Our group article appears in this month's Mississippi Libraries!
Loads of fun, Folks! Margaret and Crystal are the best people to work for and with! Our collaboration was akin to participating in an online college course where one is paired with two 
others to write a paper. Each member writes what they know and then someone organizes it into (hopefully) good reading.
I know exactly what you are thinking and nothing could be further from the truth! Typically group effort means one person does 80% of the work and the rest chip in when an adjective, image, example, etc. is needed. Us peeps got busy, wrote good stuff, and organizing was a snap. I kid you not, I had fun!
Hum, maybe I should let y'all decide whether it is good stuff?!? The title is Reading Round Table: Northwest Mississippi Community College and located on page 86. Yeah, yeah, the title needs work...
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Hot Diggity Dog!
Sunday, January 06, 2008
The Goose Girl (copy)
Once upon a time, in a kingdom far, far away, lived a very beautiful and young King and Queen. They watched over prosperous lands from mountains and valleys to streams and lakes. The perfect place to start a family, for the territory known as Kildenree, was a fertile hunting and farming ground.
First born to the Kildenree Monarch was a baby girl named Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee, or Crown Princess Ani for short. The infant, born into the finest of families, had a slight problem. She had ten fingers and ten toes, it was true, but Ani would not open her tiny eyes. No cleaning, coaxing, or cooing would make those peepers stir. For three days the royal family paced in worry, wondering what could be done.
On the third night, which shone bright blue, an older woman entered the nursery as the castle slept. She slipped her rough hands under the infant and lifted the child to her face. “Was it you I heard cooing? Did you have something you wanted to say? I’m tired from my journey, but am ready to listen.”
The lady ambled to a nearby rocker and wearily sat down. “Would you like for me to start the story and let you finish?”
The Queen, asleep in the next room, was awakened by her daughter’s cooing and an oddly familiar melody. She rushed to her daughter’s royal crib only to find it empty. In the moments that followed her panic turned to bliss as she recognized the figure in the rocking chair. In the corner near the open window sat her sister, and in her lap, bathed in the blue moonlight, her wide-eyed Ani.
This is my interpretation of the first chapter in Shannon Hale’s The Goose Girl. Published in 2002, this fantasy quest, coming-of-age tale written for tweens and teens, is loosely based on a Brothers Grimm story of the same name. And, if you enjoy this story, do not fear; Hale has written two more in the series, Enna Burning and River Secrets.
If the author’s name looks familiar, maybe you have seen Hale’s hilariously popular Austenland. This adult title is chick lit with a little less Prada and a little more Regency-era romance as a modern day girl wins a vacation to England’s answer to Disney World, Jane Austen Land.
Also Reviewed by RaiderGirl
Monday, December 31, 2007
Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
How To Talk about Books You Haven't Read (copy)
This past fall, I was walking with my girlfriends when one asked if I was a fast reader. My answer was not really; although, I am much faster due to library school. In some courses, students are required to read 25 books, give weekly book talks, and write essays on each book. One is forced to speed up in order to keep up with the course work.
Then my friend continued her line of questioning. Do I read the whole book I’m writing about? Well, I never thought that would be a question. I admitted to not always finishing books before deadline, but that was a technicality. Yes, I do read the whole book, not scan the material.
For the book talks I write it isn’t necessary to complete the book. What person in their right mind would tell the ending anyway? It happens though. I was truly enjoying a review in the Commercial Appeal when the reviewer wrapped up her review with the ending. Well, what good is the book now! It is like a movie trailer which uses all the best parts of the movie and then gives an ending shot. I’ve heard of “dummying down” but to give the whole storyline—whether book or movie—is going too far.
Now this girlfriend has me thinking. Do I really need to spend my time reading all these books? Oscar Wilde said, “I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.”
Then a copy of How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard was laid on my desk. Now, here is the inspirational guide to my new resolve to not waste time reading.
Author Bayard demonstrates his point through a literary librarian in the parody, The Man without Qualities by Musil. This librarian, known for his exceptional organizational skills, refuses to read any library books in his care. Bayard’s explains:
Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening up all the other books in the universe.Bayard’s book is purely tongue and cheek, but I see a use. I might need to start reassuring those books around the book I choose so feelings aren’t hurt. But wait a minute, books have no feelings. Right, they evoke feelings, but they have none?
I think this is going to be the first resolution I break in 2008. Not only do I need my walking buddies, but I need my book friends, too.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
I Dare You! (copy)
I dare you! You read me right. I dare you to add more books to your life in 2008. Go ahead, make this your New Year’s resolution. I’ll wait. This is important, maybe you should write this down. I’ll continue to wait as you locate a piece of paper and pen.
Okay, are we all set? No? Why? What seems to be the problem? No time with all those other pesky resolutions? Hum, I see we need to prioritize. Where does “read more” fit into our other resolutions such as lose weight, save money, spend quality time with friends and family, get fit, stop drinking, stop smoking, learn a new skill, take up a rewarding hobby, get organized, and spend more time in prayer? Let’s see, most people opt to lose weight at the beginning of the year. Remember Atkins and South Beach, both require books to follow; thus, losing weight might require some reading. So, if one wants to lose weight may I suggest Mark Hyman’s Ultra-Metabolism: The Simple Plan for Automatic Weight Loss: Awakening the Fat-burning DNA Hidden in Your Body or Rory Freedman’s Skinny Bitch in the Kitchen: Kick-ass Solutions for Hungry Girls who want to Stop Cooking Crap (and Start Looking Hot!).
Ah, spend more quality time with family and friends. What is more precious than a child or grandchild sitting in your lap being read to? Try Counting Kisses by Karen Katz or Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney to display affection and love. Change takes a little reading to become a habit, and look at all the books you will be adding to your reading list if you truly decide to change. Oh, and don’t forget I dared you. Hum, I double-dog dare you, and now you have to add more books!
Monday, December 17, 2007
Challenge Wrap-Up!
First of all, big THANKS to Lesley at A Life in Books for the Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge! I had tremendous fun reading other books outside my adopted state of Mississippi. I got rather creative with my selections and might be disqualified, but we will let Lesley make that decision. You know, smart, powerful, beautiful Lesley! ;D
Books read took me to places I would like to visit or return to!?!
Last Night at the Lobster (copy)
As I close my latest book and look down Main Street, I see a beautiful American flag dancing in the sunshine. Usually, I use the flag as a wind indicator before heading outdoors, but today it captures my gaze as I think about Stewart O’Nan’s new book Last Night at the Lobster.
I originally grabbed the book for its Christmas angle. The book is set entirely in one day which happens to be four days before Christmas. On December 20, in America’s Rust Belt, unbeknownst to the eating public, New Britain’s Red Lobster will close its doors forever. With this premise, I immediately concluded the book will be a tale of Christmas miracles involving the soon-to-be ex-Red Lobster employees.
Boy was I wrong. If there is any miracle it is the fact that employees have chosen to participate in work at all. At least this is how manager Manny DeLeon sees it. As he sits in his hand-me-down Regal, taking one last toke in the mid-day gray, he speculates on who will and who won’t show for this last shift. He guesses those who will be accompanying him to the Olive Garden in Bristol and those eager to get their hands on a pre-Christmas pay check will come in or at least make an appearance.
Manny hates to admit it, but at 35 he likes being manager of Red Lobster. For many years now he has ensured his customers enjoy prompt service in a clean facility. He is still in shock over the closing. He never saw it coming since his numbers remained high even though they resurfaced highway 9 this past summer.
Unlocking doors and turning on lights, he ambles past the appliances he has maintained for years, patting each as a pet. What will he miss most? It has to be the familial nature of the job. Whether he is breaking up brotherly fights between his cook, Ty, and slacker Fredo, or listening to motherly advice from Roz, the lifer waitress who wears a nametag so old he can’t find it on eBay, he realizes those days are over.
He knows one thing; he will not miss the beast. Covered in a corner, far from his eyes, the snow blower sits, taunting his manhood. Unfortunately, on his very last day, a nor’easter is kicking up and it looks like the beast will be needed.
As I gaze back at the flag, I realize author O’Nan has written a day in ordinary America, where each service worker deserves a little Christmas miracle.
Note: Number 6 Armchair Travelers Reading Challenge
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Friday, December 14, 2007
I'm cleaning my e-mail and I thought this was a nice note from the author of The Year of Fog.
Dear Maggie--
Thanks so much for your wonderful and creative write-up about The Year of Fog on your blog. And many thanks also for promoting it in newspapers in Mississippi! It's quite a treat for me that you're getting the word out about the book in Mississippi, as both of my parents grew up in Brookhaven and I have cousins, aunts, and uncles who live in Prentiss, Brookhaven, and rural Lincoln County. I spent a lot of time in Brookhaven as a child and have vivid memories of the drive from Mobile, through Hattiesburg.
The Year of Fog didn't have a big marketing budget behind it, so its success depends enormously on word-of-mouth. So, once again, thank you!
All Best,Michelle
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Christmas Jars (copy)
All it takes is a little glass jar full of coins to change the world. In my latest fictional world, there is a family, who by yearly tradition, use an empty mayonnaise jar for spare change. This spare change, which collects until Christmas, sometimes equals less than a hundred dollars, but somehow makes all the difference to that year’s recipient. This year is Hope Jensen’s turn.
Hope, more than anything, wants to be a reporter, not just any reporter, but a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter. A goal she doesn’t take lightly. As early as kindergarten she blurts out her career crossroads, “One day I will grow up to become either president of the United States or a famous newspaper reporter.”
Her mother teases, “The latter is more honorable.”
Hope agrees, and in increments she sets out to accomplish the latter. By second grade, she is making up stories about a pack of fun-loving motorcycling bunnies. Third grade she switches to hero stories with a down-n-out mouse that saves the day. During fourth and fifth she expands into a newsletter called the “Jensen Report” which mails out to family and friends.
Readers can guess her drive leads to the local newspaper where she starts at the bottom with advertisements and now blue inks others as a copy editor. Through it all, her single mother documents the upward climb by lovingly cutting out Hope’s best stories, opinions, and advertisements for the family’s bulging scrapbook.
Ever the workaholic, Hope rises at five in the morning and comes home around nine in the evening. Spending her time in search of the break through story—something which will carry top-of-the-fold coverage and last three or four issues—she doesn’t mind working on weekends. Now that her loving mother has died of cancer, holidays are also spent at her desk.
It is during this first Christmas Eve without her mother that trouble ensues. Working at the office, she returns home to an apartment in shambles. Her television and DVD player are gone, plus the little cash she had hidden away.
As the investigators wrap up, she notices a brown paper bag by the door. Inside is a jar marked “Christmas Jar” filled with coins and a few twenties. Here is her story of a lifetime.
In author Jason F. Wright’s 2005 book Christmas Jars one will find a world of change. Be forewarned this rates four tissue boxes.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Front Page/Bottom Fold
I Love My Job!Northwest Mississippi Community College
Reference Librarian Maggie Moran (left)
shows Senatobia Librarian Verlean Taylor
the colorful illustrations
in the book "No, David!" by David Shannon.
Moran spoke to last week's Lunch with Books
meeting on the Reader's Bill of Rights.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Feeling Like a Kid (copy)
Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature by Jerry Griswold is more than a professional development book; it is inspiration. I picked it up for the job, but just fell in love with Griswold’s ideas. In a nutshell, he would like for us to revisit the classics with our adult eye, but child’s heart.
The opening quote by Italo Calvino says it all:
There should therefore be a time in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth. Even if the books have remained the same, …we have most certainly changed, and our encounter with them will be a new
thing.
Author Griswold would like for us to remember what it was like to be young. He breaks down the book into five different themes: snugness, scariness, smallness, lightness, and aliveness. In “Snugness” he takes a few minutes to remind us how important making tents out of a table and chairs are to youngsters. My favorite place to feel snug was inside a clothes rack at the local K-Mart. I’d wiggle into the middle and play quietly while my mom searched frantically.
If you would like to get in touch with your inner child you needn’t wait to read Feeling Like a Kid. Go ahead and get started by reading a Christmas classic such as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol or Clement Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas to yourself or any lucky child visiting this holiday season.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Fame Junkies (copy)
While attending school in the early years of 2000, I frequently lunched with a vivacious group of would-be librarians. Our conversations would evolve around school, grades, families, and celebrities. The celebrity talk came mostly from a twenty-something who brought her People or Entertainment Weekly to lunch.
At first I considered the celebrity talk a little odd. Here we were, soon to be professional information retrievers, and we were discussing the worst dressed at the academy awards. Instead of discussing metadata retrieval or authoritative websites, we were wondering who Nicole Kidman was dating. How odd right?
Not really. Between 2000 and 2005, circulation of major news magazines such as Time and Newsweek only increased by 2%. Celebrity magazines enjoyed a boom as sales increased 18.7%, according to Ruth McFarland of Bacon Information.
Another interesting poll, conducted jointly by Boston and Babson Colleges, asked 653 Rochester, New York, middle school students out of a list of famous people who would they most like to have dinner with. George W. Bush and Albert Einstein received 2.7 and 3.7 percent respectfully, yet Paris Hilton and 50 Cent placed third at 15.8% each. The second place winner was Jesus Christ at 16.8%, and the first place winner was Jennifer Lopez at 17.4 percent.
Within the same poll, students were asked which jobs they would prefer out of five choices. In fifth and fourth place, below 10%, were CEOs of a major company “like General Motors” and “a Navy Seal.” Only 13.6% chose to be “a United States Senator,” and 23.7 % opted for “the president of a great university like Harvard or Yale.” At 43.4 percent and in first place, students ecstatically choose to be “the personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star.” Not a famous person, mind you, but a lowly assistant!
All these fascinating statistics are compiled in Jake Halpern’s Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths behind America’s Favorite Addiction. This book, utterly enthralling, provides the psychological reasoning for our obsession with Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton.
Halpern actually has an answer to the age-old question, “What price is fame?”
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Warm Springs (copy)
We saw the billboards as we entered the state of Georgia. The signs, whetting our appetites as we neared, featured a beautiful white house with Greek columns. The slogan may have read, “Come See FDR’s Little White House.” I’m not quite sure since I was seven years old at the time, and heading to a family vacation at Callaway Gardens, Georgia.
Brother and I understandably discarded our connect-the-dots game, as I envisioned red carpets, and he pictured huge body guards. Three billboards later, we began to beg and plea for the excursion as we neared Atlanta. Just on the other side of the city, where skyscrapers had distracted our thoughts, we caught another billboard, and our parents sighed.
After the grand tour our dad was eager to hear if all the fuss was worth it. He asked my nine-year-old brother what he thought of the excursion. To all of our surprises he exclaimed, “Little White Rip-Off!”
I remembered this family joke during the reading of Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven by Susan Richards Shreve. In Shreve’s memoir she retraced her two years spent at Franklin Roosevelt’s polio retreat, Warm Springs, in 1952. Upon entering the polio restoration facility, the doctors met with new patients to determine if any “traces” were left in his/her muscles. With traces came hope, for the doctors could operate and move muscles with traces to ones that no longer had capabilities. These operations were done in prepubescent children before bones and muscles had a chance to finally develop.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Please Leave a Comment!
I'm so sorry!
Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving to all!
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Sixth Sentence 161 meme
Ah, I’ve been tagged for the 161 meme by Lori of Smokey Mountain Family History.
Other passages from the book I have enjoyed…
“A reason, maybe the real reason, I never made an effort to be in touch with these people, who were so central to me for an important period of my growing up, is part of the reason I wanted to write this book in the first place. Not so much to discover anyone I’d lost, but to understand why I had wanted to lose them.” p64
Speaking of her parents, “I knew above all that I wanted their admiration, and that seemed difficult to earn as a sick child with a reputation for causing trouble.” p66
Friday, November 16, 2007
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
The Boy Who was Raised by Librarians (copy)
According to the landmark Perry Study released in 2004, sponsored by High/Scope Educational 
Research Foundation, children read to before they enter kindergarten will make more money, retain their jobs, and commit less crime than their peers who were unread to.
The study, began in 1962 by the late David P. Weikart, followed 123 African-American toddlers of low income in the Ypsilanti, Michigan, area for four decades. They were broken into two groups, one group of 58 were given one-on-one reading time with trained caregivers, while the other group was simply observed. The staff tested their abilities every year from age 3 to 11, and subsequently at ages 14, 15, 19, 27, and 40.
From my librarian point of view, it excites me to learn those who were nurtured by books made $50,000 more over their 40-year lifespan than the unread-to toddlers. Just think of the possibility, folks!
Imagine my surprise when a fellow librarian handed me The Boy Who was Raised by Librarians by Carla Morris and illustrated by Brad Sneed. This delightful picture book is aimed at children who can sit still and listen to a story, for it’s a story of possibility.
Little Melvin, our hero, lives at the Livingston Public Library. Well, not really, but it feels like it because he spends “lots and lots of time there.” At this particular library there are three friendly and well-read librarians, the same as one would find at any local public library.
As a modern day librarian, I’m thrilled these three drawn librarians are a little hipper. It is a real problem in our profession, as we want to be taken seriously, but the dang bun, cat-eyed glasses, and finger poised at the lips is what people tend to visualize.
I digress. Melvin likes these librarians and on his quest for knowledge he knows they are ready, willing, and able to help him in his many pursuits. As he grows older, we see him progress through seventh grade, the librarians really get a chance to strut their stuff by filing his baseball card collection, naming and organizing his bug collection, and finding his inner eggplant for the school play.
Every year a child like Melvin enters a local public library and begins his/her path to learning. As librarians, parents, and adults let us be ready to show them the world of possibilities.
