Gaming, gaming, soon we will be gaming… except that people are supposed to be here at 8 pm and sambear hasn’t been able to leave work yet! Eeep! Here’s safe fast drive home thoughts for him…
I picked up what should be some good reading at the library today.
Katie and I had both put in a request for the rest of the Weetzie Bat books by Francesca Lia Block, and then I found out that they were all out in one volume called Dangerous Angels. That arrived, now we just have to figure out who gets it first (four people in line and sambear will probably want to read it too). I think I annoyed the librarian by sending the rest of the series, which had all come available on the same day as the omnibus version, back to the shelves.
I found out this week that I had missed a Spider Robinson novel. Still not sure how that happened, but The Free Lunch is now in my hot little hands.
And I’d requested Face Down Across the Western Sea, the latest of Kathy Lynn Emerson’s Susanna, Lady Appleton mystery series, quite a while back. It came in, but the library’s email notification system wasn’t working so by the time I found out it had come in, they’d sent it on to someone else. Of course, it came in today when I got all these other books, too. I think my favorite part of that series is that Emerson is SO incredibly accurate in her portrayal of the time period.
I always have to take a gander at the new release shelves when I go in—that’s how I end up with most of my non-fiction reading. Today there were several things of interest.
The Other Parent by James Steyer is subtitled “The Inside Story of the Media’s Effect On Our Children.”
I’ve read so danged many news articles about or referring to Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine that I had to grab it when I saw it on the shelf. Must read it before the fundies check out all the copies and “lose” them! Yes, that is a documented way that the radical right uses to censor books since the library boards insist on buying stuff they don’t approve of. Because if the copies are lost, the library seldom buys new copies of those books. And paying the fine for the lost book is pretty small potatoes compared to the victory of getting the naughty stuff off the shelves in the first place. Our library no longer accepts donations of ANY books or other materials, so the rest of us can’t even buy new copies of the disappeared books to replace them.
Internet & Computer Ethics for Kids (and Parents & Teachers Who Haven’t Got a Clue by Winn Schwartau is definitely written to a younger and likely less net-savvy person than I am. If it’s any good, though, I figure I can recommend it to others. I’m always being asked about filters and parental control software and so on, so I figure I should read the danged book.
I have to say that I largely checked out Killing Monsters: Why Children NEED Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence at the behest of my inner sambear. But I’ll give it a look, as well.
