We're baaack

Mrs. Bligh and I had a great, I mean, productive and educational time in Cowtown for our annual Texas Library Association conference.  I had the pleasure of hobnobbing with authors such as K.L. Armstrong and M.A. Marr of the recently penned, Loki's Wolves.  It sounds great!  Many thanks to the lovely women at Little Brown who graciously invited me to dinner (at Ruth's Chris, nonetheless) and gave me the opportunity to meet the authors and get an autographed copy of the book.  I'm a sucker for those.



I attended the annual, much anticipated Teri Lesesne booktalk in which she gives a quick rundown of the top one hundred or so of the newest must-reads.  Although self-titled the Goddess of YA Literature, no one would argue with that moniker.  My book list for next year is already growing.  But please stop by so we can talk about everything coming out!

I also think I'm going to undertake suggesting a library social media policy for the district....we'll see.  Lots of things to think about.  Whoops, how can I forget?  Mrs. Bligh and I want to be the first school in the district to create a mobile app for the library.  What features would you like to see?  Off the top of our head we're thinking: holds, re-checks (no more overdues, dreamy) and book requests - in addition to database access, etc.  Your thoughts?

We did miss you all.  But not the testing.

PS If you are reading this at all, you have Mercedes to thank.  I took a break from the blog life last year, but once I heard Mercede's story (and she said I could share) I decided to pick it back up.  As a newbie to McNeil, Mercedes spent her summer looking up stuff about MN and other local schools to figure out where she wanted to go.   As a library frequent flier, as we like to say, she spent time on our site and reading this blog.  That's when she knew she wanted to go to MN.

Makes your heart swell just a bit, doesn't it?  So to Mercedes and my two other readers, this is all for you!  Thank you for reading.

Going once!

Some of our most recent discards.  Hmm, seems that the puppet circus craze has died down and the middle book there hasn't been checked out in over 10 years.  AND, there was a surprise in the card slot in the front of the book (for the old fashioned pen & paper check out) , but discretion prevents me from going into more detail.

Going, going, gone!

Often, people are surprised or express dismay/disapproval because we discard books.  Yet, if we didn't, we would have books that say, "One day, man will land on the moon..." (forgive my unimaginative example) taking up room on the shelf and where would our new books go?  The books with updated, current information?  (Fiction is another story before you debate, "But Paradise Lost isn't 'new'.)  So if you see a book with DISCARD stamped all over it in red, please leave it alone.  Stories of well meaning people finding discarded library books, in say the trash or river, going to great lengths to return them are nice in a people-really-are-good kind of way, but I'm over that at this point.



During my days in HEBISD, a janitor fished a paperback out of the toilet and returned it to me in a plastic bag.  The  Toilet Book was on my desk for I don't know how long. Thanks, but no thanks.


Out with the old, in with the new.  Allow me to highlight a few of our new titles:
Plane wreck.  Ocean. Sharks. Island.  Need I say more?

Old, but new to me (and MN).  Apparently, when published in the 70's Zoo Station was widely read in Germany, where Christian F. lives.  At the age of 13 she was addicted to H and would do anything to get her next fix.  Fans of Tweak and the like may want to check this out.  It's written in a more sophisticated way, and her story is much, much darker than Nic's, but it is certainly keeping me up at night.

I'm hoping Triggered is as good as The Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood, I'll find out this summer when I have the time to read it.

Happy and safe prom, Mavericks - have a great weekend!
Oh wait, one more book, aptly entitled Prom.  A documentarian view of prom in America as a rite of passage of sorts.  If you're not the prom type, you may find this more interesting than most.

John Green has my heart

I know, I know.  I'm a late-comer to the John Green craze.  But I am so glad that I finally jumped on the bandwagon.  Not only is TFiOS (Come on people, you know what I'm talking about; if you don't - look it up) one of my favorite y.a. books of all time, but it's soon to be a movie.

If the movie is a bust, it will break my heart.  I'm not kidding.  I felt the same way about Holes, and that turned out OK, so fingers crossed.

As soon as I finished TFiOS, I started listening to Paper Towns via Playaway.  (Tricky thing with Playaways, I have no earthly how far along in the book I am and our print copies are currently checked out so I can't peek - frustrating.  I'm a print girl, what can I say?)  My dog is getting much longer walks these days so I can listen to it, thus, CharChar has become a JG fan by default.

Not only is JG a fabulous author, as evidenced by his many  fans (and who knows better than our students???) and sales, but he's a history buff so I can't help by have an author-crush on him.  I used his Crash Course French Revolution for our Tale of Two Cities anticipatory project.  (More about the project later.)  I'm looking forward to hearing how Tale is going and will start grading those tonight.  Good luck, my freshmen soldiers.  I know Tale can be a bit rough, but it is SO worth it.  One of the best stories ever told.



The French Revolution Crash Course Video from Troy Sayre on Vimeo.