My job title should be “Hunger Games Librarian”

I shouldn’t complain! I do love The Hunger Games. I had another program yesterday. We made bows out of popsicle sticks and dental floss and arrows out of q-tips! Drugstore archery at it’s finest. After practice you could shoot about 10 feet with some gesture toward accuracy. It was great!

The best thing about the program was an idea that I heard about from the YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association, part of ALA) listserv: have teens bring in canned food for Hunger Games program. Since people not having enough to eat isn’t just a future problem for the districts of Panem, I thought it was a great idea. I suggested that the kids do that and at the program we had four big bags of food ready to go to a food pantry in Lawrence. So wonderful. I also had about three teens stay and help me clean up the big hall where the program was held, picking up all the lost q-tips, collecting all the props we had, and carrying all the stuff downstairs for me.  I know that teens can sometimes be bratty and petulant and rude, but they can also be sweet, helpful, and kind.

I’ve got a good job and some great kids who I get to work for and with. It’s a happy life at the library.

Oh yeah, books:

I just finished Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz. A great story about the friendship between two teen Mexican-American boys growing up in the 1980s in El Paso. It’s got a lot of tough stuff going on: questioning and discovering sexuality and friendship, incarcerated siblings, the aftermath of the Vietnam war, but it’s very well written in a straightforward and yet poetic style. I highly recommend it. It reminded me a bit of John Green because of the sort of contemporary setting and the way the characters’ emotional lives are on display.

Now I’m onto Redshirts by John Scalzi. Remember that ST:TNG episode “Lower Decks”  where you get the perspective of the junior officers? This book is sort of like that crossed with Galaxy Quest. I just started it and it’s already hilarious. Five new ensigns on the Universal United starship Intrepid, start noticing that every time there is an Away Mission, an ensign dies terribly and the handsome first officer usually gets almost killed but recovers miraculously. Needless to say, they start avoiding Away Teams and try to figure out why the ship loses so many crewmen. Awesome!