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Summer Scares is here!

Perhaps you’ve used “I have no time” as your excuse for skipping over leisure reading this year. Well, it’s time for summer vacation (surely you have at least one day of leisure between now and Labor Day), so you can’t use that as an excuse now!

“But I’m out of touch,” you say. ” I don’t even know what’s out right now”! Lucky for you, MonsterLibrarian.com has teamed up with Spooky Reads, Horror World, Hellnotes, and the Horror Fiction Review to provide you with reviews of a whole bunch of possibilities as part of our Summer Scares project. Check it out, please- some awesome people put a lot of work into putting this project together.

So, find yourself a good book and do what our reviewer Sheila Shedd recommends. Find yourself an ocean view (or a mountain view), order a pizza, and kick back for some leisurely leisure reading.

Check back here later for some of our staff’s personal recommendations!

Posted on June 5, 2011 by , Reply

The Monster Mash(up)

Kudos to Booklist Onliine for including this article, Classic Monster Mash-ups as the topic of their May 15 Core Collection feature. (Core Collection, for those of you who are not librarians, means “you gotta have this one in your collection, NOW!)

Christine Meloni put together a nice introduction to the subgenre, with an annotated booklist of some of the better known books (she did note that some of them, like Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer are not actually mash-ups. I was familiar with a lot of these but good Lord, someone out there really thinks Jane Austen and zombies are a rockin’ combination! I counted FIVE related books on Meloni’s list, and she didn’t even include the two sequels to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!

My only quibble, and I mention this mainly because I’ve recently become sensitive to it, is that once again, these books are never described as horror fiction- they are “supernatural literary fiction”. You know, if a teenage boy picks up a book promising zombies and “ultraviolent mayhem”, it’s probably not because he cares about the literary value of the timeless romance between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. Outside of that, I really appreciated Meloni’s comments about monster mash-ups- that they can be fun and are worth reading. Thanks, Christine!

 

Posted on June 2, 2011 by , Reply

Dear Governor, Please Make My School A Prison

While you are in school, some days it feels like you’ll never escape. School feels like a prison sometimes, with a sentence that ends so far in the future, it seems like you’ll never get out. There’s actually been a fair amount of thought on the topic by education reformers, a sample of which you can see in this blog post by Deborah Meier(who for the record I really admire) about the similarities between public schools and prisons.

I am a licensed teacher and school media specialist, as well as a former public school student, and with most public schools, I think the benefits of making a free education available(as restrictive as it can sometimes be) outweigh the negatives (although the word FREE to me does not mean education constrained by centralized standardized testing). At least, I thought so until this open letter to Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan from the superintendent of the Ithaca Schools appeared in the Gratriot County Herald on May 12. You’ll have to scroll down the page to see his entire letter, but here’s the essential part:

Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.

This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison.

Oh, Governor Snyder… Couldn’t you give these kids the same advantages prisoners have now? Why wait until they’ve been convicted and incarcerated to give them access to a library, information, and education?

Posted on June 2, 2011 by , Reply
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