Tomorrow my family and I depart on our annual holiday whirlwind. Today, I combed the shelves of my library (that would be the one I work in and purchase books for), and drove by two more to collect my haul of suitcase candidates. Here's the short list:
Fiction:
The Book of Lost Things John Connolly
Liar by Justine Larbalestier
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork
Wherever Nina Lies by Lynn Weingarten
Non-Fiction:
King of Heists by J. North Conway
Columbine by Dave Cullen
Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman
Tears of the Cheetah by Stephen J. O'Brien
Beauty in the Beasts by Kristen Von Kreisler
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
By the end of the evening, I have to whittle the pile down by half -- maybe more. I'm always willing to carry around a little literary insurance in case I come close to reading as much as I hope to read. Why is it that vacations seem endless before they begin and painfully brief the minute they start?
One aspect that I love about my job in school library world are students who come by looking for recommendations just before a holiday. Yesterday, a really neat kid -- a dedicated library rat and
voracious reader of fiction -- received acceptance to MIT. There's nothing I admire more than a person who can manage both sides of their brain as expertly as she, with the possible exception of a person under the age of 18 who performs such mental calisthenics.
After a serious celebration this morning we headed straight to the fiction room where I buried her beneath all the great books she'd been resisting during the application process. She walked off with a bag full, holding up Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash in front of her nose. -- Lovely!
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