October 2017

An award might be in your future.

Here’s information from ALA/PLA if you wish to make a nomination.

Biloxi has sent a letter home to students. It plans to restore “To Kill A Mockingbird” to the eighth-grade classroom and begin teaching it again in class, starting Monday.

Students do, however, have to ask to participate, by returning a permission slip signed by a parent to their school and their English Language Arts teacher by Friday.

From Biloxi Junior High will again teach ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ in class, after national outcry | The Sun Herald

An email to library members says officials were contacted last month by someone claiming to have information from the library system’s entire database of users. That contact included the names and addresses of about three dozen library patrons.

From Alameda County Library Patron Records Possibly Hacked « CBS San Francisco

Why? There are so many reasons. Blame Amazon? Sure, that’s the easy thing to say but the massive changes in the world of bookselling are far larger than that. In fact, the changes in the over-all economy make it a much, much bigger story.

From Seattle Mystery Bookshop: Why the Seattle Mystery Bookshop Must Close

It’s funny to think I just stumbled on this book by chance. I must have been escaping from something much more heavy—I love the turgid pace of an academic book, if it’s a topic I really care about, about once a year. I think I probably escaped to Jean Stafford from something like that, and I didn’t expect much of her. I thought, Oh, this is just good old-fashioned fiction, I’ll try that for a change. So often you’re just reacting to the last book you read, and you want something that’s a little bit of an antidote to that. I’ve found that if I live a more programmatic life where I’m reading the books that I’m supposed to read—if I’m accomplishing all my little chores of reading what everybody else is reading—I stop having time to read in a way that’s rich and multiple.

From Happy Accidents

“Zooming in on the document, they were pretty obvious,” says Ted Han at cataloguing platform Document Cloud, who was one of the first to notice them. “It is interesting and notable that this stuff is out there.”

From BBC – Future – Why printers add secret tracking dots

From Hamilton To Grant: Ron Chernow Paints A ‘Farsighted’ President in New Biography

Chernow, author of Hamilton, has a new book, just out this week, which also aims to revise our understanding of a figure he sees as overlooked and misunderstood: The 18th president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. In it, Chernow aims to rehabilitate the way Americans think about the man who not only led the Union Army into victory during the Civil War but also led the country during the tumultuous era that followed.

Full piece at NPR

Phyllis Rose’s book about her extreme reading experiment, in which she tackled the entire contents of a shelf in a New York library, has won high praise, but are such ‘bibliomemoirs’ a sign of an increasingly superficial literary culture or vital guides for a public swamped by choice?

From The woman who went to the library and read every book on the shelf | Books | The Guardian

Check out this group of New Zealand librarians as reported in the Daily Mail UK . They are posing in imitation of the famous portrait of the Kardashians.

CBS NEWS reports that a school district in Missippi has pulled Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird from a junior high reading list as the discussion of race “makes people uncomfortable.”. The book remains in libraries (fortunately).