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I have a post about teen furniture shopping!

Why I'm no longer afraid of Naruto

When it comes to buying manga, for a long time I felt like I had to follow Maria Von Trapp and "start at the very beginning--it's a very good place to start." So I'd buy volumes 1-5 of Negima, Naruto, One Piece, etc.

And then all my readers hated me.


Most of the fans had already read the first 5 volumes, and if they hadn't, it's not like it took them very long to get to volume 6. But I just couldn't bear to spend three times as much money on Naruto as I did on other series. It's that classic librarian dilemma: give the people what they want or give the people choices. You know what I mean?

Anyway, the point is that story arcs are my new thing.

Comparing Sketchup and Floorplanner

Sometimes impressing people is the best approach to getting your way. You can measure, you can reason, you can provide data. But if you can show people a 3D model, they might just let you move all the furniture in the library. That's what happened to me.


(Actually, we had to move all the furniture, because G-Tech donated a block of children's computers, and they just wouldn't fit in our old space. But I still think the 3D model gave me a lot of credibility when I proposed a new layout.)

I used Floorplanner to do the 3D model, without really investigating my options. So I was wondering what else was out there, and guess what? Google has a similar program. Shocking, right?

Personification in Children's Books

A teacher came in yesterday and asked me for examples of personification in picture books. The idea is to teach 5th graders about literary special effects, like onomatopoeia, personification, simile, metaphor, etc. I was like, oh great idea no problem. Then I was like, huh.

It was one of those reference questions that's harder than it sounds. I couldn't specifically remember whether certain books attributed human qualities and actions to non-humans.

What your shelving style says about you

I've already thought a lot about how to catalog and shelve graphic novels--I even wrote a post about it for the YALSA blog. But my brother just pointed me to a series of articles on Popmatters that addresses this issue from the perspective of comics readers rather than librarians. (OK, so in the article below, the comics reader sat in on a discussion among librarians, so maybe it's more of a cross-section of perspectives.)

Peep this:

"Regardless of how to interpret different ways of categorizing comics in a library, what underlies such questions is how readers read, and what comics means to them. Do they follow writers (what one librarian at the session I was at called the “Neil Gaiman problem”)? Do they follow publishers (as above)? Do they follow pencilers (or some other artist)? Do they follow a particular character (what another librarian called the “Wolverine problem”)?

Problem Parents in YA Books

I read the New York Times article on problem parents in YA lit, plus the brouhaha on the blogosphere, and I think what we have here is a case of bad editing. The article makes many observations about how the roles of parents in YA novels has changed over time. But I have no idea what the point is.

Teen Furniture: Fewer Distractions

Now that I've got all the children's furniture out of my system, I've found a few teen furniture sites with products that make me really happy. First of all, 2Modern has the most comprehensive teen section, and it was there that I discovered Fatboy products.

See, I had already narrowed down the kind of furniture I was looking for to benches, like in museums and shoe stores. I think I sang the praises of benches earlier. And Fatboy has these modular bench-things that I love.