Stuff I Love: Daria

A week ago, I turned 35.  I know a lot of people see this as a milestone, but for me, it really wasn't.  


See, I work with teens, and this has the unusual effect of making me both old before my time and perpetually young.   Thirty five is an inconceivable age to your average 12 year old, so yes, I'm old.  However, part of being good at what I do is trying to understand and appreciate youth culture.  So, today I spent 45 minutes reading Failblog and Auto Complete Me while listening to bands from the Warped Tour.  At work.  


So, 35 was really just a number.  But, being 20 years away from 15 did make me think about my teen years.  

Like most people I know, I do not look back on high school fondly.  I was the fat girl.  The one with no friends.  The weirdo with a target on her back; resented by teachers for being a smart ass and disliked by peers for being smart.   But I survived high school, got to college and realized that "the best years of my life" were yet to come.  I learned that being a mouthy little bitch wasn't a bad thing, but I needed to pick my battles.  

In short, my "story arc" was a lot like Daria Morgendorffer's.  

Stuff I Love: Percy Jackson and the Olympians

(Sorry about the late post guys! I had to work Sunday, and the kidlet got a nosebleed after she fell asleep, so last night was kind of hectic.)

Anyway, on to (belated) Stuff I Love.

I hesitated to write a post about Percy Jackson, because I’m late to the party. I’ll be honest, when the first book came out way back in 2005, I ignored it. I saw it on the VOYA Top Shelf Fiction List and the School Library Journal Best Books; but, I didn’t read it. It just… didn’t look like my kind of book.

Fast forward 5 years to a darkened movie theater playing one of those annoying trailers that aren’t trailers. You know, the ones that they try to disguise as “sneak peaks” but are really just extended commercials? Well, this one is for The Lightning Thief, and the main actress is talking about her character, Annabeth Chase as “intelligent and fierce.” My 8 year old daughter looks at me and says “We are SO there.”

However, one of the hard and fast rules in our house is “No Book/No Movie.” You must read the book before you see the film. The only exception to this rule is Lord of the Rings because asking an 8 year old to tackle Tolkien is a bit much, even for us.

So, we started listening to the audio-book of The Lightning Thief. Before long, we got hooked.

Stuff I Love: Sandman

So, I’m a comic book geek.

I probably read two graphic novels for every prose book.  Part of this is professional; for a long time, I was the only librarian in my system who knew anything about comics, and who would buy them.  The other part is personal – I just really like comics.

This is not surprising; a lot of librarians are comic book geeks.  We’re a geeky tribe after all, and the 9^th art nerds have to represent.  But my journey into comics is a little bit different.

Or, as I tell my husband, blame Sandman.

I didn’t read comics as a kid.  As a child of the 80’s, I’m not sure there were a lot of comics to read.  Also, I was “gifted” and read high above my grade level.  My mom, on the advice of innumerable teachers, kept me on a steady diet of Newbery winners and children’s classics.    I didn’t really discover comics until I was an adult. 

One of the first I picked up was Sandman by Neil Gaiman.  I knew Gaiman’s name, kind of.  As a fan of BBC science fiction, it was sort of familiar to me.  Looking at comics as a field, his name came up a lot.  I knew that Sandman was a horror/fantasy hybrid.   I wasn’t expecting much, going into it.  I was buying books for a library collection, and just had to get a feeling for it. 

The first Sandman collection Prelude and Noctunes, gave me the kind of visceral response that I think people look for in a horror comic.  I think I would have stopped reading there, if it hadn’t been for the last story in the volume. If the horror story “24 Hours” was a punch in the stomach, “The Sound of Her Wings” was a kiss on the forehead, one of the most beautiful and moving stories that I had ever read – in prose or comics. 

I had to keep reading.  An author who could do that, who could make me tear up over feeding pigeons, needed more attention. 

Stuff I Love: Howl's Moving Castle

I’ve decided that every Sunday night, I’m going to post about something that I 100% adore. 

This week, it’s Howl’s Moving Castle. 

I first read Howl’s Moving Castle when I was about 16 years old or so.  I was going through my “I only read CLASSICS” stage; I would sniff disdainfully at my peers who had a Stephen King or a Dean Koontz under their arm, and proclaim the superiority of Elizabethan playwrights. 

I was not a popular kid.

However, I did have a shamefaced secret.  I was a voracious and indiscriminate fantasy reader.  I haunted a used paperback store near my house, and gobbled up all of the dragons, knights and damsels I could get my hands on.  Unfortunately, since I was shopping at a junky used book store, I read a lot of crap.  Sometimes, it seems like any author who can spell dragon thinks they can write a fantasy novel.  Most of these were straight up Tolkien rip-offs.  Some took Star Wars as their guiding text.  Others just novelized the D&D handbook. Objectively, I would say that 85%  of what I read was terrible.

I remember the day I found Howl’s Moving Castle on the shelf.  In my memory, it was shrouded by a golden glow, in a shaft of divine light, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the case.  It cost $1.50, which was a whole hour of babysitting for me.  Normally, I only paid $0.25 for my paperbacks; but something told me to blow my budget for this one.