Yes, that IS a rip in the paper labeled "Bloody Owl!"

I mean, I can’t say I’m surprised. Obviously if you’re going to take your magical family on a muggle vacation, you would end up at the Holly Springs Library. You can TELL this was written by an authentic English witch because she uses the word “bloody” TWICE and also “horrid”. My only point of confusion is that it is written in pencil on notebook paper instead of on parchment with a quill, but I assume it is all part of her undercover muggle disguise.

After years of picking up pieces of paper with chewed gum stuck to them in the stacks, I feel like this was the universe’s way of giving me a reward.

–While reviewing children’s non-fiction books that are older than 10 years, find Dave’s Quick ‘n’ Easy Web Pages, copyright 1999, which leads me to place numerous bets with myself about whether the numerous links it directs me to still exist. A sample:
Anything on Netscape: No
Angelfire: Yes?
Alta Vista: Yes
Geocities: No. Sad face.

–Completely baffled a dad when I instantly found the book he wanted just as he was about to despair. I described this event in loving detail on the blog I’m keeping for my advisor to grade, but all you really need to know is that someone else recognized that I have MAGICAL LIBRARY POWERS. And that my advisor clearly did not know he would be getting an epic saga when he assigned me to blog my field experience log.

–With my whole iPod to choose from, Trixie decides to only play The A*Teens on the way home. I go with it, since, for some reason, I still know all the words to all of their songs. I’m momentarily ashamed, then decide it is further proof that I am awesome.

–Steven has made Thai curry for dinner! It is even tastier because he also did all the dishes.

–Now I am updating my blog downstairs while listening to the quiet yet vehement cursing of Steven working on websites up in his office. Maybe he needs Dave’s Quick ‘n’ Easy Web Pages? It’s so quick, they don’t even have time for two-thirds of the letters in “and”! And the cover blurb is from the co-founder of Netscape! Maybe for his birthday.

One of my coworkers who goes to NC State showed me this news report today at work about, as she put it “some guy running through the library (voice drops to a whisper) IN THE BUFF”. The headline “Naked Rampage” confused me at first until I saw the video and how he was wildly throwing books off the shelves. So maybe it should be retitled “Naked Book Rampage”, which sounds like a fun time.

But maybe that’s just because I, too, am really stressed about finals. I feel your pain, Seth Pace.

And watching this is a great way to procrastinate. And feel happy inside.

(I saw this first on Bookshelves of Doom)

Also, libraries are the best thing ever:

Despite the fact that only one person in this video is wearing remotely-Lady Gaga-approved fashion:

QED

Anyway, because of these entirely uninformed habits, it always kind of amazes me when I pick out a book I genuinely really like. And this weekend I read TWO. It was craziness.

Up first:

Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge

The first chapter of this book features misfit 12-year-old Mosca rescuing a conman from the stocks in exchange for employment, stealing a homicidal goose, and burning down her uncle’s mill. The conman, after various failed attempts at trying to lose her, eventually leads her into a world of disputed kingship, guild war and espionage, heavy censorship, and religious confusion. It’s not just Hardinge’s intensely detailed world-building, but Mosca and the reader are never really sure who’s on what side until the very end, which makes for exciting dramatic reveals. My favorite part was a Robin Hood-like escape turned sea battle between floating coffee houses. Also that the Guild of Stationers threatened to fight a battle by stabbing rival guildsmen with pens and crushing them underneath printing presses. Also: homicidal goose consistently saves the day. Come on.

You should read this book if:
1) Brave New World and 1984 are too old and serious but you want the same kind of message
2) You like characters who are mostly disreputable but sometimes decide to do the right thing, you know, just to keep people guessing
3) HOMICIDAL GOOSE

Then, as if that weren’t enough book love for one weekend, I also got:

China Mieville's Un Lun Dun

The only thing I don’t like about this book is that the girl on the cover looks kind of freaky, especially at night, so I always had to keep it cover-down when not reading.

Un Lun Dun is basically Alice in Wonderland on speed. After a series of weird and unexplainable events, Zanna and her friend Deebra follow a sentient umbrella to a strange parallel-London, an “abcity”, called UnLondon, where things from the real London go after they’ve become “moderately obsolete” or have just fallen through the cracks. Zanna is greeted by the strange inhabitants as some kind of mythical hero who will deliver them from their greatest enemy, a sentient form of smog banished from London after the Clean Air Act, but it eventually falls to Deebra to go on a bizarre quest with the help of a boy who’s half-ghost, a tailor with a pincushion for a head who makes clothes out of book pages, a bus conductor and his flying bus, and a sentient milk carton. Also, KILLER GIRAFFES. Here’s an excerpt:

“They’ve done a good job making people believe that those hippy refugees in the zoo are normal giraffes. Next you’ll tell me that they’ve got long necks so they can reach high leaves! Nothing to do with waving the bloody skins of their victims like flags, of course. There’s a lot of animals very good at that sort of disinformation. There are no cats in UnLondon, for example, because they’re not magic and mysterious at all, they’re idiots.”–Busconductor Jones pg. 53

And, as if that weren’t enough, China Mieville also does his own illustrations:

A Binja!

This and other illustrations (including the homicidal giraffes) can be found here.

This was definitely the best book I’ve read in a long time, and not just because they mention Extreme Librarians or Bookaneers. You should read this book if:
1) You are alive.

In place of adventures, here is what I do with my time, ordered roughly in how much time I spend on it:

1. Complaining about grad school’s total inadequacy
2. Working at the public library
3. Working on my summer course in management
4. Reading
5. Cooking

Complaining gets top billing because I can pretty much do it while simultaneously doing any of those other things, plus while doing almost anything else (I’m a Tenth Level Whiny Complainer). Working at the public library is awesome, but has the aforementioned Lack of Crazy problems. My summer course’s goal seems to be to mention libraries as little as possible and to have as little to do with my actual life and job goals as it can, thus providing excellent fodder for #1, but not much help in the Cool Things To Blog About arena. That leaves reading (I work at a library) and cooking, two things which I usually don’t blog about because I see them as not of interest to my legions of fans, with a few exceptions. This is going to change.

March
See a class called “How To Write a Novel In a Month” while registering. Decide this is the class for me because 1) I like writing novels, 2) I like having no time to revise, and 3) I only needed one more credit hour.

August–First Week of Class
Discover this is a Martel Student Taught Course. Half the people signed up are Serious English Major Novelists, the other half seem to make up Rice’s Anime Club.

August–Second Week of Class
Discover the Serious English Major Novelists have dropped the class en masse. Learn about: how writing is a serious mystical art that puts your mind in tune with the gods; anime.

September–Third Week of Class
Begin bringing laptop and playing Mah Jong during class, which this week consists of watching a youtube fan video about Halo 2 or something. And always the constant hum of Anime in the background.

September–Fourth Week of Class
Listen to a girl’s novel idea about puppies that, when they lick you, they change your gender.

Rest of September
Skip class. See above.

October
Try to think of ideas for 50,000 word novels that I could write way fast. Decide to just write about my summer job at the library in third person, artfully changing everyone’s name. Figure that will give me AT LEAST 50,000 words of ridic stories.

November 1st
Start novel. Decide this is going to be easy.

November 5th
Already 1000 words behind.

November 10th
3000 words behind. Introduce library trolls for variety.

November 12th
Library trolls aren’t working out. Change plot entirely so that it is now Me (Summer Intern) and the elderly assistant director against a horde of zombies and other book characters that have come alive and are attacking the library in the night.

November 13th
We team up with Napoleon. Excerpt:

I saw that Pat was shifting nervously from foot to foot. “Parlez-vous anglais, Monsieur?
“Vous etes anglaises?!? Je deteste les anglais!”
“Non, non, Monsieur, nous sommes americaines!”
This did not seem to assuage the French general’s suspicions. He glared at us with narrowed eyes. “Yes,” he finally said grudgingly in a heavy French accent. “I do speak English. The text in the side bars around my pictures is in English.”
“So you know that you’re a literary character and not the real Napoleon?” Pat asked, narrowing her eyes. Clearly in her experience this had never happened before.
“Bien sur! The real Napoleon died in 1821. It happens in the end of my book. I was just about to fight Waterloo, as I’ve done precisely seven hundred and fourteen times before, when instead of walking out of my quarters into the dewy morning light, here I was in this… this… how do you say in English?”
“Library?” I supplied.
“Library,” Napoleon agreed. “And there was a dead man attacking me. Most unusual. Does that happen often here? This is, as you say, the real world?”
“Yes,” Pat said. “Welcome to reality, Mr. Bonaparte, or at least the library, which is a step in that direction.”
“I do not like it here at all,” Napoleon said, sheathing his saber and folding his arms across his chest. “I demand that you put me back in my literary genre this instant.”
“Easier said than done,” Pat said. “First we have to find the book you came from.”
“Facile! It’s Napoleon Bonaparte. A biography.”
Pat sighed. “Mr. Bonaparte, we own approximately fifty three books on Napoleon. I assume yours was a child’s biography.”
“Yes, I don’t have syphilis,” Napoleon agreed. “As Andrew Jackson once told me the real Napoleon did. I was mis-shelved next to him once,” he added by way of explanation.

November 14th
Still about 4000 words behind. Give up on plot and start writing random, free-association paragraphs about my life. Excerpt:
Pompeii. I first heard about Pompeii in the fourth grade, and it terrified me. Lots of silly things terrified me in the fourth grade—for instance I spent eight years of my life terrified of Immaculate Conception—but Pompeii I found incredibly creepy. I don’t think I understood exactly how it worked—when the town is covered in ash and preserves everything. Now I realize that the bodies rotted away as normal and the holes left in the ash are what are important—though how they excavate the holes intact I’m still unsure. At the time I thought their bodies somehow lasted, locked in ash, and that these were the, in reality, plaster figures I saw in pictures. The thought of scraping off the ash to the body underneath I found scary. Not to mention the thought of being in a room peopled by ash covered zombies. I think it must have been an early manifestation of my eventual zombie fear.

November 25th
With a lame segue, copy in all the notes I had written that year as Secretary to meet word count.

November 30th
Add some bogus ending attempting to tie it all together subtitled “The Library of the Mind”. Upload to NaNoWriMo website. Send verification page to Student Prof (who I have not seen in approximately two months due to skipping class constantly).

December
Get an A/Pass. Awesome. Vow to never think about it again.

Or so I thought.

Confession: I recently bought Twilight.
I know, I know, I feel awful about it. Especially since I’ve already managed to read the first three books through extreme patience and library-fu. Buying a Twilight book is shameful. Buying a Twilight book you’ve already read is definitely more shameful. To be fair, it is on my reading list for my Young Adult Literature Class next semester, and I did buy it at a used book store for $3. I don’t think any of that went to Stephanie Meyer, so I still feel pretty okay about the practical facts, but my reputation may never recover. I knew this would be necessary since the tens or hundreds of people on the waiting list for it back at my library at home would make it impossible to guarantee my having it a specific week for class, but, oddly, this morning when I went online to request the fourth book, Breaking Dawn, to write a wildly popular review of it, I found that I was number FOUR on the list. And there are EIGHT copies. I’ll probably have it tomorrow. I’m shocked by Twilight’s apparent lack of popularity here, until I realized that a typo in the description of the book calls the vapid main character “Ellen Swan” instead of “Bella Swan”, thus confusing legions of preteen girls. Suckers.

In Penance for this: I vow to be as sarcastic and withering as possible to the inevitable one or two people in our class discussion who will gush endlessly about how much they love Twilight.

Confession: I am incurring library fines AS WE SPEAK
As a librarian, this is incredibly shameful. It gets worse: the source of these fines is none other than the book-on-CD version of I’d Tell You I Love You But Then I’d Have to Kill You. To be fair, I didn’t steal it so that it could be mine forever, but simply forgot to give it to Mom Ladd before her return to Florida and have since been unable to find it to mail it back myself. Trixie probably hid it. Which means that, years from now, someone will pull it from some secret compartment in the back seat, stare at it with raised eyebrows, and then say “Patricia R. Ladd, why do you own this?” in a disgusted tone.

In penance for this: I vow to NOT punch them in the face.

Confession: I stole a full set of cutlery from the Servery
Which I am using EVEN NOW, hundreds of miles away. Just like my embarrassing library fines, I didn’t do this on purpose either. I just sort of found various spoons and forks and knives in various purses and book bags while attempting to pack. On the plus side, it can be very useful to have a fork in your purse, in case someone offers you free but messy food while out and about. On the minus side, they tend to look at you a little funny, and I may be the sole reason why the Servery is losing money.

In Penance for this: I vow to only eat with said cutlery things worthy of the Servery. Meaning anything I cook while really tired or am having one of those haphazard “well, I’m sure applesauce is a fine substitution for flour” kind of days.

There. Now my conscience is clear.

For those of you philistines who are less library-savvy, the Dewey Decimal System divides all books and media into ten basic categories:
000: Computer Science, General Information and General Works
100: Philosophy and Psychology
200: Religion
300: Social Sciences
400: Language
500: Science
600: Technology
700: Arts and Recreation
800: Literature
900: History, Geography, and Biography

Then there are further divisions within each wider category. For instances, the 590′s are “zoological science”, the 599′s are specifically mammals, and some decimal place after that are horses, the most asked-for books at the library by girls aged 5-9 last summer.

With such lengthy numbers possible, I decided the best way to organize the new future-predicting system I’d just invented–or, rather, “discovered” was to use the basic principle of numerology, that certain numbers have inherent meaning in your life and can therefore tell you some truth about it. At least, that’s what I vaguely recall numerology is. Emboldened with this groundbreaking new psychic discovery, I hit the stacks to find out the juicy deets on the future.

I decided to find out about my brother Thomas’ future first, using his birthday, September 12th, 1991. Unfortunately this was the closest:

I can't help feeling like it might be illegal to take pictures of books in a library without checking them out

The book is this one:

A collection of subway and bus maps from international destinations!

Now for the dramatic interpretation bit: On the surface, this could tell us that my brother is destined for a life of international travel and public transport, which means he will always vaguely smell like Burger King and sweat. Another interpretation: that he will spend his life collecting useful data and then transform it into something useless and irrelevant, like this book. Why would I need to know the bus routes in Moscow? I’m sure they’ve changed by now anyway, and even if I were visiting there I’d look online. Who would ever, ever buy this? Therefore, through my keen new psychic powers, I can tell you that my brother’s future is that of an unmarketable book. Trust me, it sounds better with mystic arm movements.

Next I decided to get a glimpse into my own future with this:

Albert Einstein! This is more like it! Thanks, 521.19!

A clear reading of this would be that I am incredibly intelligent, some might even say groundbreaking (in the field of Dewey Decimalogy perhaps?), with memorable hair and extreme pop-culture staying power. This omen also bodes well for my upcoming entrance into the world of science. Do you think this counts as a science experiment?

I then decided to try out other numbers besides birthdays. For instance, my Rice student ID number, the last four digits of which have become such a part of my life over the last few years:

Yeah, 386.3!

That was all the in-library research I did today, mostly because the librarians were starting to give me weird looks and I wanted to escape during a break in the torrential rain, but most libraries have an option for searching by Dewey Decimal number. My library’s new catalog software is a bit crap, but I hope to continue this fascinating new field of paranormal library science in my Library Science grad classes this fall. Who knows, maybe I’ve found my thesis topic?