Lunch Lady and the League of Librarians - by Jarrett J. Krosoczka

One in a series of "Lunch Lady" books, this graphic novel demonstrates the power of books and reading, but at the expense of librarians (Rhonda Page, Edna Bibliosa, Vivian Bookwormer, and Jane Shelver). The librarians are out to destroy the new shipment of the X-Station 5000 videogame system and steal money from the cheerleaders, the Book Fair, and the public fund so they can buy weapons in order to carry out their dastardly plan. An epic magic battle the Lunch Lady (using her aresenal of food ammunition) and the Librarians using characters from well known books (e.g. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Three Little Pigs; Alice in Wonderland) ends with the librarians' arrest. Didn't like this one much. The librarians were evil.

Two Naomi's - by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich & Audrey Vernick

I found this novel on the free book exchange shelf at my library. The back blurb indicated that "Naomi Marie starts clubs at the library..." so I took it home to read. It turned out that there was actually quite a bit about libraries in this story of two ten-year olds named Naomi whose parents are dating.

The first page of the story opens with Naomi Marie at her local branch of the New York Public Library talking to librarian Ms. Starr about her new club (Bored? Bored Games!) which appears not to be as popular as Naomi Marie had hoped. Naomi Marie uses the verb "sparkle" when describing how Ms. Starr speaks to her "which must be something they teach in library school" Naomi Marie thinks because her mother, a school librarian, "is like that too, especially ...when she talks about Tom."

Naomi Marie thinks about the library a lot. Even while she's at the beach she's thinking about what books she needs to check out next. And she imagines herself there "accidentally in purpose" pulling up the computer game she and Naomi Edith are creating in order to impress the kids in the Teen Gamez Crew. The adventure game requires the player to use different skills to navigate through different worlds, including naming three Coretta Scott King Book Award Winners and a Newberry. The two Naomis' parents had enrolled both of them in the in the the Girls Gaming the System workshop at the Y, without telling them, in the hopes that it would help them become friends. Their plan turned out to have mixed results. Ultimately everyone learns that just because parents may make unpopular decisions, and are a bit dorky, it doesn't make them bad people.

Naomi Marie really makes good use of the library including placing books on hold. She is excited to be able to walk there with Naomi Edith to pick up the book on "making your old clothes into new ones" that is waiting for her. It is a bit ironic that Naomi Marie's best friend Xiomara (aka Xio) is so uninterested in the library that she needs to be bribed by her parents into going there with a sleepover at Naomi Marie's house.

This is a sweet tale with believably-flawed characters. I read it in an day and allowed myself to bask in some nostalgia about how proud I used to feel as a child when I finished a chapter book.

Visit the authors' websites at
https://www.olugbemisolabooks.com/
http://www.audreyvernick.com/

The Most Fun We Ever Had - by Claire Lombardo

I borrowed this novel about Chicago from the library to read during my recent Thanksgiving trip to the Windy City. It tells the tale of the Sorenson family: Marilyn and David and their four daughters (Wendy, Violet, Liza, and Grace). There is quite a bit of drama between the sisters, and a fair bit of secrecy. But love wins out in the end.

Of course loving families use the library, and we know that the Sorenson's do so from the start. Even sleep-deprived, Marilyn knows to take her two-month old to the library. And like many new mothers she is sure that all the others are better at parenting than she is. She recounts this episode to her husband

I saw this woman at the library today with three kids and the youngest was about Wendy's age and she looked so - competent. And there I was wandering around the new fiction, not even awake, really, and I realized when I got home that I had too many buttons open on my shirt and you could see my whole bra, and I feel like I have this smell about me - do you smell it?

It's clear that trips to the library have become de rigueur by the time third child Liza is born. "The librarian asked me if I'd gotten myself pregnant again. She said she's been noticing that I'm gaining weight" Marilyn tells David by way of explaining that she wants to move from Iowa City back to Chicago, to her childhood home because she just doesn't get out much.

It's swell that the librarian knows the family so well, but really, everyone, never assume anyone is pregnant. And never ask. If someone wants you to know they will tell you.

Adult Violet clearly took her children to the library from a young age as well. She uses a story about a bear keeping a surprise party a secret that they'd heard at story hour as a simile for keeping their new-found half brother (whom Violet gave up for adoption fifteen years prior) a secret from the busybody Shady Oaks moms. Violet's reunion with her birth son (Jonah) is super awkward. She realizes how dull her life is when she drives him through her neighborhood and points out things like her children's school and the Little Free Library for which she helped fund raise. Jonah, who grew up mostly in foster care, also spent some time at Lathrop House (a group home). A place that could use some new iPads for the computer lab and "contemporary books for the library." 

When youngest daughter Grace realizes she is broke, crushing hard on Ben the barista, and, therefore, preoccupied with sex she makes use of the library to "surreptitiously" borrow D.H. Lawrence, Catulus, and Lolita.

Irish twins Wendy and Violet have a long-standing rivalry. Wendy is especially adept at pushing Violet's buttons and decides to give her grief about breastfeeding in front of Wendy - in her own home! "Oh my God, Violet, you have a guest." Wendy taunts. Violet "glanced down at the baby as though she were doing something workaday and normal, filling her gas tank or renewing her library books." Yes, that's because nursing your baby is as perfectly normal as putting gas in your car, or using the library. Don't even get me started. 

Little Women (2018) - the movie

 This modern retelling of Louisa May Alcott's classic work features many of the iconic scenes from the beloved novel, including (spoiler altert!) Beth dies. I mention this because my husband, who has seen the Winona Ryder version of this movie at least twice, seemed blindsided by this turn of events. "You didn't tell me it was going to be a tear-jerker" he sobbed at the end of the film.

Anyway, its inclusion on this blog is made possible by Jo (Sarah Davenport) who, while railing against her editor's demands for further revisions of her novel suggests that she has "other talents" and because she loves books perhaps she could just become "a spinster librarian". Oh, Jo, don't you realize that a simple love of books does not a librarian make? And spinster, really?

Despite this flaw I enjoyed the film.      

Mrs. Fletcher - by Tom Perrotta

Divorced Eve Fletcher is getting ready to send her only son, Brendan, to college. In this case the college is the fictitious Berkshire State University in Massachusetts (aka BSU - the shortened version of  the non-fictitious Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, where I work). This novel alternates between a third-person narration of Eve's life and a first-person narration of Brendan's.

Brendan meets Amber while trying to study at the University library. She comes to the library along with a group of students who are protesting the Michael Brown shooting (Ferguson, Missouri). For Amber Brendan is a "bouquet of red flags" but the two do share the fact that they each have an autistic sibling in common. This, however, is not enough to sustain a relationship. And despite the fact that he occasionally goes to the library to study, Brendan doesn't do well in college, and drops out by Thanksgiving.

Eve, meanwhile has been attending classes at the local community college. She enjoys her class in gender studies and interacting with her classmates, but in the spring when Brendan decides to enroll in classes there she gives this up so as to "spare him the embarrassment of attending the same college as his mother, of possibly bumping into her at the library..."

Something else Eve explores when she becomes an empty-nester is her own sexuality. One way she does is through a three way involving one of her much younger classmates (Julian) and one of her employees (Amanda). Not surprisingly Amanda leaves her job at the Senior Center shortly thereafter in order to take a job at the Public Library as Director of Children's Events "in charge of story time, arts and crafts, author visits, holiday celebrations...Kind of like here (the senior center) just with kids instead of old people." It is at the library that Amanda finds her soul mate "an excommunicated Mormon research librarian named Betsy".

This is good satire. Looking forward to watching the HBO series.

Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder - by John Waters

John Waters was the keynote speaker at the Association of College and Research Libraries Conference at the Baltimore Convention Center in 2007. And I was there. As a dyed-in-the-wool Baltimoreon I was happy to visit my hometown and hear this native son giving us exceptional advice  on how to get more people to visit the library ("be nude").

In this collection of essays he reflects on his work over the last 50 years, and looks at his life today. I was glad to find five places where libraries were mentioned, although all were a bit unusual.

In "Bye, Bye Underground" in which he describes his "odorama" gimmick in the film Polyester using scratch and sniff cards he tells of 3M's inspriational "library of smells".

He recounts many of the strange things people have asked him to autograph, including a freshly used tampon, in "Overexposed". It is of course not unusual to ask an author to sign a book and he relates the story of a girl he scolded for "bending the paperback cover back far enough to break the spine when she asked for autograph on the title page". The fan snapped back at him "I bought the book, so I can do anything I want with it." Waters accepts this and paraphrases the young woman: "In other words, take your library-science bullshit and shove it, Mr. Know-It-All."

Few people would suggest that their ideal home would be in the Brutalist architecture style, but Waters' describes a house of horrors to rival the Addams Family's in "My Brutalist Dream House". The house does have a library, though which one would be able to enter a panic room

by pulling a faux spine of a book you grab like a handle and the whole shelf spins around. Once you saw the horrifying selection of fascist books displayed here in my satellite reading room, you'd feel anything but safe. Hitler at Home, Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany, Magda Goebbles: First Lady of the Third Reich, and Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families. We've got all the other monsters, too: Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Ronald Reagan, even On Democracy by Saddam Hussein.  

As this essay wraps up Waters fetishizes Brutalism as he fantasizes about his favorite coffee-table book This Brutal World by Peter Chadwick. "Damn" he says "that giant concrete mushroom sprouting rigidly from the top of the Geisel Library in San Diego (architect: William Pereira) is hot!"

I'd never heard about Betsy the finger-painting chimpanzee before reading "Betsy". This monkey artist, like Waters and me, hailed from Baltimore. Betsy had some fame in the 1950s, but it was short-lived. Likewise her boyfriend Dr. Thom (a relationship created by her managers) was unable to find success playing piano.

Dr. Watson tried to make him a star in his own right, buying him a piano and hoping to donate some of the recordings of his banging on the keys to the public library to be cataloged and placed alongside the the composers Beethoven, Bartók, and Brahms. The library politely declined. 

I do wonder which library was contacted. Enoch Pratt? Baltimore County Public?

Fans of Waters won't be surprised by his raunchy brand of humor. Those who don't like him, still won't like him, and those who don't know him will likely find out more than they bargained for.

Enough Said - the movie

Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) meets Marianne (Catherine Keener) and Albert (James Gandolfini) at a party. She becomes friends with Marianne, and begins dating Albert unaware that he is Marianne's ex-husband. Eva has heard Marianne bad-mouthing her ex on any number of occasions, and when she discovers that Marianne's ex is her new boyfriend, what she once found endearing about him, suddenly becomes annoying.

Albert works at a television and movie archive and has an uncanny ability to provide historic television lineup information for any day of the week.