Status Report

Perhaps one or two readers of this blog have wondered about my rather minimal output lately. Haven't I been reading? Don't I have interesting things to say about my favorite topics (me, libraries, books, tiny things, and ME) and the leisure to transmit those thoughts through a keyboard and click "publish"? I have been doing those things, dear readers, just not here! I have been throwing my intellectual seed to the winds of the internet, and I expect that strange things will start growing in the next nine months or so. Let me point you in the direction of some recent output:

I recently started a blog with my friend Robin (@Tuphlos) so that we could host longer-format discussions of the collection development issues that we regularly discuss (or possibly rant about) on Twitter. Recent posts include practical advice for librarians tackling nonfiction collection development and a description of how materials donations are handled at my library.* If you are interested in guest posting, please let me know! It would be great to have some perspectives beyond that of the harried public librarian.

On a monthly basis, I lovingly select romance and cozy mystery book covers to . . . "feature" at MARC of the Beast in conjunction with broadcasting their blurbs over Twitter. This is a collaborative foray into the wilds of Tumblr with my friend Kristin (@shinyinfo). If you appreciate puns, and wish that every cozy mystery title featured a spectacularly good/bad one, this is the site for you. If you are genuinely excited that every third romance novel published by Harlequin features a pregnancy and/or a boss, you might not be as interested.

And finally, I recently responded to a call for more lesbrarians, and started reading and submitting monthly reviews of lesbian fiction over on the Lesbrary site. My first review garnered a response from the author; I'm still not sure if this is good or bad. My most recent review was of Karin Kallmaker's Paperback Romance, and I've just volunteered to read Rum Spring, which features an Amish heroine ("Love or tradition? Which path will she choose?").

That is what I've been up to, but I'm also finishing up some books that will be absolutely ideal for review on this blog, and I am working on a general post about lesbian fiction. Thanks for reading!


*I suppose I should say at some point that my views are my own, and do not represent my place of employment.