Super Cute Animal Rescue Program!

Tri is ready to meet fans!

Blossom the Beagle is ready to be adopted!

Today at my library, Miss "Carol Has Her Nose in a Book" hosted a wonderful animal rescue program. Our guests were Homeward Bound http://www.homewardboundrescue.com/, the Humane Society http://www.mnhumane.org/and the K9 unit http://www.ci.west-saint-paul.mn.us/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC=%7B327EFD67-EC59-4B64-A75B-1105C0329D3A%7D with the West Saint Paul police. They brought lovely animals: Blossom, the Beagle, Phineas, the American Pittbull puppy, Tri, the kitty, and Mike, the German Shepherd police dog.

I'm crazy about animals. so this was really exciting for me! More pictures to come.

150 books you should read

Floating Lush found these lists at http://jezebel.com/5053732/75-books-every-woman-should-read-the-complete-list and http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/75-books?src=rss

and so I had to see how many I'd read.

From the woman's list:

1. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
2. The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
3. Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
4. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
5. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
6. Possession, A.S. Byatt
7. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
8. The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
9. The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
10. The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
11. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
12. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
13. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
14. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
15. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
16. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
17. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft

And I'd like to read: Beloved, Toni Morrison , Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, My Antonia, Willa Cather and Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Now for the men's list, from Esquire;

1. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
2. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
3. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
4. The Shining, Stephen King
5. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
6. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
7. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
8. Slaughter House Five, Kurt Vonnegut
9. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

And I'd like to read: As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner and A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O'Connor

Obsolete Librarian?

My husband and I were watching some episodes of Season 2 of The Twilight Zone when we ran across the above episode. Burgess Meredith plays a librarian declared obsolete by the State and targeted for termination. I love the fuss that he causes when he states his profession!

Tonight's Pajama Storytime

lions-tigers-bears-cats
Originally uploaded by rosebuddls

We will be doing stories about:

Lions:

• We're Going on a Lion Hunt by David Axtell
• Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen

Tigers:

• Charles Tiger by Siobhan Dodds
• The Dancing Tiger by Malachy Doyle
• Tiger Can't Sleep by S. J. Fore

Bears:

• Orange Pear Apple Bear by Emily Gravett
• Old Bear by Kevin Henkes
• Bears by Ruth Krauss
• Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson

Oh My!:

• The Seals on the Bus by Lenny Hort
  
  

Black Box by Julie Schumacher

I loved this brief and important novel. If you or someone close to you has suffered from depression, you will be able to identify with Elena and her family as her sister Dora slides into mental illness.

In Elena's close knit family, she is the steady one, the level one, the one who never cries. Her older sister Dora is more fun and popular until her sudden change into an angry, apathetic and suicidal stranger. The family and especially Elena are left reeling. She knows that she must save Elena, but what does that mean? Why are her parents keeping secrets from her and refusing to listen to her opinions? With support from her "grandma therapist" and her new friend Jimmy, Elena will try to muddle through this dark and lonely experience.

Here's to One Hundred More!

I like Polly Horvath's books. I have read Everything on a Waffle, The Trolls, The Canning Season and now, My One Hundred Adventures. I think that this new book may be my favorite.

The summer that Jane is twelve and living with her poet mother and younger sister and brothers in their home on the beach, she prays for 100 adventures. Her prayers are nearly answered (okay, she has fourteen adventures, but they're special ones) as she gets roped into heisting a hot air balloon to deliver bibles, treks around a lake looking for a transparent "poodle," is blackmailed into babysitting a family of untidy, unruly little children and more. Throughout the summer, Jane meets several of her mom's former boyfriends, and learns a lot about the adults around her.

My favorite thing about Horvath's books is her quirky sense of humor. Jane describes a farmer walking down the road with his cows, "It would be peaceful to walk some cows. They wouldn't bark alarmingly. They would moo in celestial harmony." I get a huge kick out of this!

This is fun reading and a nice change for me. It is lighter, without being fluff. Adults like me can read it and enjoy themselves, and I think thoughtful kids will like it too.

Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott

This book has certainly caused a lot of buzz. You've probably heard of it. Like 33 Snowfish by Adam Rapp, which puts us readers into the lives of abused, sexually exploited and damaged kids, or Doing It by Melvin Burgess, that delivers us teen sexual fantasies with more detail than any of Judy Blume's most censored material ever did, it expands the limits of Teen fiction. I feel that, like 33 Snowfish, it does so successfully and seriously.

Our 15 year old narrator, known as Alice, was abducted five years ago from a school field trip. Since then she has been raped, abused and completely controlled by Ray, who is unstable and certainly capable of murder. Alice's brightest hope is to die, but then one day Ray decides that she should help him pick her replacement, a sweet little girl who will never be allowed to grow up. Alice will accept any means to free herself from Ray. Or so she believes.

It is horrific stuff and Scott tells her story without flinching. She also completely gets inside her character. I kept wondering why I was subjecting myself to something so disturbing, but it seemed important that I finish. There was no bizarre plot twist (I'm think Breathe My Name by R.A. Nelson), no scenes of hyped up drama. The story itself is riveting enough, and although it's terrible to ingest, it's beautifully and straightforwardly told.