Reflecting on 2009 (in books)

One of the main reasons I detested 2009, being unemployed (months 7-14), was also the reason I was able to read a lot. Early in the year I managed to read Anna Karenina and Infinite Jest, two rather large books that I may not have read had I been working. One of these books, Infinite Jest, found it's rightful place in my mental list of favorite books of all time (FBOAT!).

In recent years I had been reading fiction almost exclusively and felt that I needed to break this habit. So when I started reading in 2009 I was determined to read more non-fiction. As the year drew to a close I found I had read 14 non-fiction titles (or approx. 23% of what I read). This was a major improvement of a previous ratio of 1 in 50. I have recently been writing down book titles and author names while listening to the magnificent Radio Lab and expect a stronger non-fiction showing in 2010.

My only reading regret is that I may have been too numbers focused and fear that I have read many of the books too quickly. I can only recall bits and pieces of plots and characters for many of the books I have read this year. 2010 will be the year I slow down and try to read more closely. At the same time I plan to read some of the larger novels I have skipped or have started and stopped numerous times (Yeah, I am talking about you Joyce).

So here is a list of books I read in 2009 with some of my favorites in bold:

**Birds of America: Stories – Lorrie Moore **
Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet – James P. Othmer
Zeitoun – Dave Eggers
Fables – Aesop
** The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery **
A Confederate General from Big Sur – Richard Brautigan
Dreaming of Babylon – Richard Brautigan
** The Hawkline Monster – Richard Brautigan **
Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto
** The Devil in the White City – Erik Larson **
The Code of the Woosters – P.G. Wodehouse
Ubik – Philip K. Dick
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
** Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov **
** Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann **
Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
How to Be Good – Nick Hornby
The Death of Ahasuerus – Pär Lagerkvist
Pilgrim at Sea – Pär Lagerkvist
The Holy Land – Pär Lagerkvist
The Unlikely Disciple – Kevin Roose
Born on a Blue Day – Daniel Tammet
Homer and Langley: A Novel – E.L. Doctorow
Thousand Cranes – Yasunari Kawabata
The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America – Christopher Hitchens
Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living – Doug Fine
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto – Michael Pollan
Sappho: Poems and Fragments – Stanley Lombardo
Sixty-Nine – Ryu Murakami
In the Miso Soup – Ryu Murakami
Trout Fishing in America – Richard Brautigan
The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster – Richard Brautigan
In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey – Richard Brautigan
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick
The Easter Parade – Richard Yates
The Sportswriter – Richard Ford
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
** Infinite Jest: A Novel – David Foster Wallace **
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
The Art of Teaching – Jay Parini
Gourmet Rhapsody – Muriel Barbery
The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
Tree of Smoke: A Novel – Denis Johnson
How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel – Alain de Botton
Eats, Shoots & Leaves – Lynne Truss
This One Is Mine: A Novel – Maria Semple
How to Be Alone: Essays – Jonathan Franzen
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – Haruki Murakami
Piercing – Ryu Murakami
Armageddon in Retrospect – Kurt Vonnegut
The Game-Players of Titan – Philip K. Dick
Galapagos – Kurt Vonnegut
Jailbird – Kurt Vonnegut
Invitation to a Beheading – Vladimir Nabokov
The Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac
Wittgenstein's Mistress – David Markson

If you have made it this far and are interested in reading my poorly written reviews you can jump on over to my Goodreads profile.

Changing the library space.

Since starting at Potsdam I have been consumed with making the library a better environment for users to work in. Luckily for me I quickly found a like minded co-worker in Keith that would entertain most of my crazy ideas and even provide some crazy ideas of his own.

Most recently in an effort to both spruce up and increase traffic to our basement study area Keith suggested we hold an event that allows students to Graffiti the walls in our stairwells. It seemed like a crazy idea, but what was the worst that could happen? We could simply repaint the stairwell in the event of disaster.

The pieces soon fell into place, our director got on-board, and we found a latex based spray-paint that met the campus' safety requirements and the fire marshal's fire spread requirement.

The project was a success, one participant mentioned that it was the coolest thing the college had done in his three plus years as a student. The project also created a buzz on campus, generated attention for the library and made the stairwell more attractive.

A radical idea with a measured risk can have tremendous results.

Before:




During:







After:











Check out more pics of the stairwell on our library's Flickr page

Finals week

So today was day one of finals week. I am only working three days this week, but I am blessed to have 7.5 hours on the reference desk, which is not busy, at all. In fact I will go ahead and say it: It's boring sitting there hoping to be asked a question. Despite this the library was packed with students today. There was not an empty table in site on any of the three floors. The computers were constantly in use, whether it was someone quickly printing a paper or rushing to finish their final papers and projects. In fact, it was so busy that a student set up shop on the floor near my office to use an outlet. She was using a step stool for a laptop table. There was also a group of about 5 students gathered around one of the lab computers doing group work. It was somewhat bewildering.

This week won't have high circulation statistics, database use might not even be high, but the gate counts will be through the roof. What is clear is that the library is the most popular place to go to get work done and that bodes well for the library, it's employees, and the campus community at large.

Things I have recently learned

My word! It has been awhile since my last blog post. I guess I have been dragging my feet a bit with this blog. For that I apologize, to no one in particular. The weather has begun to turn wintery here. There is snow on the ground and nip to the air. I might even need to put on my boots to walk to work soon.

The fact that it is cold and snowy can mean only one thing: The fall semester is nearly over. In fact next week is finals week. This semester has gone incredibly fast and I believe it was only a bit less stressful than it was when I was a student. I am guessing this is due to my newness to the profession. In the last 15 weeks I taught 20 information literacy classes, placed my first book orders for the English and Communication, History, and Business departments, and spent a fair amount of time at the reference desk.

Some of the realities of librarianship I learned while at the reference desk: There simply aren't as many true reference queries as I wished there to be. I also learned that due to proximity of the reference desk to the computers we are the frontline computer help desk and also the refillers of staplers. All of these things I seem to be able to do adequately, though I must say I excel in refilling the stapler.

One phenomenon that I have noticed since the weather has cooled is the dragging of feet. The reference desk, in a way, is sandwiched (maybe hot-dogged is a better term) between the computers and the printers. As a result there tends to be a good deal of foot traffic passing before the reference desk. Overall, most foot-draggers happen to be female and usually the culprits are wearing some form of boot. This leads me to believe that either these girls are so out of shape they cannot properly lift their booted foot or that the boots are purposely weighted down in order to build tone up and build muscle. At this point I cannot be certain as to which it is; this investigation remains open.

Once this mystery is solved perhaps I will devise a way to harness the static electricity from the foot-dragging to power a printer or two.

Happily borrowed from: everyday marvels

Information, Information, Information

After a recent blog post and possibly the Tweet or Retweet from The Pumped Librarian I have been thinking a lot about how we interact with information. Is it better or worse to have this much media flowing into our phones, computers and for some televisions? I have thus far refused to use del.icio.us because I already cannot handle the amount of information coming to me through various forms of social media and standard web surfing. I would have a complete mental breakdown if I had a running list of articles bookmarked that I had meant to read but hadn't found the time to.

One of the articles I did receive and read was MSNBC's Search questions often both wacky and weird which discusses how search engines have changed our lives and how Google (and other companies) auto-fill search predictors offer an amusing insight into the world's searches.

I first noted the hilarity when typing in the phrase, "which is worse" when trying to compare high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners. What I saw was this:



I found it funny that marijuana use is listed twice but not using it's hard to spell term, but rather weed. You would think that a browser's auto-spell check would help out with this, but perhaps it is a bunch 12 year olds sitting around trying to figure out what to try first. It's not surprising, to me, that health concerns dominate the list, considering how unhealthy we Americans tend to be.

Of course, seeing this and then reading the above mentioned article I decided to test out a few other phrases to see how entertaining this could be. I tried "who is" next:



Here we find someone looking for a question posed in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, among other things. I am most struck by the last one asking who the antichrist is. Seriously? Is this just a group of scared christian children using the web to get all the answers they couldn't find in the good book? But seriously if there was an antichrist who came to town and there was an epic battle between heaven and hell I am pretty sure this would be common knowledge to all of humankind.

Next up "Should I...":



"Should I get a divorce"

"Should I call him?"

There can't really be people sitting at their computers thinking that the internet has the answers of these extremely personal questions, right? Please tell me I am right.

I am pretty sure "should I shave my pubic hair" wins this round. I think google should respond to this one with questions of its own.

"Do you have crabs?"

"Is it uncomfortable?"

"Does your boyfriend or girlfriend call your nether regions The Black Forest?"

"Is your Boyfriend or Girlfriend having a hard time locating the desired parts?"

Two other great phrases are "last night I" and "could I"





Hopefully we have all learned something about how Google has practically become everything to everyone, a confidant and a friend. What does this say about us? About the age of information? And about where we are headed as a culture?

A Confession (30 days on)

In the name of the books, the director, and the holy library.

Bless me Father for I have worked. It has been 1 month since my last day of unemployment. These are my tasks…

Collection Development: I am the library liaison for English, Communication, History and Business Administration. This means I am in communication with each of the mentioned departments discussing collection needs and accepting requests for monograph purchases. It is up to me to judge whether a suggested book is appropriate for our collection and ultimately whether it is to be purchased or not. I also get to do some purchasing when the departments don’t submit enough requests. It looks like I have a lot to learn in this area.

Reference: I am scheduled 5 hours a week at the reference desk once the semester starts. This is one of the things I am looking forward to the most. The reference desk is one of the most fun places for me. You get to interact with people and help them find the information they needed. I like helping people but and more selfishly I enjoy learning about the random things that people need help researching.

Instruction: Over the course of this semester I will be eased into Library Instruction. Luckily I am not being thrown into the fire (though I am sure I would survive). I will be teaching classes about research and how to use resources at a professor’s request for various courses offered here at the college. First I get to observe, then co-instruct, then instruct (with support) and finally set free to soar on my own. Hopefully I won’t fly too close to the sun. There haven’t been many advances in wax over the last 3000 years.

Miscellaneous : Reformatting and updating the Subject Guides on the library website. This is often tedious and sometimes entertaining. We are using Springshare’s LibGuides for our guides. I edited and updated the Information Literacy Modules on Blackboard that all incoming freshmen are required to complete. I am also on the planning committee for the Library Expo 2009, which is a fun, informational event for students to become familiar with the library and its services. As of right now I am tasked with creating a crossword puzzle using clues from the various stations or stops setup throughout the library.

I am happy for these tasks and all the tasks I cannot remember

My God, In choosing to do work
 and failing to continue to be unemployed, 
I have sinned against you and the failing economy 
whom I should love above all things.
 I firmly intend, with your help,
 to do penance, 
but work no less,
 and to avoid whatever leads me to unemployment.
 Amen.

‘Your un-unemployment is truly forgiven. Go in peace.’

Thanks be to Employment.