Shakespeare made shit up

Well, duh. But really, he made up an astounding number of words and phrases! He lived in a time where language was flexing to accomodate the influences of merging dialects, and the populace had no expectation of a set syntax or vocabulary. Simply, the average audience member was prepared for verbal innovation due to the incredible linguistic commingling underway in 17thC london.

But Chaucer...now Chaucer had it good. He could choose between clawed and clew, ached and oke, climbed and clomb, and he variously used hi, hem and her to denote they, them and their. The English of the time had not yet settled into even a simple set of plurals, and gender was still applied slipshod across the land according to local dialect. Chaucer, a relatively cosmopolitan man, simply chose his verbiage according to scanning expediency. Lucky sod.

But all this is leading to my minor obsession; the greater and lesser vowel shifts that swept across the english language and changed vowel pronunciation forever. For example, the Domesday book is pronounced doomsday not because of some apocolyptic association with the census, but because "Dome" (for domestic census) was actually pronounced "doom" back in the day. Why did we lower the vowel sound? Nobody knows, and it happened to all vowels across the board. I'm fascinated by this, and if I have one complaint about Bill Bryson's fantastic book, "Mother Tongue", it's just that it can't unravel this particular knot for me. i guess i'll keep reading.

Twilight

Twilight is the best book I have read in years. I absolutely loved loved loved it, and even better, it has a sequel that's just as good. Stephenie Meyer has written a gripping vampire romance that catches 18 year old Bella on the cusp of adulthood. Bella moves from sunny Phoenix, where she lived with her mom, to the perpetually rainy town of Forks, WA. On the surface, it's just another teen vampire romance; girl goes to new school, meets uncannily pale boy and strange family, falls in love, gets into mortal peril, and is rescued by vampire using his supernatural powers. But oh, it's so much more than that.

Something about the writing in this book just grabbed me and sucked me in emotionally. It helps that Bella is cool, but not too cool; her actions and reactions are absolutely believable, and her incredulity when faced with Edward's nature is perfectly balanced by her I-dont-care-I-love-you teen attitude. This is a book that never even strays into discussing the physical side of teen love, but nevertheless gives you goosebumps as you read about Edward and Bella's first (and supremely dangerous) touch and kiss. The dismal, overcast atmosphere of Forks and environs comes through loud and clear, and it picks up the bittersweet, haunting tone of the writing.

The entire 500 plus pages keeps you trembling on the precipice of first love; I really felt like it was me falling in love for the first time, and that's such an amazing feeling. Somewhere just past the midpoint, Twilight switches its focus from romance to thriller/adventure, and this is where the time spent on developing the characters really pays off. The hunt at the end is certainly well written and executed, but it's impact is made far greater because of the supremely involving (and semi-tragic) love story.

Definitely, absolutely read this book. I could not put it down (even when Rob begged, badgered, and eventually got mad) and when I had binge read its sequel, New Moon, I went out and bought both books and started reading them again. Go NOW and reserve it at the library.

Hangin' with Hilary Du(h)ff (actually a rant)

C'mon little girls, Hilary Duff is here (courtesy of Scholastic Books) to teach you all about being a ho! Although the book talks the talk about how smart/hardworking/morally upstanding Hilary is, it wrecks the whole thing by splashing pix of a scantily clad Hilary on almost every page. And O MY GOD this book is PINK!! There's a whole lot o' pinkness going on here girls, and if you want to be just like Hilary (which is the subtext of this whole book) then you should get your mom to drive you to the mall right now so that you can buy some pink belly tops and chaps (oops, that was Christina Aguilera).

Now, I wouldn't be so adamantly opposed to this book if it were published and marketed as the drivel that it is. However, the publisher is Scholastic. Hmmm...Scholastic...makes you think of education, right? Learning, freedom to make choices and be who you want, freedom from stereotypes of hot pink big breasted prepubescent skankiness...hmm. Not quite what we have here, folks. Score one for false advertising.

And worst, the way most little girls will access this book is through School Book Fairs. that's right, some dipshit elementary school librarian is going to sell out her school to Scholastic so that she can get a few extra bucks for *real* books for her library. Let's analyse this transaction. Teacher invites the devil (Scholastic) into school...parents give kids money because after all, the books are from *scholastic*, and must promote learning...little girls buy ho-in-training manuals so that they can become an army of skanks...teacher gets maybe $100 dollars from fair, which will purchase maybe 10 books, max...kids refuse to read good literature because they are happy with the trash taht they bought. Who benefits here? That's right! The Devil! The moral? I hate biographies. If I have to suffer, so do you.

note: picture from amazon is not quite as per our cover. Our cover has more boob.

I'm a Baaaaad librarian

So today i had a Celebrate Chinese New Year program that was extra celebratory. We had a fairly civilized storytime, but then (o stupid me) I ended with a craft involving glitter. Several kinds of glitter, in almost unlimited quantities. The kids painted a chinese character (love, prosperity, etc) onto stiff paper with watery glue, then shook glitter over the picture on top of a pan to make a glitter character.

This all went very well until we had a shortage of pans. What, no pan? No problem! This here carpet will do just dandy, thanks. So that's why this afternoon the Head of Children's Services (that's me) was on my hands and knees with a dustbuster that I had to bring from home, vacuuming up glitter because it was being tracked all over the city complex. Yep, that's why I get paid the big bucks. But secretly, it was worth it to see the look on the city clerks' faces when they came in for their meeting immediately after our program, and had to dodge mountains of leftover glitter and gluey children. HA!

The Omnivore's Dilemma

The title of this book was so good, I just used it as my caption. The Omnivore's Dilemma is by Michael Pollan, a Berkeley prof who tends to write books about the intersections of social structrues and biology. In this book, he takes a look at how food is produced for the fast food market, the organic agribusiness industry, and the sustainable eating community. His final chapter follows his quest to hunt and forage for his very own meal.

An interesting read, Pollan includes the usual horror stories about the disgusting treatment of animals in feedlots and industrial chicken houses, and he chronicles the terrible environmental (and epidemiological) effects that these processes are having on our world. He also explores the lesser known ubiquity of corn in our processed and mass market food, and explains some of the economic and digestive pitfalls of relying so heavily on one food source for calories.

The most interesting part of this book is Pollan's exploration of the organic industry. And yes, it is an industry. Granted it started with some fucking dirty California hippies selling mustard greens and spring mix by the side of the road; but success will make a whore of anyone, and those same hippies are now presiding over businesses that have grown large enough to demand ethical compromises such as forcing land, long-distance food distribution chains, etc. It turns out that organic food, when trucked from florida to Vancouver, is really not so environmentally friendly after all. Also, the regulations that that the US (and Canadian) government imposes on the food industry are meant to encourage large companies and big business, where the bottom line is key. Needless to say, this does not encourage farmers to live by the spirit, rather than the letter, of organic regs. Organic, yes. Sustainable, no.

I was also very interested in the discussion about sustainable food chains. Buy locally, without shipping food vast distances. Stay away from monoculture crops. The featured farm (in Virginia, dammit) rotated crops and animals across fields to allow animals to live as natural a life as possible, while making the most of their fertilizing, pesticidal, and aerating capacities. When necessary, a small input of chemical fertilizer or nutrients was added, but only in order to reduce the overall external input into a mostly closed system. It sounded like a beautifully balanced system; definitely worth a read.

It actually impressed me so much that I have signed our house up for organics delivery from a local company that buys locally when possible. I may also plant things this summer that will be nice to eat rather than nice to look at. After reading this book, I could care less about organic content; it's the sustainability of supporting a local food chain that i'm after. I strongly believe that one day we will not be able to truck food thousands of miles; in the meantime, we would be smart to support and protect local farming practices. One day we'll need them.

I have been doing some very depressing reading in the last little while. Like a good little librarian, when Nana got sick I ran straight to the stacks to do research on Nursing Homes, since that is exactly where Papa is going to end up now that Nana can't take care of him. Let me share some gems of wisdom with you.
1. The name "Nursing Home" is not the correct nomenclature. Care Facility, please.
2. Alzheimers is both tragically sad and hysterically funny. Really, how can you not laugh when your grandfather puts his pants on backwards like KrisKros?
3. Any family member who gives a damn will feel like a murdering ungrateful son of a bitch for even thinking of letting their loved on set foot in the door of a care home. The only ones spared this miasma of guilt are those assholes who don't care anyhow, which strangely makes them the only people who are really able to make objective decisions.
4. There are two types of books on Nursing Homes. First, there are the kind that actually give you good information on the different types of homes, making the transitions, assuaging your overwhelming guilt, etc. These books tend to be written by medical professionals or researchers. They are often helpful.

Then there are the books that average-joe authors wrote to assuage their guilt for putting their own parents/grandparents in crappy awful nursing homes. These books vacillate unpredictably between telling you that your parent will be just fine, and giving you examples of the horrific treatment their own loved one suffered at the hands of the demonic care aides before gasping out "how could you?" with their dying breath. These books are not helpful.

Sadly, there is no way of knowing which type of book you have got your hands on before you jump onto the rollercoaster ride of either medical detail or heartrending stories of someone else's crappy experience. I would like to send a general notice out to all authors of books on care facilities: IF YOU DON"T HAVE A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM DONT TELL ME ABOUT IT!!! If my grandfather might be restrained upside down from a chair in the ceiling so that the psycho head spinning care aides can watch him better, and YOU KNOW A WAY TO PREVENT THIS, then by all means, include problem and solution in your book. If you don't have a fucking clue how to prevent said tragic problem, DONT" TELL ME ABOUT IT because it will just make me freak out, and want to send my grandfather to the SPCA instead of the BC health care system.

Ok, i'm quite sorry. That was quite a rant there, please forgive. Signing off,
Guilt-ravaged-moderately-coping-granddaughter.

And the moral is...

Ugly fish is an excellent, if totally amoral, picture book. Ugly fish starts off as king of his tank, and every time a new fishy little friend joins him, he shows off his lovely abode before eating the unfortunate tankmate. Well, once all the friends are eaten, Ugly Fish comes to realize that he is lonely. Perhaps eating all those other fish was a poor idea. Think you smell a moral? Yes, so did I. I could not have been more mistaken.

Ugly Fish is pleased when a new tankmate, Shiny Fish, joins him. He proudly shows off his tank to the much larger Shiny Fish, who likes the tank just fine, thanks, and polishes off Ugly fish in short order. The end.

What, you say? What about character development, learning from mistakes? Couldn't Ugly Fish have found a non-violent solution, and seen the error of his ways? What will this book teach our children? The answer, my friends, is absolutely nothing. They will learn not to make mistakes at all, and go to bed haunted by nightmares of Shiny Fish eating them up because they were mean to the kid sitting next to them in kindergarten. You, however, will be howling with laughter on the floor, which is a very good reason to read this picturebook.

Ambulance Idiot

Never have I disagreed so throughly with both Booklist and the general reading public in my assessment of a book. Ambulance Girl is the "heartwarming" "inspirational" and "honest" tale of a fat, middle aged, phobic, depressed woman (all her words, not mine) who decides, along with her therapist, that a job as a small town volunteer EMT will be lift her out of her slump. She proceeds to sign on to the local firehouse (in the states, municipal fire stations=EMS services for small towns) and drags her whining ass through the minimal required training. Upon "graduation", she recounts tales of such astounding ineptitude that i'm shocked she wasn't fired immediately on publication, or at least sued. Although her unprofessional bumbling improves marginally by the end of the book, it is made up for through a sharp increase in self importance and woe-is-meing over the emotional stress and strange hours that are (hello!?!) part of the job.

There are so many things I hate about this book, I am having trouble organizing them. Perhaps point form will help.

1. If you have serious emotional and mental illnesses, coupled with a physical disability that prevents you from moving with agility, you are NOT a good candidate for an emergency services job. Even if the service is starving for people and willing to accept you while holding its nose, you should probably do your hapless patients a favour and donate some money to the service instead. People's lives are depending on you being fit, alert, and competent.
2. If you work in the medical field, you should be aware of something called confidentiality. The author, Jane Stern, has a professional reputation as a writer. People know her work. They can find out where she lives. Therefore, they can figure out who the people are that she writes about. This presents a problem. Either she is flagrantly and outrageously violating the privacy of her patients for financial gain, or she has lied lied lied about her exploits for financial gain. Neither option really promotes a professional view of EMT's.
3. A professional complaint. Some of the stories in this book are, shall we say, padded for effect. But hey, in the words of James Frey, it could have happened. I prefer my non-fiction to be, well, non-fiction. Is that so wrong?

Anyhow, the upshot is that this strange and misguided woman has done everyone but herself a disservice by elbowing into Emergency Medical Services. To read a book filled with self aggrandizing drek about her misuse of the job was annoying in the extreme. Being a paramedic is a tough and rewarding job. It demands commitment and a tenacious will to work without glory. And in the end, the thing that really sunk this book for me was her astonishing lack of professionalism.

I love you, Nanas!

Ok, this is my first stab at Manga review, so please bear with me as I stumble through it. Nana is a Shojo Beat serial that reads like a soap opera for young adults. No! Wait! I mean that in a good way! Since Shojo Beat is VIZ media's "manga from the heart", it's really no surprise that the 2 stories contained separately in this publication are all about the loves and losses of Nana Komatsu and Nana Osaki. Both young women are hovering on the brink of adulthood, and both end up moving to Tokyo for love. But there, the similarities end. I read Nana 1 tonight, and despite the utter silliness of Nana K and the posturing bad-assedness of Nana O, I ended up rooting for both. The girls are just so perfectly teenaged; they do stupid things, waffle and whine and take ridiculous moral stands, throw love away and date the wrong men...but every once in a while, they both display an inner strength and determination that makes it all worthwhile. They make the same mistakes as I did, or could have, and they recover from them with a fragility and fortitude that I hope I recognize.

Reading this installment was literally like watching the Nanas grow up, and I can't believe it, but I'm now addicted. I *MUST* read the next installment, as soon as possible. This first book is really just a prologue, telling you about how Nana K gets dumped by an older slimeball and mends her broken heart, and how Nana O gets left behind in a small town by her rock star boyfriend. Both Nana's end the installment by moving to Tokyo, and the forthcoming books will tell about how they meet and become best friends.

Audrey, these books are so good that next time I come over I'm going to bring them for you to read. You can return them at any Victoria public library, because BC just instituted a program where libraries have to ship returned books all over the province for borrowers. Nice, huh?

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, Never Let Me Go, is an undercover masterpiece of horror. Kathy H. is a 31 year old caregiver living in England, and this book follows the nostalgic reminisces of her childhood spent in an English boarding school. Slowly, we come to realize that Kathy's comfortable life is not at all what we assumed from the first half of the book; our initial assumptions are terribly wrong. By the middle of the book, I wanted to shout a warning to Kathy the child, and to shake Kathy the adult out of her inculcated apathy. The complete shocking horror of this book lies in the characters' inaction when faced with a fate worse (although including) certain death. Reading Never Let Me Go is rather like watching a lobster boil to death in a pot of water, hardly noticing as you turn up the heat. I'm trying not to give too much away, because really, you should read this book and give yourself the worst halloween nightmares ever.

La pipi della zebra

oh, the things you discover when you travel to foreign lands. Being a librarian, i discovered this book. Actually, rob discovered it, as he was transfixed by the sight of a cartoon zebra with a rubber-hose-like penis, peeing all over the cover of this hardcover children's reader. For the uninitiated, readers would cover ages 6-8, roughly.

Anyhow, we found this book in Rome, in a tiny bookshop near the pantheon, and although it is entirely in italian, the gist is fairly easy to get. In translation, the first page says...this zebra is a zebra with a little problem. He pisses all the time. Psssssssssssss.... (the accompanying pictures portray a gleeful zebra urinating happily in a piazza).

First the unfortunate zebra pees in a restaraunt, into his friends duck and pig's soup and dessert, respectively. Next, he pees out the window onto their heads, to their dismay. Repulsively, he pees into his bath, and overflows it, and the apartments below. The lovely pen and ink illustrations of these events invariably show zebra with a beatific smile on his face as he contemplates his spouting nether regions. I especially liked the well drawn and substantial ball sack that the illustrator added. Nothing like anatomical correctness in a reader.

Anyhow, by now you also get the gist. The story progresses to pig and duck banishing zebra for fear he will overflow the whole town; a fire breaks out; only zebra's unending stream of urine can save the day! Zebra returns in triumph and is made the fire chief, and everyone is issued regulation umbrellas.

A happy ending? yes, except for the poor librarian who accidentally orders this title on spec from a publisher, and gets fired due to patron complaints when little johnny tries to pee on his sister's head. My favourite part of all is the tiny illustration on the endpaper of the bakc page, where zebra, wearing his new fire hat, pees out the sun. Good job zebra.

i'm too tired to connect a link, so the isbn for interested parties is 9788880331841. Do see if you can find a cover illustration! Sadly this book will never be release

Oooooooooooh, I'm so Scaaaaaared!

Scaredy Squirrel, by Melanie Watt, insists that everyone wash their hands with antibacterial soap before reading his book. Ever met a rodent with OCD? Read right on! Scaredy squirrel never leaves his nut tree because he is a furry little control freak who just can't deal with the possibility of meeting up with any of the several things that terrify him out in the big wide world. These things include, but are not limited to, tarantulas, poison ivy, green martians, germs, sharks, and killer bees.

Good point, Scaredy Squirrel.

But one day, Scaredy Squirrel's comfy routine gets wrecked by an event that not even his carefully stocked emergency kit can save him from! A killer (ahem) bee approaches, and as he flails around wildly, he falls (?) from his tree to his death. OK, he glides from his tree to a bush where he scares himself so much he plays dead for 2 hours, then climbs back up. Scaredy Squirrel ends the book by making some big changes to his safe little life. (ok, not so big...read this book dammit, and find out!)

Cutest book ever. Written for neurotic adults who want to feel better about themselves and preternaturally tightassed preschoolers. And Audrey, do you remember a certain jumping-off-roof incident that occurred somewhere south of the border when we were 14, due to a killer, enormous, deadly, coming-right-at-me bumblebee? hmmmm. I wonder why i loved this book so much...

Note to readers; this is a picturebook. I will review anything I want to in this blog. You too should read more kid's lit.

Warning: graphic content

This is heroine number two signing in. Yes, when Audrey and I get together, we cook up the most amazing (often illegal) plans. Yesterday I read Neil Gaiman's Sandman: The Doll's House while floating around on an air mattress on Buntzen lake. And yes, being a librarian gives me absolute freedom to do with books all the things I forbid you to do. This includes, but is not limited to, activities such as reading in the bath, reading while eating sloppy joes and fizzy pop, reading while lounging around on floatation devices, and reading while seriously impaired.

Anyhow, back to the book. Love the story, hate the art. Need more detail? I thought this book was a tease. Gorgeously horrifying photo art on the cover and front pages, creepily blurred and superimposed introductory text, followed by...crap. Art that I would expect from a failed out DC comics hack with a mild brain injury. Even Gaiman's consistently excellent storytelling can't save this graphic novel from crapdom. I only read it cuz i was trapped on a floaty thing; normally i bail out immediately from such a yawnorama.

But don't be deterred; Sandman comics in general are good. Find out more about this generally superior series at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(DC_Comics/Vertigo). Just don't bother with this particular edition. Instead, check out Kabuki, David Mack's hauntingly slow paced graphic novel at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabuki_%28comic%29. Enjoy!