Status Report: What I've Been Up to Elsewhere

My dear @booksNyarn and I were recently interviewed for the Circulating Ideas podcast as part of the Best Books of 2012 episode!

At Collection Reflection, I wrote a post on how to start weeding your reference collection. The post was recently, to my astonishment, linked to by American Libraries Direct.

I also made a list as one of the 125 librarians to follow on Twitter!

Over on Tumblr, I posted some thoughts about how (and when) I buy books.

I've reviewed quite a few books over at the Lesbrary since I last made this sort of update:

I Can't Think Straight, by Shamim Sharif
Strange Bedfellows, by Q. Kelly
Getting There, by Lyn Denison
But She is My Student, by Kiki Archer; LoveLife, by Rachel Spangler
96 Hours, by Georgia Beers
Switch, by Q. Kelly
Keepers of the Cave, by Gerri Hill
Silhouette of a Sparrow, by Molly Beth Griffin [my favorite of this bunch]
The Campaign, by Tracey Richardson
Girl Friends Complete Collection v. 1, by Milk Morinaga
Double Pleasure, Double Pain, by Nikki Rashan

And of course I've been posting with frightening regularity on Twitter. I recommend that you search the hashtag #librarylife to see some of what librarians are up to every day.

Status Report

I have been busy online for the last several months, even though I haven't posted regularly here. Here's a quick rundown:

Even though I've been reading, I haven't posted a book review here in a while. That doesn't mean I haven't been reviewing books, however! Several of my reviews of lesbian-themed novels have been posted at the Lesbrary: Storms by Gerri Hill; The Jewel Box by Alcamia Payne (not recommended, but the review was fun to write); Rulebreaker by Cathy Pegau; Ghosts of Winter by Rebecca S. Buck; and Rum Spring by Yolanda Wallace. Of those, Rulebreaker was my favorite. Keep your eye on the Lesbrary for more material--I'm committed to reviewing at least one item per month.

On the professional front, Robin (@Tuphlos) and I have been working steadily on our collection development blog, talking about issues that we see every day. Some of my recent posts include:

Weeding Window, Deaccession Drama
Collection Dilemmas: Poetry
Reporting From the Front Lines
Statistics 2: Extreme Close-Up

I also participated in the Library Day in the Life project at Collection Reflection as well as on this blog.

I was interviewed by Sarah at YA Librarian Tales for her "Life Behind the Reference Desk" series. I also recently did a guest post on the Letters to a Young Librarian blog about one of my favorite activities: walking.

And of course I've been busy posting humorous book covers at MARC of the Beast.

When I actually put all this together, it looks like I've been busy! My goal is to post book reviews more regularly here, but in the meantime I have been getting back in the flow of writing by writing a few more personal pieces. I hope they've been enjoyable!

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.