Shojo Crush!

I've got my first crush on a shojo title and all atwitter over it. The book is Love Roma and it is middle school puppy love at it's toothachingly sweet finest. I picked up the first issue as part of my subway/collection development reading and so far it is just too cute and honest to not adore it.

This has me thinking that I need to read some of the "hot pink" titles I am so leery of in my collection. "Hot pink" is a term we came up with in our YA room for the current batch of semi-steamy teen romance books out there. Your usual "girl book" have been known around librarians as "pink books" for a while. Adding the Hot to the term differentiates these from you run of the mill teen heartache texts.

Gossip Girls, Seven Deadly Sins, The A-List, these books circulate like mad out of my YA room. They certainly have the girls reading and they are crazy about getting the next in the series, it is nice to see thier enthusiasm. All the same there is something shallow about these books, something vaguely skeevy about them. There is a vibe that they embrace fairly shallow concepts of relationships and that they are just another place to reinforce the empty values of wealth and beauty over all which make for a disturbing counterpoint to contemporary pop culture.

In a way I suppose they are primers for Zane or Danielle Steele which the girls will eventually grow into. Since they are currently my worst book I've never read I should really just grab a handful and read them.

Romance fiction is, for me, a wonderful collection development excercise. In my case it is col. dev. in a genre which I have absolutely no history in. I don't think I have read a real romance (outside of manga titles) in my life. As a genre it is wildly complicated with easily a dozen subgenres all publishing like mad. It is a great way to keep your librarian cops up to speed to be getting relevant titles when you have nothing other than your professional resources, training, and reader's advisory experience to go on.

Man I cannot wait until someone returns the next volume of Love Roma though...

Great Symposium

I spent Saturday at The Center for Independent Publishing's SPLAT, aGraphic novel symposium. The event was a blast. I met a lot of really great people, made what I hope will be some good contacts, and generally learned a bunch.

The thing happened at the General Society for Mechanics and Tradesmen, this wonderfully old school gorgeous building right by the theatres off Times Square. The place is just a confectionary of stonework and has one of those achingly lovely libraries which are so unlike contemporary library design.

Spent the vast majority of my time in the Track 3 educators sequence. Lots of big brain stuff on applications of the art form to education and how libraries of different types make them work.

Details to follow, I got too much out of this to blaze it all out at once...

blogger travail

after some time off the blog I am now trying to get back into the swing

having seem to have lost both user name and password this may take a moment, the fact that I have recently done some work which is pointing far more people to this site ups the ante considerably.

really need to set this thing up so I can spout off when I am home and not just in the odd two minute burst that my YS desk schedule is affording me...

more to follow