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Showing posts from March, 2011

revolution

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly is a tour de force YA novel.  It's realistic fiction most of the way through, but with just enough historical fiction and fantasy to make it a somewhat genre-defying.  At its heart, though, it's a problem novel about a girl, Andi, who loses her 10-year-old brother Truman to a freak accident, loses her father to an affair, and then loses her mother to mental instability following her brother's death.  When her father institutionalizes her mother for treatment, he takes Andi with him to Paris where she is told to work on her senior thesis.  She's just motivated enough to do that, because the thesis is about music, and guitar playing is the only thing that makes her want to live.  She chugs anti-depressants at near suicidal levels, and yet this does not keep her from being suicidal.  Go figure.  Donnelly's descriptions of the raw grief at losing so much so irretrievably in a single year are all the more moving because they are understat

and boy are my arms tired!

It's spring break, and I'm taking the opportunity to catch up on a zillion projects, from work to house to filing.  In the filing area, I consolidated two folders today of conference information, dating back to 2006.  And, just for kicks, I'm listing here all the conferences/places I have (mostly) flown to or (less often) driven to in the past 5 years.  I feel very lucky to have travel be part of my work, and when I look at this list it confirms for me why I'm not typically keen on adding extra travel...  Not listed here are little trips to Chicago to the Newberry library.  So I just flew in from 3 countries and 14 confererences, and boy are my arms tired! Association of Library and Information Science Educators (ALISE), San Antonio, TX, Jan 2006. Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America conference, Education and the Culture of Print, Madison, WI, Sept 2006.  [I don't seem to have the flyer for this one, but I'm in the book that got produced ,