I'm a 40-something embarking on a second career as a librarian. While in library school I was shocked and amazed at how many librarians are not readers. I'll grant you, the non-readers were the minority...but shouldn't non-reading librarians be non-existent? Of those who do read, the vast majority do very little in the way of literary reading. In fact, it almost seems to be frowned upon. After all, we librarians are nostalgic for the days when we were hip, and there is nothing hip in parsing out one of Shakespeare's sonnets. Why there isn't even a graphic novelization of those things. Wait a minute...we were never hip. No, we were boring old pedants, but not any more, world! We are shaking the dust from those old stacks off of our feet and we are going to.....design websites, or something. Put up pictures of books on the World Wide Web. Classify video games. Like that. Not that these aren't things worth doing.
Before the reverse elitists start calling me a snob, let me just say that I think it's totally cool to read graphic novels. I just read David Boring, myself and quite enjoyed it. I read my share of crime/noir/detective novels and dote on bad movies. I'm just trying to gently suggest that there is more to life than comic books, noir and YA novels (which are also totally cool, I'm told). Especially if one is to be promoting literacy and advising readers. Which are a couple of the things librarians are supposed to do, yes? It seems it might be a good idea for us to read a little more widely, perhaps even things that aren't our cup of tea (personal the the librarian from UFL: yes that includes me reading the occasional romance novel).
So, reading. Books. That is what we'll talk about here mostly, with the occasional foray into movies and music and websites and other things that interest me. Tomorrow, the moment you've been waiting for...what I'm reading.
