Librarians are surrounded by books.
A love of literature runs in their blood, their very DNA. So what do librarians read when they are
off-duty and not helping the public find books?
AbeBooks visited three branches of the Greater Victoria Public Library in Victoria, BC, Canada, (where we are located) and
posed that very question to 10 librarians. Sarah, Children
& Family Literacy Librarian, is reading Far from
the Madding Crowd by
Thomas Hardy. Lara, Senior Librarian, Collections Services, is
reading 2 A.M.
at the Cat's Pajama's by
Marie-Helene Bertino. Audrey, Senior Librarian, Cataloguing, is reading
the Needed Killing Series by Bill Fitts. Richard, Librarian, Cataloguing, is reading Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix.
Olivia, District Coordinator,
Saanich & Peninsula, is reading Being Mortal: Medicine and what Matters in the End by Atul Gawande. Devon, Children & Family Literacy Librarian, is reading
Dorothy
Must Die by
Danielle Paige. Tracy,
Coordinator, Children & Teen Services, is reading World of
Trouble by
Ben H. Winters. Stephen, Adult Services Librarian, is reading So
Anyway by John Cleese. Maureen, Chief Executive Officer, is reading Family
Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995-2014 by Alice Munro. Katie,
Children & Family Literacy Librarian, is reading Before I
Go to Sleep by
S.J. Watson. Find information about the books at
http://www.abebooks.com/books/features/what-librarians-are-reading.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-C150203-h00-libradAM-341424GP-_-herogr&abersp=1
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts
means "Don't trust your enemies." It is an allusion to the story of the wooden
horse of Troy, used by the Greeks to trick their way into the city. recorded in
Virgil's Aeneid, Book 2, 19 BC:
"Do not trust the horse, Trojans.
Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts." Of course that English version is a
translation. Another translation, by
John Dryden, has "Trust not their presents, nor admit the
horse." The same thought was also
recorded by Sophocles (496 - 406 BC), in Ajax:
Nought from the Greeks towards me hath sped well. So now I find that ancient proverb true, Foes' gifts are no gifts: profit bring they
none. The Classics are no longer widely
taught or read, so this phrase is now little used, although it was resurrected
in a sideways reference during a 1990s copyright dispute. There was considerable discussion then, in
Internet chat rooms etc., regarding the company Compuserve, which owned the
copyright to the GIF image format, and their possible intentions to restrict
its use. Some people feared that they
might be taken to law by Compuserve if they received and viewed GIF images
without permission. The phrase
"beware of geeks bearing gifs" was coined to sum that up. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/beware-of-greeks-bearing-gifts.html
Quotes from The Devil, a Jack Taylor novel by Ken Bruen "Beware of geeks bearing
gifts." "I was frustrated by
the new automatic candle routine, Vegas
without the showgirls. I'm a dinosaur, I
know, way past my sell-by date, but is it too much to ask for the old gig of tapers, actually lighting the candle and
being connected? It was my
version of comfort food. Candle soup for the soul,
if you will."
Vint Cerf, a
"father of the internet", says he is worried that all the images and
documents we have been saving on computers will eventually be lost. Currently a Google vice-president, he believes
this could occur as hardware and software become obsolete. He fears that future generations will have
little or no record of the 21st Century as we enter what he describes as a
"digital Dark Age". Vint Cerf
is promoting an idea to preserve every piece of software and hardware so that
it never becomes obsolete - just like what happens in a museum - but in digital
form, in servers in the cloud. If his
idea works, the memories we hold so dear could be accessible for generations to
come. "The solution is to take an
X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system
together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that
for long periods of time. And that
digital snapshot will recreate the past in the future." Pallab Ghosh Link
to interview with Vint Cerf at http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389
Tommy John surgery
(TJS), known in medical practice as ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) reconstruction, is a surgical graft procedure
in which the ulnar
collateral ligament in the medial elbow is replaced with a tendon from elsewhere in the body. The procedure is common among collegiate and
professional athletes in several sports, most notably baseball.
The procedure was first performed in 1974 by orthopedic surgeon Dr. Frank Jobe, then a Los Angeles Dodgers team
physician who served as a special advisor to the team until his death in
2014. It is named after the first
baseball player to undergo the surgery, major league pitcher Tommy John, whose 288 career victories ranks
seventh all time among left-handed pitchers.
The initial operation, John's successful post-surgery career, and the
relationship between the two men is the subject of a 2013 ESPN 30 for 30 Shorts documentary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_John_surgery
Who is the mystery author in this interview? Q. I'm seeing you called "the Pope of
Galway" and "the Godfather of Irish crime fiction." Who pinned these on you? A. I
have no idea, but what it does is make me feel old, very. But you know, I'm also being called
"Bukowski on crystal meth," the Prince of Darkness, and my favorite,
an "intellectual guttersnipe"—a sideswipe at my PhD in
metaphysics. Q. Your detective, Jack Taylor, must be the
best-read detective in the history of fiction.
I think yours are the first crime novels I've ever read that quote
Yeats, Nietzsche, and Ruskin—among numerous others. But is it true that there were no books in
your house when you were growing up and your father said he didn't want you to
be a writer? A. The only book in our home was the Bible. My parents forbade books. They thought I needed help because I wanted
to be a writer! My father believed a
real man didn't read, and my parents hoped I'd get some sense and find a job in
insurance. Q. Much of what Jack reads is crime
fiction. What crime fiction did you read
when you were young? Were there any
specific influences? A. I got the gift of a library card when I was
ten and found a discarded box in the library.
They let me keep it and, oh, phew, what a treasure! All the Black Mask editions, Gold Medal
books, all the pulps. So my influences
then and now are American. They formed
me as a writer and still do. Heresy in
Ireland—where I'm supposed to worship Joyce, Beckett, and the other
suspects. Find name of the author at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/10/irish-crime-writer-ken-bruen-on-alcoholism-sick-priests-and-neo-nazis/246119/
On Feb.
18, 2015 Random House Children’s Books
said it would publish on July 28 a rediscovered manuscript by the late Theodor
Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, titled “What Pet Should I Get?” The manuscript of
“What Pet Should I Get?” was initially found in Mr. Geisel’s home in La Jolla,
Calif., in a box with assorted text and sketches soon after he died in 1991 by
his widow Audrey Geisel. Ms. Geisel rediscovered
the box while she was cleaning out his office in 2013 with Claudia Prescott,
described as Mr. Geisel’s “longtime secretary and friend.” Ms. Geisel then contacted Random House by
phone. The rediscovered box included the
full text and illustrations for “What Pet Should I Get?” together with enough
material for two other books. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg http://www.wsj.com/articles/bound-to-astound-seuss-book-found-1424286064
The Great Lakes ice cover continues to grow as winter weather slams the
country. Lake Erie had 98% ice cover on Feb. 18, 2015 according
to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. Lake Erie usually gets an extensive ice
coverage because of how shallow the lake is, according to George Leshkevich
with the Great Lakes Coastwatch. He says
Erie isn't the only lake experiencing the deep freeze. The Great Lakes as a whole experienced 85.4%
ice cover as of Feb. 18, Leshkevich says.
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/02/19/great-lakes-ice-cover/23674689/
The water that flows over Niagara Falls has not come to an icy halt - despite what you might
have heard on the news or read on the Internet.
It's a news story that seems to make the rounds every year or two, but
it's false. If Niagara Falls did
actually freeze over, the one person who would certainly hear about it is Tony
Baldinelli, a senior manager with the Niagara Parks Commission, who is in
charge of their communications and routinely puts out media releases about
items that are of interest to members of the public. "People are seeing these magnificent,
beautiful images of the falls in the winter time with the tremendous amount of
ice that is created and some are left with the impression that it has frozen
over, but in fact it is not," said Baldinelli. Before 1964, each winter ice floating in from
Lake Erie would create ice jams along the Niagara River that seriously hampered
power diversions and damaged shoreline installations and bridges. Since 1964, potential ice damage has been
controlled by the installation of an “Ice Boom” at the source of the river. The 2.7 km (1.7 mile) long boom is made of
floating 30-foot long steel pontoons and is placed between Fort Erie and the
city of Buffalo to hold the ice back. It’s
hard to imagine anything could stop the gigantic rush of water over the Falls,
yet records show it happened once. For
30 long, silent hours in March 1848, the river ceased its flow. High winds set the ice fields of Lake Erie in
motion and millions of tons of ice became lodged at the source of the river,
blocking the channel completely. Local
inhabitants, accustomed to the sound of the river, heard an eerie silence and
those who were brave enough, walked or rode horses over the exposed basin. The self-made dam held the water back until a
shift allowed the pent-up weight of water to break through to its accustomed
route. This has been prevented from
happening again since 1964 by the annual installation of an “Ice Boom” at the
source of the river. Tony Ricciuto
Many East Asian cultures use zodiac animals to symbolize each New Year and predict a person's
fortunes. But which animal represents
2015 is up for debate. You may have seen
goat, sheep or ram as the English translation for this year's animal according
to the Chinese zodiac — yang, in
Mandarin. All of them are correct, says
Lala Zuo, a Chinese language and culture professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in
Maryland. Some Chinese words are vague
and not as specific as English words, so yang could
refer to a goat, sheep or even a ram. But in ancient times, Zuo says, that Chinese
character meant goat. "I think goat
is more commonly seen by people in China, both in the north and south,"
she says. Not in Korea, though,
according to Sang-Seok Yoon, a Korean language instructor at the University of
Iowa. "China is big and there are
many different types of one animal, but Korea is small and the most
prototypical image of yang for Korean people is sheep," he says. The correct way to describe this Vietnamese
New Year is the year of the goat — or mùi in
Vietnamese, according to James Lap, who teaches the language at Columbia
University. "In Vietnam, there is
no sheep or ram at all because the weather is so hot," Lap says. Some cultures go beyond the goat-sheep divide
and assign one of five elements borrowed from Chinese astrology and even a
gender to a zodiac animal. All of these
characteristics can, supposedly, predict what's to come in the New Year. In Tibetan culture, this is the year of the
female wood sheep, according to Tsering Shakya, who teaches Tibetan literature
at the University of British Columbia. "A
female year tends to be much more sort of peaceful than say male," he
says. The Mongolian zodiac also
forecasts a peaceful new year under the blue female sheep. http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2015/02/19/387203812/whatever-floats-your-goat-asian-languages-interpret-lunar-year-animal-differentl
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1259
February 20, 2015 On this date in
1816, Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville premiered at the Teatro
Argentina in Rome. On this date in 1962, while aboard Friendship
7, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, making three
orbits in four hours, 55 minutes.
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