Personal Stumper SOLVED!!!!

This is a lesson in the importance of keywords. I have had two ongoing personal stumpers--books I read when I was younger that I can't remember pertinent info about for the life of me. I've tried to do searches for them before with no real results. One is a young adult novel that must have been published in the late '70s or '80s. It's about kids at a school. Some of them are freakish - one girl in particular is a type of beast. It turns into a war, children who live in the sewers may or may not be enlisted, and in the end the freaks win--but with casualties. The girl who is a beast is turned into a statue or stuffed and mounted.

I still can't figure out how to find that one, save going to my old library and hoping it hasn't been weeded. (Fat chance.)

The second is a series of mysteries set in China--they were long and sort of funny and slightly mystical. For a long time I kept doing the "mystery set in China" or "chinese mystery" search and turning up nothing. But today I realized I should be doing a search for "detective" and "China". Which I did, in Novelist (an essential database, may I add). And I found my answer: The Master Li novels of Barry Hughart. A Google image search confirms that the covers of these books are what I remember. But I'm putting a copy on hold just to make sure.

Books in Spanish: not necessarily Spanish books

Something I've noticed while looking for library selections to recommend to my Spanish teacher mother or to read for myself is the tendency for libraries to stock a high percentage of English books translated into Spanish, instead of more Spanish books by Spanish and Latin American authors. And just now I read VOYA's most recent article on Noteworthy Books in Spanish for Teens, and only 2 of the 15 selections were originally written in Spanish. Really? Is there such a dearth of books that actually were written in Spanish for teens that you could only find 2 to put in the list?

It's perfectly true that a lot of kids reading these books would be attracted to these translations either because they'd like to practice their Spanish reading skills on something familiar or because they are Spanish speakers who want to read what their English-speaking friends are reading. It's entirely possible that authors and publishers in Spain haven't caught sight of the beneficial tsunami that is Young Adult literature. And it's probably easier (not to mention cheaper) to deal with publishers in the United States than to search out contacts and titles in Spain or Latin America (especially if none of your staff has the language skills). I don't really know how it's done in our system here. The last time I was in an Acquisitions department was a couple years ago at CMU.

Still, it's something I notice. I can't come down too hard on the issue because it's not like NOTHING but translations of NYT bestsellers are available. It just makes me want to know more about the whole process of developing the collection, yannow?

23Things Week 10 - Firefox!

Tabbed browsing really transformed my life. This was before Internet Explorer offered tabs. Someone clued me into Firefox, and I never looked back. (Unless I happened to be on an IE only computer.) Before tabbed browsing, I rarely clicked on a link or watched a video online. I preferred the continuity of the main story and the clutterless bottom bar of the desktop to following the webbed trail of internet links. But once I could store those open links in neat little tabs in the browser, my life would never be the same. I felt like I was getting the whole story.

When I got a Delicious account this year, I installed the Firefox Delicious add-on onto my home computer's browser, and have been happily using it since. It makes adding bookmarks to Delicious a little bit simpler, and accessing my most-recently-bookmarked URLs easier.

Looking at the text sizing options, I find that Firefox lets you magnify the screen to a much larger, uh, magnitude(?) than Internet Explorer does. Something I never knew, and something that will be much appreciated by some of our older patrons!

23things: youtube and flickr

photo by flickr user Hil

I am a huge fan of flickr (see the slideshow to your left on the blog) and find that YouTube is a near endless source of entertainment in my household. I think the creative commons license is a super idea. I did have trouble copy and pasting the embed code into this space. I'm not sure if that was a blogger issue. The same small fragment kept showing up, like it was stuck in the clipboard or something. I ended up having to go to the Potter Puppet Pals website, right-click on the video, and select "copy embed html", then paste it into a Word document, re-copy the code, and go back here and paste it in. I hope it works.

I chose to search the term "puppet" because puppets are creepy, fascinating, and often used in children's programming. They touch on the interesting concept of the uncanny valley (funnily explained, although in NSFW terms, in 30 Rock). And they are used to great effect in videos making homage to and/or fun of children's literature. (Harry Potter Puppet Pals, above, and the Twilight puppet video, also to be found on YouTube).

Other instances of puppets that come to mind right now:

-Vermont's Bread and Puppet Theater (related: a personal recollection from the blog of composer Nico Muhly)

-Haunting puppet show in the haunting Kieslowski film La Double Vie de Veronique

-Wonderful puppet shows held in the summer in the Parque del Buen Retiro in Madrid

-Black Sheep Puppet Festival here in Pittsburgh!