schoollibraryjournal:

Happy May birthdays to LJ and SLJ staffers Annalisa, Beth, Karyn, Kent, Margaret, and Shelley!

I am full of so many brownies.

Found note in database that reviewer quit @LJReviews ‘to focus on more substantial publications.’ We don’t need ya stinkin’ reviews.

— 

(via willywaldo)

schoollibraryjournal:

“Tut, tut, it looks like rain” ― A.A. Milne

It’s a silver day at the SLJ office in Manhattan.

GPOLJ.

Hells yeah, LJ is cosponsoring a party at BEA this year. From the Facebook page:

Join Bookrageous, “a podcast about books and why they’re awesome” for a party featuring some of our favorite authors — hijinks guaranteed to ensue. First 250 drinks are on us! After that, every drink is a good deed and a donation to Housing Works. 

Thanks to this year’s raffle, three lucky attendees will get a personalized list of reading recommendations, courtesy of the Bookrageous hosts and the Library Journal Book Review! You could also win one of several audiobooks, hand-picked by Library Journal Media Editor, Stephanie Klose. Raffle tickets will be $5 each, or 5 for $20, and all proceeds will benefit Housing Works.

We’ve been recommending their books for months, and now they’ll be joining us in person! This year’s featured authors include: Nathan Larson, Sarah MacLean, Rosie Schaap, and Teddy Wayne. We’ll also be joined by Library Journal Reviews Editor and librarian Etta Thornton, who will teach us the secrets of readers advisory.

All hail our wonderful sponsors: BookExpo America, Book Riot, and Library Journal.

It’s going down Wednesday, May 29 from 7pm until 9pm, right after LJ’s Day of Dialog, at Housing Works Books. Be there or be square!

(Source: facebook.com)

Over at Library Journal, check out Steve Jobs, Harry Houdini, and Beyoncé | What We’re Reading. SLJer Shelley and LJerStephanie talk a little about the books they’re on right now:

Shelley Diaz, Associate Editor, SLJ
Newbery Honor-winner Margarita Engle reimagines the coming of age and artistic awakening of Latin American poet, abolitionist, and women’s rights pioneer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (Tula) in her novel in verse, The Lightning Dreamer. Best known for Sab (1841), which predated Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Tula’s work emphasized racial, religious, and social equality. Engle’s lyrical, short novel captures a young woman’s yearning to be accepted as a writer—without regard to her sex—bringing to mind Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

Stephanie Klose, Audio Editor, LJ 
I’m reading Harry Houdini’s The Right Way To Do Wrong: A Unique Selection of Writings by History’s Greatest Escape Artist, originally published in 1906. It is, essentially, a how-to guide for crime and deception (including the sorts of illusions for which Houdini was famous). He is surprisingly—and delightfully—free with trade secrets, explaining how to accomplish feats from sword swallowing to card games to jewel heists carried out via sofa delivery. Bold, brash, self-absorbed, and aggressively, astonishingly clever, Houdini is now my number one fantasy dinner party seatmate—I’m wracked with despair that no one is ever going to tell me a story starting thus: “About 22 years ago, during one of my many engagements at Kohl and Middleton’s, Chicago, there appeared at the same house a marvelous ‘rattle-snake poison defier’ named Thardo.”

Ever wonder what some of the Library Journal and School Library Journal staffers are reading? Check out What We’re Reading, April 22, 2013 | Library Journal. Here’s a sample:

Matt Enis, Associate Editor, Technology, LJ

I’m reading The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa’s fictionalized account of the life of Sir Roger Casement, who was knighted for his efforts to expose human rights abuses in colonial Africa and Peru, and then executed for treason after joining the Irish rebellion. Vargas Llosa is a favorite, and I’ve been interested in this period of African history since reading King Leopold’s Ghost a couple of years ago. So far it’s great—definitely recommend.

Molly McArdle, Assistant Book Review Editor, LJ
I just finished Their Eyes Were Watching God last week and oof! It hit me hard. I had to scramble to find a new book before I left town for the weekend so I packed Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (a LJ Best Book of 2012 I’m excited to return to), E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and Saeed Jones’s collection of poems, When the Only Light Is Fire.Billy Lynn was chosen as the primary read, the poetry as the backup read, and Ragtime as the emergency read. (One must always pack at least one emergency read.)

Meredith Schwartz, News Editor, LJ
I’m reading The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke. Set (some of them, at least, I haven’t finished it). Entertaining, well-written, occasionally creepy the way that fairy tales used to be before we worried about traumatizing children (though the scariest thing so far has been an exercise in period spelling). Set in the same alternate Regency world with magic as Clarke’s behemoth Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. The book has added stronger women to the Norellverse, which in my opinion it could use, and manages to be neither offensive to modern feminist sensibilities nor cloyingly anachronistic. Romance is approached more in the spirit of Austen than Heyer. So far nothing has jumped out to transcend the general mood into one more memorable on the plot or character level.

mollitudo:

Today is Poem in Your Pocket day (yes, really), an occasion I would have let pass by totally unrecognized if not for my colleagues. My poem? Fellow native Washingtonian Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “Roll Call,” a poem about names—one of my favorite subjects.

Your LJ tumblrer’s poem today, currently stuffed in the her back pocket of her jeans.

What We’re Reading, April 15, 2013 | Library Journal →

Here’s a sampling:

Kate DiGirolomo, Editorial Assistant, LJ
Right now I’m reading The Story of English in 100 Words by David Crystal. I’m only on word two out of 100, but a good word is my catnip. I can’t wait to get to the histories of dilly-dally (word 56) and dinkum (word 68)!

Josh Hadro, Executive Editor, LJ
I’m closing in on The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, a black comedy about a fascinating period of economy and society (California Gold Rush, c. 1851). It reads like a screenplay (something that’s both good and bad in my book), but I’ll follow this murder-for-hire brother duo anywhere, just to see where they end up.

Shelley Diaz, Assistant Book Review Editor, SLJ
I just finished Greg Takoudes’s When We Wuz Famous. It was inspired by a guerrilla film that the author created with the help of a group of young adults from Spanish Harlem. The novel’s frenetic pacing and visceral dialogue gives it a cinematic quality. Though not as elegantly told as Paul Griffin’s Ten Mile River or Ernesto Quiñonez’s Bodega Dreams, it has a lot of heart.

booksyarnink:

April 15 Library Journal with my Mystery Preview on the cover! Love the design.

Check out our awesome April 15 cover, with a great preview of forthcoming mystery books from Kristi Chadwick (aka booksyarnink) and a cover so cool that it makes QR codes look good too.

therumpus:

A second post in regard to Rachel’s A+ Tumblr instructions: The Rumblr would not exist without the Tumblr bookmarklet. Our tentacles would have fallen off a long time ago.

(gif via)

This also goes for the Library Journal tumblr. If you don’t use the bookmarklet yet, get up in that thing.

WildaBookBeast: Authors, Remember the Librarians Who Helped You →

willywaldo:

Skimming through the Sunday New York Times Book Review I found a nice shoutout to my LJ colleague Margaret Heilbrun in the back page essay by historian Amanda Foreman. 

In January, the 133-year-old Library Journal announced the creation of a new annual prize: the Amanda Foreman Award for best acknowledgments. Laugh all you like; it was one of the proudest moments of my life. I knew how much effort had been expended in making those acknowledgments as comprehensive and accurate as possible; but I never thought anyone else would notice.

As a librarian who worked for years at the New York Historical Society, Margaret  appreciates the extensive research that the best biographies and histories entail. And she definitely notices when authors give full credit to the librarians and archivists who assisted them.

Librarians‚ like all mortals‚ love to be on the receiving end of gratitude. When the occasional library, archives, or special collections researcher publishes the results of all that research and expresses thanks to the library in the book’s acknowledgments, and includes the names of the staff who helped, well, the staff in question are thrilled. Natch.

You know what? It doesn’t happen often.

As Margaret recounts in her delightful post “Best Acknowledgements of 2011”for LJ’s In the Bookroom blog, she decided to remedy this shameful ommission and  acknowledge the authors who best showed their appreciation for the librarians who helped bring their books to life. The winner of 2011? Amanda Foreman’s A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War.

In this book, which is among our best of 2011, Ms. Foreman personally names and thanks over 200 library, archives, and special collections staff members from around the world who helped her and her assistants with access to materials over the course of several years. Her acknowledgments are not only a tribute to all the women and men who enabled her work, but a tribute to her for the stamina and focus to keep track of them all systematically and name them with little fuss or muss.

In honor of Foreman’s feat, Margaret created the Amanda Foreman Award to “acknowledge an acknowledger who uses the Foreman format.” She cited 2012 winner Matthew Hollis’s roll call of libraries and staffers in Now All Roads Lead to France: A Life of Edward Thomas as a “fine exemplar of Foreman tradition.”    So authors, don’t forget the librarians who helped you. Remember to give credit where credit is due.  Margaret will be watching!  

Tumblarians are hitting the big time, folks. The Library Journal tumblr is absolutely thrilled to be joining the esteemed ranks of such awesome library & librarian Spotlight blogs as NYPL, thelifeguardlibrarian, bookavore, and lookslikelibraryscience.

Twitter / ettathornton: The only photo I can find that I’m sure is me as a teenager shows me with eyes closed. #librariansasteenagers pic.twitter.com/6RnwK6nYvx

Etta Thornton, Editor, LJ Reviews, as a teenager!

I picked the most embarrassing / pure-teen picture I could for you people. I was 16. This was taken…at a church retreat. I really loved eye liner. And chokers. The pants…the pants have…quotations from The Wasteland on them. Okay. I am done.

Tumblr Patron Saint Rachel visited LJ today! This is the belly of the beast.