Guardienne of the Tomes

Please let me expound, for a moment, about my love for LibraryThing. LibraryThing is the nerd tool to end all nerd tools, at least for the bibliophiles around the world. If you could see me, you would see little floaty hearts rising above my head every time I wrote LibraryThing. LibraryThing allows you, for free for a few hundred books and for as many books as you can enter for a $25 lifetime subscription, to catalog your own library . Oh yes, ladies and gents – the broke folks among us who have tried to do it in Excel and failed? Who have dreamed of having Voyager modules of our very own, but not quite so complicated or expensive? Our time has come. Try it for free; you’ll find yourself slapping down the $25 fee happily, just to be able to enter ALL of your books, and to have this nifty thing for a lifetime. An online catalog of your own personal library – no moldy old card catalogs for us (though we may still dream of someday getting the gumption to buy one and slave over handwrit...

My cheeky, but oh-so-correct girlfriend A has hit the nail on the head (well, at least my nail) with her latest post Nice Girls Don't Talk About Money . Now, Suze Orman I am not (as evidenced by my teetering piles of credit card bills and the fact that I didn't even look up what sort of interest rates I was paying until this morning), but I like to think of myself as a relatively civilized, evolved woman. I am smart. I am relatively good-enough looking that people don't look at me funny in Starbucks. (Well, they do, but it's the tattoos, not my face, that has them a bit out of sorts.) I have graduate degrees under my belt. I have a personal library of more volumes than most people own in entire lifetimes. All in all, I am a normal(ish) late-twenties woman. But I have to admit, that I often fall into the trap of wishing I had someone I could hand my check over to and trust to get my bills paid properly. As long as he gave me a book allowance, of course. A woman has to ...

Because I am supposed to move halfway around the country next Thursday, I have been diligently putting off anything that resembles packing and or preparing to move my giant hoard of junk. Strategies have included cooking actual dinners instead of my handy salad-in-a-bag standby, wandering aimlessly about the house ignoring the packable items, eating far too much ice cream for my waistline's comfort, and reading. Ah, yes - this is one of the reasons I became a librarian in the first place. When there's something unpleasant to be done, you can usually find me shuttled away with a book. (At work, at least, it comforts me to be surrounded by them, even if I can't escape into the tomes.) Anyway, having polished off Rowlings' Deathly Hallows in a voracious 5 hour stint, I have managed to drum up some other reading to keep me occupied. Let me review for you: Greenfire by Saranne Dawson. Publisher: Love Spell, 1994. ISBN-10: 0505519852. ISBN-13: 978-0505519856 To be fair, I p...

My good friend (and former classmate at a teeny private liberal arts college - that should warm you for what's coming) and I were talking the other day about Romeo & Juliet . Now, I have to say, I love the Bard. In an unadulterated, flamboyant, non-sexual, "I-wish-they'd-find-additional-secret-tomes-of-work-in-a-flat-somewhere" kind of way. I think it's a durned shame that some students never become enamored with him - love, sex, war, insanity - the man incorporated it all. Anyway, back to our discussion of R&J . After listening to Deana Carter's song 'Romeo" and the intriguing tagline "I would not die for you," I wondered. Wouldn't die for him, eh? Is it possible that many of the relationship ills we find ourselves beseiged with are traceable back to this lovely little play? (What relationship ills, you say? Watch the news. Or your neighbors. It's pretty obvious.) Yes, truly, where did we get it into our heads that true lov...

So, I have been semi-lurking on a list of librarians that have been addressing bibliographic citation. (By semi-lurking, I mean reading everyone else's comments and limiting myself to only one.) Yes, even we librarians understand that for most (read: normal ) folks, working on citations is just left of the sort of fun represented by, say, a pitbull attached to the left cheek of your Levis. We understand that. We strive to make you understand WHY you need to purchase the MLA and APA handbooks, and know about Turabian and various other nifty styles of citation. Not because we enjoy torturing you - that's hardly the case. (Have you ever noticed that the folks teaching this look almost worse off than the students?) It's because we - okay, I - feel that citation is necessary to not become academic whores. That's right, I said it. I like bibliographic citation. It requires a bit of effort, yes, which apparently everyone has become allergic to. (Good thing we are now an infor...

Yes, folks, I have been out and about for the better part of a year. I left my evening post in Kentucky for greener (literally, better-paying) pastures in New York and visited with the family a bit. It took me approximately three weeks to remember why I haven't lived in the Big Apple for the past ten years, so I began the job hunt. Ah, the job-hunt. I actually enjoyed mine, believe it or not. No, really. I don't have a single horror story. It helped that I didn't have a personal deadline, and was simply hoping to get nearby to Kentucky, if at all possible. (What can I say, it grew on me.) After a number of phone interviews, and a few flights out to some wonderful places, I seem to have found a wonderful match at the University of Tennessee - Chattanooga, where I will begin my first (gasp! drumroll!) tenure-track faculty position on August 6th. I am terribly excited. The job is bagged, the apartment is paid for (well, the first month, at least), and all I have left to do is ...