unreal expectations regarding the amount of cooking I'm going to do to save money. This year, it's mostly vegetarian and freezable, with the aid of my new crockpot.

So far, the biggest problem is getting home often enough to actually eat what I've cooked before it goes bad. The other problem has been finding cheap, easy recipes that don't involve investing more than five bucks in a random spice that I will probably never need again. So lately, instead of curling up with a good book, I've been sitting at the kitchen table, scanning cookbooks from our library collections. Even with them, most of my cooking is still just this side of edible. I shudder to think of how it will be after a few weeks in the freezer.

Anyway...

I did finish one book over the last few weeks, and oddly enough, it's also food related. Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl is an awesome book about how her eccentric upbringing led to her love of food. The book is more a series of chronological essays than a detailed memoir. Reichl centers each memory around a recipe, whether she is sneaking away from her job as a camp counselor in France, living on a commune in California or working as a waitress in a failing Midwestern restaurant. The recipes were a little above me, but Reichl's bittersweet vignettes and wry comic touches definitely hit the spot.

Check out VidLit

In the course of my ongoing hunt for cool, helpful and otherwise book-pushing websites to foist upon my friends, family, coworkers and patrons, I found Vidlit. And it was all of the above, and I was very taken with it. Basically, it is a small collection of short excerpts from recent books, read by the authors and animated Terry Gilliam-style. David Foster Wallace's clip from Consider the Lobster is a little too highbrow and grumpy for me, but Julie Powell's reading from Julie and Julia had me giggling at my desk.

On another note, I'm currently reading True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall by Mark Salzman. I haven't been a huge fan of his fiction works (couldn't even get through the one set in a library!) but this is completely different, and completely engrossing. Salzman is cajoled by a fellow writer into teaching a writing class at a juvenile hall in California in 1997. His five-person class is made up of teens who are being tried as adults, typically for murder or armed robbery. Their writings, presented in full text, as well as his recollections of their conversations, are fascinating. A must-read for anyone working with troubled kids or anyone interested in how our justice system works in regard to juvenile offenders.

My Favorite Books in 2005

Read in 2005, that is. Most of them were written in other years.

1. Stiff- Mary Roach
2. Brass- Helen Walsh
3. Know it All- AJ Jacobs
4. Shopping for Buddhas- Jeff Greenwald
5. Chronicles, Volume 1- Bob Dylan
6. Hello to All That- John Falk
7. Long Way Round- Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman
8. Grassroots- Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
9. Nickel and Dimed- Barbara Ehrenreich
10. Prince of Darkness- Sharon K Penman
11. Creating True Peace- Thich Nhat Hanh
12. No Logo- Naomi Klein
13. A Very Long Engagement- Sebastien Japrisot
14. The Fire This Time- Dawn Martin Lundy, editor
15. Wandering Home- Bill McKibbens
16. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince- JK Rowling
17. The Time-Traveler’s Wife- Audrey Niffenegger
18. A Star Called Henry- Roddy Doyle
19. A Breath of Snow and Ashes- Diana Gabaldon
20. Outposts- Simon Winchester
21. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire- Amanda Foreman
22. It Happened One Autumn- Lisa Kleypas
23. Don’t Lets Go To the Dogs Tonight- Alexandra Fuller
24. Savage Inequalities- Jonathan Kozol
25. The Greedy Bastard Diary- Eric Idle

Wow. It suddenly occurs to me that I am really lacking classic literature this year. Let’s make that resolution #8005 for 2006. Seriously, next year I’m going to finish Our Mutual Friend if I have to carry it on every flight I take.

Every once in a while there is a book I will simply give up on. Most of the time, I've given up because I can't get interested or find myself reading the same page over and over again without comprehending. Nancy Pearl, the librarian immortalized by Archie McPhee's novelty toys, once endorsed the old 50-page rule. She argued that there are too many good books out there to waste time reading a book you don't like. I heartily agree.

My unfinished read for this week is Spook by Mary Roach. What a disappointment! I liked her last book, Stiff, so much that I spent weeks pressing it on unsuspecting friends, family and patrons. It was a great combination of funny and thoughtful contemplations amid well-researched facts and interviews. Spook is an attempt to do the same thing-- take a controversial aspect of death (the afterlife) and examine it with a touch of humor.

It fails miserably. It's not unreadable or hard to understand or even uninteresting. Several times I found myself laughing at Roach's anecdotes, footnotes and asides. But therein lies the problem. While Roach approached Stiff with some sense of openmindedness and reverence, her tone in Spook is downright snarky. Roach doesn't believe in an afterlife and she writes the entire book with an air of indulgence, as if to say, "the arguments supporting the possibility of an afterlife are all very curious and a little quaint, but we know better, don't we, darling?" Her interviews read as though she is trying to give the appearance of objective listening while simultaneously concocting another witty, demeaning chapter heading. After a while, it grates. No amount of interesting information (and there was quite a bit of it) could entice me to keep reading.