Banned Books Week #1

From Unshelved.com

Banned Books Week

So this coming week is Banned Books Week. I find it interesting which books are banned and why. All of the books on my high school senior year book list are banned books. How weird is that?

Books such as:

A Separate Peace- John Knowles
Death of a Salesman- Arthur Miller
Flowers for Algernon- Daniel Keyes
The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hamlet- Shakespeare
Lord of the Flies- William Golding
Merchant of Venice- Shakespeare
Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
To Kill a Mockingbird- Harper Lee

I think these are all wonderful books. Some of them have moments that are disturbing, vulgar, overly graphic, sexual, racist, foul language (all of which are reasons that books are banned) but they all have lessons to teach. I think that people should have the freedom to read whatever they like.

When a person has a problem with a book, a good solution is NOT having the book banned, thereby not allowing those who want to read it the ability to do so. A good solution would be, DON’T READ IT!! I don’t why it is so hard for these people to allow others the freedom to read what they like. I am sure that if anyone tried to tell the banning people what to read, they would not appreciate it, so why do it to others?

Books are the key

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” –Sir Richard Steele

I always knew that reading opens doors to the imagination. From childhood I read books to escape to fantastical places. I could be riding a dragon through a purple cloud bank, watching in horror as a queen is beheaded, shivering in fear as a curse takes over my village, attempting to remain on a bull while he bucks in anger, or watching my neighbor turn into a wolf. The possibilities are endless.

My high school yearbook quote was something my father said, “A person with a book is never alone.” I was usually walking down the halls with a book in front of my nose. To me, books are a way to experience things most people will never get a chance to do.

I don’t know why but digital books just don’t do it as well. Sure, you are reading the same material, but the effect is not the same. I need the physical book in my hands.

Service with a Snicker

It is becoming more and more clear to me what the true nature of the job of a librarian is:

1. Help as many people as you can, as nicely as you can

2. Never tell any patron who silly/inane/ridiculous their question really is

3. Maintain a sense of humor in order to remain sane

These strips, form unshelved.com seem so appropriate to me.

Chat with a Librarian

Many libraries now have a ‘chat with a librarian’ option. This allows the patron to connect with a librarian in a chat, and ask questions and receive answers.

I am currently on chat, asking a question. It took my librarian 5 minutes already to enter the chat room and read my questions. Still waiting for a response…ok. So I am apparently connected to a librarian who is not from my system, she is from a company that helps out when my librarians are too busy to chat. While that would normally be fine, she doesn’t seem to know the answer to my question. That might be because it is a question about how my system works, and she doesn’t know…

Ok, so my first experience with chat was a bad one. Not sure if I will do that again.

Credit Card Theft

This week we are discussing privacy issues in my Web 2.0 class. The class discussion led to the topic of Credit Card Theft. I find it a very interesting topic because my family just had an issue with our credit card’s safety measures.

My family switched to a new credit card a few months ago. The first time we went to Woodberry Commons (which we do rarely) with our new credit card, we got a phone call the next day from the credit card company to validate that we had made the purchases. We really appreciated that. A while later we made a large purchase out of state, and two days later we received a phone call to ensure that we had made that purchase. That was all well and good, but they did not only ask about the large purchase, they also wanted to check all of our purchases made that week. Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t remember exactly what I buy with my credit card from week to week. Not only that, but we have three copies of the credit card, for three separate people, and we don’t always go shopping together. So when the credit card people asked if we had spent $4.39 at Target, my Dad did not know that I had gone to Target, and could not answer. When they asked if we had spent $12.95 at an internet site which my Mom had and my Dad was not aware of, he could not answer. When he told them that he didn’t know if someone in the family had spent those amounts in those places, they froze our account. While we appreciate that they were looking out for us, we were quite annoyed when we went shopping the next day, and our credit card was denied. A quick phone call to the credit card, a few questions to my Mom and me, and my Dad was able to tell them that we did make the two purchases. They unfroze our credit card right away, but the experience was still unpleasant.

So what do you do? On the one hand, you want someone to make sure that no one stole your credit card and is making purchases with it, but how annoying is it to have to remember each and every purchase you make?!

Unshelved

There is one comic strip that I love. It’s called Unshelved. It is about a library and the daily issues that the librarians have to deal with. Here is one that just came out this week.

More can be found at http://www.unshelved.com/ and you can sign up for the daily e-mail, 1 strip per day like I did. I love them.

De.li.cious

Ok, I hate De.li.cious. It’s annoying….

Book- Into-Movie

The big question. Should a book be used as a basis for a movie? I think it depends on the book and how the movie is done. Jumper and Reflex are wonderful books written by Steven Gould. The movie called Jumper, is based on a combination of both books. Um… let’s just say that I prefer a world where things are logical and the laws of nature or magic, are consistent rather than constantly changing.

The Time Traveler’s Wife, however is an amazing book, and the movie adaptation was extremely well done. Is it exactly the same as the book, no. But it was adapted in such a way that the rules of the story are followed throughout the movie. Even though I already knew the story from reading the book, the movie kept me emotionally involved the whole way through I was brought to tears several times, and did not feel bored at any point.

Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are two book series’ that were done very well when they were made into movies. I personally liked Lord of the Rings better. But I thoroughly enjoyed, and purchased both of them.

For some books, a movie adaptation helps the story to flow, without the need for overlong descriptions of clothing, time period and other details. For others, the adaptation drags on the tedious details to the point of torture.

Guardian of Knowledge

According to thesaurus.com, an archivist is a guardian of knowledge. How cool is that? Like those movies The Librarian: Quest for the Spear. I only saw the Quest for the Spear (there are two more that I didn’t see), and while I thought it rather silly, illogical and somewhat stupid, I enjoyed the idea. The Librarian goes out into the world to retrieve ancient artifacts and priceless pieces of history to keep them safe in the Library.

The idea that the Librarian is retrieving artifacts, as opposed to knowledge itself is interesting.  I would think that a Librarian would attempt to preserve ancient manuscripts or other forms of information rather than artifacts. To me, information is more vulnerable than artifacts. If an artifact is lost, there can still be a record of what it was and what purpose it served, so that the artifact is not entirely lost. However, information can be lost completely. Although the information can be written down, if the written record is destroyed, then it can be changed, remembered incorrectly or lost altogether. This has happened in the past, most famously with the information in the Library in Alexandria. That is one of the reasons why I love the easy access to and reproduction of knowledge in today’s day and age.

I saw a book title once that I found very scary, it was called, “The Last Book in the Universe.”  The book is set in the future at a time when there are no more books.  I didn’t read the book so I don’t know where it went from there, but the premise itself was enough to make me dislike technology such as the Kindle.  Once the information is purely digital, it can be adjusted, abridged and otherwise distorted from the original.  I don’t know if books will ever be ‘extinct,’ but if they are, I think so much of value will be lost.

P.S.  Funnily enough, the TV show Warehouse 13 has a similar premise without the library aspect.  Secret Service agents hunt objects of power, (such as a a Bio-energy vehicle created by Thomas Edison, the guillotine that beheaded Marie Antoinette, Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod, and many more), which are then stored in Warehouse 13.