Jonathan Frazen's take on why novels will survive

Dan Winters for TIME

On the eve of his much lauded new release, "Freedom", Jonathan Frazen, author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Corrections (2001), waxes poetic about life, writing, and the pleasure - and need - of humans to sit down and become immersed in a good read in this cover article from TIME magazine. Here's an excerpt:

"There are any number of reasons to want novels to survive. The way Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can't. He cites — as one does — the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions. With the help of cell phones, e-mail and handheld games, it's easier to stay busy, in the Kierkegaardian sense, than it's ever been.

Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. "We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful," Franzen says. "The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world."

Read more: 

TIME magazine cover article on Jonathan Frazen: Great American Novelist, by Lev Grossman

Barnes & Noble on the sale block

More BookStore turmoil. After reporting huge losses last quarter, and indeed all last year, it's not surprising especially given the upsurge in online e-book purchases. Amazon recently reported that e-books are currently surpassing hard cover purchases and CEO Jeff Bezos is expecting sales of e-books to pass paperbacks within 18 months. Is the bricks and mortar bookstore dead? I hope not. I still like to browse amongst titles I'd not necessarily search for online.

More here:

The Most Amazing Bookstores in the World

Shakespere and Co. in Paris. This legendary English language bookstore has served as a haunt for literary greats such as Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. The store is generously stocked with both used and new books, and features an eclectic collection of not for sale books that can be enjoyed in the reading room upstairs. Often flooded with tourists, the bookstore still serves as go to spot for readers and writers alike.

We seen other pics of bookstores around the globe before but these take the prize.
It's a difficult time for bookstores. Online booksellers offer seductively low prices and the convenience of ordering from home. eBooks are poised to change the business of publishing as we know it, allowing readers to bypass printed material altogether. There are news stories almost every day telling us about another independent bookstore that has shut down, a casualty of the changing book business.

Hay-on-Wye in Wales is known through out the world as 'The Town of Books.' There are more then thirty bookstores in the town, and it has come to be known as a center for second hand and antiquarian books.

However, we hope that there will always be a place for physical bookstores. Below, we have gathered some of the most amazing bookstores in the world (slideshow at link)-- the places that would make any reader shut their laptop, put aside their eReader, and go out to buy a book. From New York to Portugal to China, we've picked the most beautiful, impressive, and inspiring. Let us know what you think!
Slideshow of other great bookstores.

Fox News Attacks Chicago Libraries

Gads!

Here's an excerpt: "They eat up millions of your hard earned tax dollars. It's money that could be used to keep your child's school running. So with the internet and e-books, do we really need millions for libraries?"

Little Bee - there's nothing "little" about this powerful novel

This is one of the most moving books I've read this year. It reaches in and grabs hold of you and won't let go. I found myself examining my own life choices, could I have made different decisions that would have impacted the people around me more, or less? The harsh and sometimes difficult material is bathed in straightforward prose, so much so that it sneaks up on the reader. Often one finds oneself with an unconscious hand over mouth in stunned review as you keep on reading, unable to turn away. You'll emerge with a greater awareness of our world, and maybe even a bit of change to your own world view, on the themes of violence, immigration, friendship, and the power of one person to impact them all.

From the Washington Post Review: "Little Bee" deserves a warning label: "Do not judge this book by its cover. Contents under pressure." Despite the cutesy title (the book was more sensibly published in Britain as "The Other Hand") and the coy book-flap description ("It is a truly special storyand we don't want to spoil it"), "Little Bee" will blow you away.

Like Ian McEwan's propulsive novel "Enduring Love," in which a fatal hot-air balloon accident binds together two strangers who witness it, "Little Bee," by Guardian columnist Chris Cleave, hinges on a single horrific encounter. On a beach in Nigeria, the lives of Little Bee, a teenager from a small village, and Sarah O'Rourke, editor of a posh British women's magazine, are brought into brutal conjunction. Little Bee and her older sister have the misfortune to live on valuable Nigerian oil deposits, for which their family pays a deadly price. Sarah and her husband, heedless tourists out for a walk in the sand, are confronted in an instant with a choice: Save the girls at great personal cost or ignore them.

'The Shallows': This Is Your Brain Online

Just the latest lament on how the internet is making us all incapable of deep thought:
(from the npr article)

June 2, 2010

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle, and that, says author Nicholas Carr, is what you're doing every time you use the Internet.

Carr is the author of the Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? which he has expanded into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption — and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there's not much of that to be found online.

Chronic Distraction

Carr started research for The Shallows after he noticed a change in his own ability to concentrate.

"I'd sit down with a book, or a long article," he tells NPR's Robert Siegel, "and after a couple of pages my brain wanted to do what it does when I'm online: check e-mail, click on links, do some Googling, hop from page to page."

Carr admits he's something of a fatalist when it comes to technology. He views the advent of the Internet as "not just technological progress but a form of human regress."

Human ancestors had to stay alert and shift their attention all the time; cavemen who got too wrapped up in their cave paintings just didn't survive. Carr acknowledges that prolonged, solitary thought is not the natural human state, but rather "an aberration in the great sweep of intellectual history that really just emerged with [the] technology of the printed page."

Read the whole article

The Internet, Carr laments, simply returns us to our "natural state of distractedness."

Mysteries Resolved: Edgar Awards Given

The Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of their prestigious Edgar Awards for the best crime and mystery writing at a banquet in New York City on Thursday night. Edgars went to John Hart, right, for his novel “The Last Child” and Stefanie Pintoff, whose “In the Shadow of Gotham” won best first novel by an American author. In nonfiction, “The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives,” edited by Otto Penzler, won in the critical-biographical category, and Dave Cullen took the prize for best “fact crime” for “Columbine,” his account of the 1999 shootings at that Colorado high school. Dorothy Gilman was named this year’s grand master. A complete list of winners is at theedgars.com.

Other best novel nominees - winner in red:

• The Missing by Tim Gautreaux (Random House - Alfred A. Knopf)
• The Odds by Kathleen George (Minotaur Books)
• The Last Child by John Hart (Minotaur Books)
• Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston (Random House - Ballantine Books)
• Nemesis by Jo Nesbø, translated by Don Bartlett (HarperCollins)
• A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (Simon & Schuster - Atria Books)

A complete list of winners is at theedgars.com.

Why iPad ebooks are so cool - check out Alice in Wonderland

Yeah, we all love paper books. But you have to admit that e-books can, indeed, do stuff that paper books cannot. A good example of this is Alice for the iPad, Lewis Carroll’s story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland turned into a children’s storybook but with an interactive twist.

This particular e-book is not meant to be read sitting still; it’s meant to be shaken and stirred, forcing many interactive elements on the screen to move around, fall down or jump up. And I bet the kids will love it.

Pulitzer Prize 2010 fiction to "Tinkers" by Paul Harding

For distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to "Tinkers," by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press), a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.

Finalists

Also nominated as finalists in this category were "Love in Infant Monkeys," by Lydia Millet (Soft Skull Press), an imaginative collection of linked stories, often describing a memorable encounter between a famous person and an animal, underscoring the human folly of longing for significance while chasing trifles; and “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” by Daniyal Mueenuddin (W.W. Norton & Company), a collection of beautifully crafted stories that exposes the Western reader to the hopes, dreams and dramas of an array of characters in feudal Pakistan, resulting in both an aesthetic and cultural achievement.

From the Booklist review of "Tinkers":

A tinker is a mender, and in Harding’s spellbinding debut, he imagines the old, mendable horse-and-carriage world. The objects of the past were more readily repaired than our electronics, but the living world was a mystery, as it still is, as it always will be. And so in this rhapsodic novel of impending death, Harding considers humankind’s contrary desires to conquer the “imps of disorder” and to be one with life, fully meshed within the great glimmering web. In the present, George lies on his death bed in the Massachusetts house he built himself, surrounded by family and the antique clocks he restores. George loves the precision of fine timepieces, but now he is at the mercy of chaotic forces and seems to be channeling his late father, Howard, a tinker and a mystic whose epileptic seizures strike like lightning. Howard, in turn, remembers his “strange and gentle” minister father. Each man is extraordinarily porous to nature and prone to becoming “unhitched” from everyday human existence and entering a state of ecstasy, even transcendence. Writing with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense. --Donna Seaman

Looking for a happily ever after? What’s the story with the future of independent bookstores? In some cases, it’s quite positive.

More than three independent bookstores are hanging on, if not thriving, in Boston. With more and more city libraries shutting their doors at least several days per week, let's look again to the independent bookstore as a place to browse new and old titles and converse in the community square about all things "books".

Here's the article from the Wall St. Journal:

The iPad from Apple is here - wonder whether it's worth the hype?

The iPad, Apple's version of a slate-like hand-held computer device has arrived to much fanfare. The ebook, web-browser, and video playing is all it's cracked up to be, but there's more. Watch MacWorld's video below to see the iPad in action.

Pen/Faulkner Award announced, Sherman Alexie wins for "War Dances"

The prestigious annual award, presented by the Washington-based PEN/Faulkner Foundation, was given to Alexie because of his book's breadth of topics and innovative style, judges said. "War Dances" consists of short stories interspersed with poems.

Alexie, who lives in Seattle, won a National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2007 and this week, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. He is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian who grew up on a reservation 50 miles northwest of Spokane. Severely ill as a child, he overcame his conditions and set out for a life of reading and writing. In high school he was the only Native American and became a scholar-athlete, later writing about those experiences in "True Diary."

Many of Alexie's works have been honored, including a story collection, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," which was a PEN/Hemingway Award winner for best first book of fiction. The attention led to a film, "Smoke Signals," which won two awards at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.

Alexie, who receives $15,000 for the PEN/Faulkner honor, will be saluted May 8 on the 30th anniversary of the program.

The other finalists -- Barbara Kingsolver, Lorraine M. Lopez, Lorrie Moore and Colson Whitehead -- will also be recognized.

More>>>

Eat Pray Love - soon to be movie with Julia Roberts. Watch the trailer.

After months and months of waiting, the trailer for the adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, has finally arrived.

Here's a summary of the film from the NY Times:
A woman who once made it her goal in life to marry and rear a family finds her priorities suddenly shifting in director Ryan Murphy's adaptation of author Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir. In the eyes of many, Gilbert was a woman who had it all -- a loving husband, a great apartment, and a weekend home -- but sometimes one realizes too little too late that they haven't gotten what they truly wanted from life. On the heels of a painful divorce, the woman who had previously looked forward to a contented life of domesticated bliss sets out to explore the world and seek out her true destiny.


Although I didn't love the book as so many others did, I do find the trailer for the movie to be intriguing, perhaps the parts of the book that annoyed me will be condensed or eliminated, so I'll probably venture out to see it when it releases on August 13, 2010 or thereabouts.

Elmore Leonard character of Kentucky lawman comes to FX channel in "Justified"

Check out this new series on FX Channel (check local listings). Created and co-produced by reknowned crime writer Elmore Leonard from a character in his short story, "Fire in the Hole" (you can read this entire short story here.) The series captures most of Leonard's tone and the new take on "lawman" is well worth a look. You might even say, it's "justified".
You can read more about Elmore Leonard here.
Here's what the FX website has to say about this new show:  


JUSTIFIED is the story of Deputy U.S. Marshal RAYLAN GIVENS (Timothy Olyphant), a true-blue hero and something of a throwback, given to wearing a Stetson and cowboy boots, carrying his sidearm in a hip holster – a weapon he only draws when he has to, and when he does, he shoots to kill, because, as he sees it, that’s the purpose of a gun. something of a throwback, given to wearing a Stetson and cowboy boots, carrying his sidearm in a hip holster – a weapon he only draws when he has to, and when he does, he shoots to kill, because, as he sees it, that’s the purpose of a gun. JUSTIFIED is the story of Deputy U.S. Marshal RAYLAN GIVENS (Timothy Olyphant), a true-blue hero and something of a throwback, given to wearing a Stetson and cowboy boots, carrying his sidearm in a hip holster – a weapon he only draws when he has to, and when he does, he shoots to kill, because, as he sees it, that’s the purpose of a gun. USTIFIED is the story of Deputy U.S. Marshal RAYLAN GIVENS (Timothy Olyphant), a true-blue hero. JUSTIFIED is the story of Deputy U.S. Marshal RAYLAN GIVENS (Timothy Olyphant), a true-blue hero and something of a throwback, given to wearing a Stetson and cowboy boots, carrying his sidearm in a hip holster – a weapon he only draws when he has to, and when he does, he shoots to kill, because, as he sees it, that’s the purpose of a gun. 
Raylan was born and reared in the hill country of eastern Kentucky.   It was in Harlan where he played ball, chased girls and dug coal.  And it was from Harlan, at age 19, that he ran, determined to become a U.S. Marshal.  Now, years later, after shooting a gun thug in a Miami hotel and thereby incurring the wrath of his Marshals Service superiors, Raylan has been sent in punishment (and by fate?) to the one place to which he vowed he would never return – Kentucky.
The character of Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens was created by America’s pre-eminent crime novelist Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, Out of Sight) and is played by Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood, Live Free or Die Hard).  The Chief Deputy of the Lexington U.S.M.S. office is ART MULLEN, played by Nick Searcy (Cast Away, From the Earth to the Moon).  Working alongside Raylan are fellow deputies TIM GUTTERSON – played by Jacob Pitts (The Pacific) – and RACHEL BROOKS – played by Erica Tazel (Life, The Office).  Raylan, Art and the other deputies do what all U.S. Marshals do – chase down fugitives, protect witnesses, transport prisoners.
But, being back in Kentucky, Raylan will also have to confront a past crowded with enough skeletons to choke a graveyard.  There’s his old friend and fellow coal-miner, now fugitive bank-robber, BOYD CROWDER (Walton Goggins - The Shield).  There’s AVA CROWDER (Joelle Carter - Monk, CSI: Miami), the cheerleader from his youth he always had a crush on.  There’s ex-wife WINONA (Natalie Zea -Hung, Dirty Sexy Money).  And, looming largest of all in Raylan’s past, there’s his career criminal father ARLO (Raymond Barry - Cold Case, Training Day).ething of a throwback, given to wearing a Stetson and cowboy boots, carrying his sidearm in a hip holster – a weapon he only draws when he has to, and when he does, he shoots to kill, because, as he sees it, that’s the purpose of a gun.
Raylan was born and reared in the hill country of eastern Kentucky.   It was in Harlan where he played ball, chased girls and dug coal.  And it was from Harlan, at age 19, that he ran, determined to become a U.S. Marshal.  Now, years later, after shooting a gun thug in a Miami hotel and thereby incurring the wrath of his Marshals Service superiors, Raylan has been sent in punishment (and by fate?) to the one place to which he vowed he would never return – Kentucky.
The character of Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens was created by America’s pre-eminent crime novelist Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, Out of Sight) and is played by Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood, Live Free or Die Hard).  The Chief Deputy of the Lexington U.S.M.S. office is ART MULLEN, played by Nick Searcy (Cast Away, From the Earth to the Moon).  Working alongside Raylan are fellow deputies TIM GUTTERSON – played by Jacob Pitts (The Pacific) – and RACHEL BROOKS – played by Erica Tazel (Life, The Office).  Raylan, Art and the other deputies do what all U.S. Marshals do – chase down fugitives, protect witnesses, transport prisoners.
But, being back in Kentucky, Raylan will also have to confront a past crowded with enough skeletons to choke a graveyard.  There’s his old friend and fellow coal-miner, now fugitive bank-robber, BOYD CROWDER (Walton Goggins - The Shield).  There’s AVA CROWDER (Joelle Carter - Monk, CSI: Miami), the cheerleader from his youth he always had a crush on.  There’s ex-wife WINONA (Natalie Zea -Hung, Dirty Sexy Money).  And, looming largest of all in Raylan’s past, there’s his career criminal father ARLO (Raymond Barry - Cold Case, Training Day).

Great international bookstores pics:

Selexyz Bookstore in Maastricht, Holland. The bookstore is installed in an old Dominican church.  Photography by madcrow Flickr.com

The coffee shop of the Selexyz Bookstore in Maastricht is settled in the altar of the church. Photography by edwin_wisse Flickr.com

Borderlands Science Fiction Bookstore in San Francisco is home to this hairless Sphynx cat.  

Photography by massdistraction Flickr.com

Shakespeare & Co. Antiquarian Books, Paris.  Probably the most photographed bookstore of the world. 

Photography by Simple Dolphin Flickr.com

 A view from inside the bookstore Shakespeare & Co in Paris. Photo by Toshio Kishiyama Flickr.com

On the third floor of the bookstore Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, you'll find this bed and the motice board behind. 

Photography by Glynnis Ritchie Flickr.com

The Art Nouveau facade of the Lello bookstore in Porto, Portugal. Photography by pedrosimoes7  Flickr.com

The Lello bookstore in Porto, Portugal, is open since 1906 and is surely one of the most beautiful bookstores of the world. 

Photography by delviking Flickr.com

This is the entrance of the bookstore Le Bal des Ardents in Lyon, France. 

Photography by punkinmom_{caroline} Flickr.com and www.butterflymoments.fr

As you know if you frequent this blog, we love great bookstores wherever we can find them. More examples from around the web will be posted soon. Please check back and thanks for supporting your local library or bookshop!

More Creative Bookshelves

We had such a huge response for a previous posting of creative bookshelves, we've pulled together a few more examples from around the web. Enjoy!

'Wolf Hall' By Hilary Mantel Wins National Book Critics Circle Award

Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall," winner last year of the Man Booker Prize in London, was honored Thursday night on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The novel, set in the age of King Henry VIII, won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for fiction. It's a compassionate narrative of royal adviser Thomas Cromwell, a leading enforcer of the English Reformation and a rival of Sir Thomas More.

More>>>

Founded in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Award is among the US's most prestigious literary prizes, along with the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner, for books published in English including translations. Last year's fiction winner was Roberto Bolaño's 2666, which was published in English translation in 2008.

Books as Art: Carol Owen's mixed media

Carol Owen has been a professional artist for 30 years, working initially as a weaver and papermaker, and now in mixed media. She has exhibited throughout the United States and her work has appeared in many publications, including Collage for the Soul, and magazines including Mary Engelbreit's Home Campanion (Dec/Jan 2008), Somerset Studio, Legacy and Country Living. 


Her creations, which she calls "altered books," have a "found-object" and Victorian feel.


Her interview with The Baltimore Sun is reprinted below:

How long have you been working with books and/or paper? I’ve been working with paper for a long time. I made my own paper for several years, and created wall pieces with it. And with the shrine Spirit Houses I do, I use handmade Japanese rice paper, and collage with various papers.

What is it about books that connects with you – and with buyers? I got into altered books about 5 or 6 years ago. I’ve always had a love of books, since I was a child. And with the altered books, people are fascinated with holding a book in their hands and turning pages to reveal the art work.

Name a favorite book, and tell us why you liked it. Nick Bantock’s books, specifically the Gryphon and Sabine series, started me on my fascination with altered books. And I collect Robert Sabuda’s pop-up books.

What have you read lately that you’d recommend? I’m in a book club (actually, I’m in two book clubs!), and my favorite read lately was The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. It really grabs your heart.

Teachers promote reading with a flash mob dancing to new lyrics of Black Eyed Peas song!

Teachers and administrators at Ocoee Middle School in Florida promote reading with a flash mob dancing to new lyrics of Black Eyed Peas song!




Students and faculty at Ocoee Middle School who made a music video to promote reading -- changing the lyrics to a song by the Black-Eyed Peas -- shared the spotlight with Diane Sawyer on the Oprah show this afternoon.

The "Gotta Keep Reading" music video by Ocoee Middle featured students and staff dancing and singing, while holding books, in the school's courtyard.

Oprah Winfrey had a segment of her show filmed on the campus this morning, where she announced that she and Target would pay for a "wall-to-wall" makeover of the school library, including new furniture, new computers and 2,000 books.

"They managed to get almost 1,700 kids pumped up about something you know I love," Winfrey said during the broadcast. The Ocoee song includes the refrain, "This book's going to be a good, good book to read."

Principal Sharyn Gabriel said the school was thrilled with the attention from the national talk show and hopeful the experience would make reading seem cool to sometimes reluctant teenage readers.

"We really, really wanted to get kids excited about reading," Gabriel said.

The video idea started with the school's reading coach, Janet Bergh, who thought it would be fun to do something similar to the "flash mob" video The Oprah Show had done in Chicago.

"Students have a lot of other interests. Oftentimes, reading takes a back seat to that," Bergh said on The Oprah Show, explaining why she thought a "flash mob" video might inspire. "It's not always real cool to be seen with a book."

The school secured copyright information from the Black-Eyed Peas, and music and drama teachers then set out to write lyrics to the band's "I Gotta Feelin" song and to choreograph dance moves. Students practiced the dance in their physical education classes, and then shot video, with help from Full Sail University, in December.

Great idea to get kids interested and excited about reading!

Want to see Carnegie Libraries in California - including the old Corona Library?

This picture makes us sad because our childhood library was torn down in a misguided attempt at "urban renewal" by the City of Corona in the 1970's. Here's the details:

Corona Public Library
opened 1906
Public library from 1906-1971
demolished, 1978

grant amount: $11,500
architectural style: Classical Revival (Type B)
architect: F. P. Burnham

---

The architectural significance of the Corona Public Library as Corona's only example of the Classical Revival style, designed by prominent architect F. P. Burnham, and built by S.L. Bloom, was acknowledged by its placement on the National Register of Historic Places. However, the building stood "boarded up and vacant while the city raged about what was to be done with the building" from 1971 to 1978. It was demolished in 1978 and the Heritage Room at the new library was "started as a compromise between keeping the city's history alive and having a new library building." Corona's library history dates from an 1893 WCTU reading room, replaced by an 1895 YMCA library, in its turn taken over by the Women's Improvement Club and finally transferred to the city in 1900. The early libraries occupied a succession of rented rooms until Carnegie funding of $10,000 was obtained in March,1905. This was increased to $11,500 due to the intercession of J. A. Flagler of New York, who apparently had ties in Corona in addition to being a close friend of Andrew Carnegie. Ground was broken in August and the building was dedicated July 2, 1906. The building was demolished in 1978.

You can check out other examples of Carnegie Libraries in California  and elsewhere here>>>

photos courtesy of the Heritage Room, Corona Public Library

The Coolest Bookcases

We love bookcases. We love perusing our friends', we love organizing our own, and we love how having books all over the house personalizes it in a way that furniture rarely can.

Your bookcase can illustrate your personality and the importance (or not) of books in your life.


Check out these pics of more of the coolest bookcases.

Librarians now cool - and also, endangered. Read about it In the new book release "This Book is Overdue", Bryan Hissong's humorous love letter to those who toil in the stacks.

Reprinted from: USA TODAY
by Craig Wilson
WESTMINSTER, Md. — Bryan Hissong is 31, happily married, and the father of a 2-year-old named Olivia. He seems quite content with his life.
But Marilyn Johnson, who is not his wife, loves him and has said so very publicly. It doesn't matter that she has never met him. Hissong is a librarian.

He doesn't look like the clichéd librarian of old. He favors plaid shirts and is sporting a beard on his babyface — but that doesn't matter to Johnson, either. She's well aware that librarians wear many disguises these days. Often they're pierced, tattooed, punk with bright blue hair. She loves them all.

Who knew librarians had become so ... cool?

Johnson is the author of the new This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (Harper, 272 pp., $24.99), a humorous, unabashed love letter to the men and women who used to toil quietly in stacks but now circulate in cyberspace.

"They're smart and they're funny and they totally get it," says Johnson, whose respect for librarians grew tenfold when she was researching The Dead Beat, her acclaimed 2006 book on obituaries and obit writers. "They're not saints, but ethically and morally and every other good way, they're professionals. They're good people."

And possibly endangered.

"It turns out this is a good time to point out that we're shooting ourselves in the foot if we let these people go from our lives," says Johnson, 55, who lives in New York's Hudson Valley. "We need them more than ever."

The reasons are simple and multiple: "The middle class is squeezed and needs libraries more, information is multiplying at an alarming rate so we need librarians more, and the jobless are streaming to libraries in droves," she says.

Overall, the use of public libraries is up by 6% over last year, according to the Library Journal, while states and municipalities are drastically cutting back on aid to libraries, causing many to close. New York has just proposed its fifth cut to state library spending in two years. Ohio libraries were threatened with up to 50% cuts in aid last summer before thousands of patrons protested to legislators, who then cut state funding by 18%.

Hissong's boss, Lynn Wheeler, 61, director of the Carroll County (Md.) Public Library system and a 37-year veteran in the library world, has seen all this firsthand but remains upbeat about her rapidly changing profession.

"Librarians are life-long learners," Wheeler says. "We're flexible. We're up to speed."

And despite losses in the ranks — mainly from budget cuts nationwide — librarians march on into new territory. According to Johnson, thousands of librarians even frequent virtual reality sites such as Second Life where they share resources and socialize. Wheeler acknowledges that this brave new tech world can be overwhelming but says libraries are keeping up, with 24/7 website operations, self-checkouts and improved cooperation between branches. Some patrons now even text-message their questions.

"The demand for technology access and the teaching role for librarians will only continue to grow," she says.

Hissong agrees. "We have had this huge burst of information, yes, but how do you know what you want or need?" he asks of his patrons. "That's where a librarian comes in: to usher people through, to filter things out."

Johnson, who visited libraries big and small researching her book, will be the keynote speaker for the Virtual Worlds and Libraries Online Conference on March 6. The theme: "The Future is Now."

That "future" includes Kindle and other e-readers. What will their arrival do to traditional libraries?

"Nothing," Johnson says. "It's just more neat delivery systems for books. There will be some shifting shelf space, as there has been to accommodate DVDs and audiobooks, but we will always need books. And good public libraries, if they're funded, will figure out ways to get them to us."

On a recent afternoon at the Westminster library here in northern Maryland, the main reading room is packed, and all 20 computers are occupied.

Hissong is wandering the floor with a Samsung Q1 tablet computer in his hands, helping patrons find everything from a Jane Austen classic to an Austin Powers DVD.

"A library is as popular as ever. It's not just a book depository anymore," he says. "We're a resource for everyone. If they check out a book, great. If not, that's OK, too."

"Harriet the Spy" re-imagined by Disney for 21st cent. kids

In March, the Disney Channel will release Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars starringJennifer Stone (one of the leads in the Disney Channel's Wizards of Waverly Place).

It will, for better or for worse, give the beloved children's book a 21st Century makeover. Watch the trailer below for more details, but here are the basics: Harriet is now a blogger competing with a popular girl at school in "blog war," armed with a laptop and high-tech surveillance devices.

One YouTube commenter was pretty excited by the trailer: "OMG love the book the 90s movie and will love this!" Another commenter skipped the book altogether: "They should leave Harriet the Spy alone and keep it as an awesome memory that belongs to Nickelodeon." Finally, one reader added an expletive-laden comment with this bit of criticism: "Harriet the Spy is not about popularity or getting the hot guy. It's about a girl who wants to become a writer one day so she observes people and writes in her notebook."

This will undoubtedly spawn The Big Literary Debate of the Week. What do you think? Is this an imaginative improvement or abusive adaptation?