List-making for librarians
What is the worst, or most time-consuming, question to ask a librarian? No, this is not a trick question or a joke, it actually just happened to me:
What are your 10 favourite books?
Not 10 favourite teen books, or picture books, or graphic novels, but 10 books in general ... this is a project a lady in our Reader's Services department is working on, where she puts little slips of paper in various books that people check out, to show what the staff favourites are. I think that other librarians, booksellers, and Nick Hornby will agree that this is a very loaded question, and will only encourage insomnia and feverish list-making. While I did find it tricky, I managed to come up with ten for this list:
- Ella Minnow Pea - Mark Dunn
- The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
- Beasts of No Nation - Uzodinma Iweala
- In the Shadow of No Towers - Art Spiegelman
- Black and White - David Macaulay
- Little Wolf's Book of Badness - Ian Whybrow and Tony Ross
- His Dark Materials Trilogy - Philip Pullman
- Why? - Nikolai Popov
- How I Live Now - Meg Rosoff
- Please Don't Kill the Freshman - Zoe Trope
Here are the ones I didn't include, but really wanted to ... and keep in mind that both these lists are in no particular order (a request that would take even more time) and I haven't even looked at my bookcases at home, which would give me even more ideas.
- Snow Flower and the Secret Fan – Lisa See
- Flood: A Novel in Pictures - Eric Drooker
- The Rabbits – John Marsden and Shaun Tan
- The Three Pigs - David Wiesner
- The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales - Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith
posted by WMJenner at 12:36 p.m.
1 Comments:
The odd thing is I'm not sure I think in terms of favourite books. I can think of a few that stand out, like Calvino's If On A Winter's Night, and Going Too Far by Tony Hendra, but I haven't read them for a while, and I don't know if they'd still be my favourites if I read them today. They might not have aged well. It's more that they captured my attention and held it at a particular point in time. Okay, so I've read the Calvino book four times, but still.
Probably I think more in terms of favourite authors, which I can save the time of listing by just asking people to click on my profile.
By the way, I'd forgotten about Harlan Ellison, a favourite from many years ago, until reading something by him on the Hello Cthulhu website today. Okay, so it's not brilliant, but does it remind you of anybody?
'E' IS FOR ELEVATOR PEOPLE
They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. There are 500 buildings in the U.S. whose elevators go deeper than the basement. When you have pressed the 'B' button and reached bottom, you must press it twice more. The elevator doors will close and you will hear the sound of special relays being thrown, and the elevator will descend into the caverns.
Chance has not looked favorably on occassional voyagers in those 500 cages. They have pressed the wronge button, too many times. They have been seized by those who shuffle through the caverns, and they have been... treated. Now they ride the cages. They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. They stare at the numbers as they light and then go off, riding up and down even after night has fallen. Their clothes are clean, there is a special dry-cleaner who does all the work. Once, you saw one of them, and her eyes were filled with screams.
London is a city filled with narrow, secure stairways.
3:15 p.m.
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