Bookworm Love

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.