Library Diva's Page

I don't know what to call this one, but inspiration hit when I saw a copy of George Orwell's Burmese Days on my bookshelf. Most people know Orwell from 1984 or Animal Farm. Before he wrote either of the books that was turn his name into an adjective, he wrote this novel, inspired by the years he spent living and working in colonial Burma. I'd never the hell heard of it before my Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature professor assigned it, but it's very good. So the idea behind the feature is tha… Continue

I came up with this one late last night, and decided to look at several series of books, rather than individual books. Forces of darkness are primarily the provenance of fantasy. Realistic books contain nasty bosses, catty rivals, or heinous ex-boyfriends, but not any real evil, generally. So the books I picked to discuss are the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, the Harry Potter books by J.K Rowling, and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman.

The oldest of these is the Prydain book… Continue

Driving home from orchestra rehearsal tonight, I had no idea what I was going to blog about tonight. None. I've thrown all my "get out of jail free cards." My book is slow going, and I already wrote about how it was slow going. There's not a whole lot else going on right now. No house fires or robberies or anything like last year. Then I realized something. Yesterday was Thursday, and I didn't do BTT! So here goes:


I receive a lot of review books, but I have never once told lies about the book… Continue

Of all the months of the year in which to bog down in a book, NaBloPoMo is probably the worst. Yet that's what's happening to me right now. Normally, I don't "bog down" in books. If it's not engaging, I pull out the bookmark and go on to the next book. But this book is different. It's by Tony Horwitz.

His other two books have been awesome. I just wrote about the one. His other book is a journey through the lands that Captain Cook explored. He visited Australia, Tahiti, Tonga, the obscure countr… Continue

Here are some highlights of my recent job hunt:

1. Chainsawing my resume to exclude my graduate degree and all my publications and presentations, in order to make room for my mad Microsoft Office skillz and my vast knowledge of phone-answering techniques. I'm a blink away from writing on there that I have over 25 of experience in answering phones. I think I was about five or six when my parents started letting me do that, so it's not a lie.

2. Filling out a lengthy questionaire at a temp agenc… Continue