Book review: will grayson, will grayson

So I just finished reading will grayson, will grayson by john green and david levithan which was leant to me by my awesome friend Pam at our last book club meetup. It's taken me a few months to actually get through it, because I'm super lazy, but I have to say it's quite an interesting book.

Two teens, both named will grayson, meet on a cold night in Chicago after having gone through some interesting events earlier on in the night. Their meeting causes a chain of events that really ends up making both characters grow up a little bit. 

Will Grayson is a sarcastic, hip teenager. Will has a best friend named Tiny Cooper, which is ironic since Tiny is not-so-tiny. Also, Tiny is very much the gayest person he knows.

"Tiny Copper is not the world's gayest person, and he is not the world's largest person, but I believe he may be the world's largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world's gayest person who is really, really huge."

Will describes their friendship as almost being pushed onto him, like they wouldn't be friends if they hadn't met as eight year olds. When Tiny decides to put on a musical based on his life, tension between the two rise up enough to cause a fight.

will grayson is sarcastic, alone, and in love with a boy he met online. he has no friends except for maura who is as sarcastic and depressed as he is.

"it's like those people who become friends in prison even though they would never really talk to each other if they weren't in prison. that's what maura and i are like, i think."

Both characters meet on a night out in Chicago. Will Grayson is there to see some hipster band called the Maybe Dead Cats that he actually ends up not being able to get into due to his shitty fake ID. He ends up wandering the streets of Chicago while his two friends Tiny and Jane (maybemorethanafriend) enjoy the show, which is where he meets will grayson.

will grayson came to chicago to meet isaac, who he met in a chatroom. what he ultimately finds out is that issaac doesn't exist and was being portrayed online by his friend maura. 

This is the moment the two characters meet, and other than being  an awkward moment of two people having the same name, it goes quite normally. But when Tiny meets up with them after the concert, he is certain he is in love with other will grayson.

Teen angst, wittiness, musicals, internet speak, loud personalities are all things you can find in this novel. If you are looking for realistic portrayals of teenager, then don't look here. That is my only complaint about will grayson, will grayson; I don't really see the characters as being realistic. No teens I've ever known talk or act like the ones in this book. 

Otherwise, quite an enjoyable read. The thing I liked most of it was how it was written. The authors differentiate the characters by writing Will Grayson's chapters with no grammatical errors and will grayson's chapters with not capital letters and some internet speak. Maybe 3/5 stars for me.

On my shelf this week

So, I have these two shelving units at work. They basically run my life. On a normal week you can see me using my rolling step stool numerous times to shift material around and keep things organized. I sometimes find myself shifting things I have just moved into a different spot just because it's organized better that way (or because it looks better, if I have more space).

I thought it might be interesting to take a few pictures of my shelves to show how our library handles processing, and the interesting stuff I have in this week. My shelves are a little crammed lately due to procrastination on my part in sending out rural material.

When material comes in, our admin date stamps it and puts it onto my "Enter into Genie" shelf. I then sort through this material and decide where it goes next. Books get placed onto my "to catalogue" shelf and wait patiently for me to get to them. Serials (journals, looseleafs, etc.) get entered quite quickly and then move on to the library with only a date stamp.

After I catalogue an item, it gets placed in the "Catalogued (waiting for proofing)" shelf, then moves on to "Waiting for labels". Depending on how busy I or the librarians are things can stay in any one of these steps for a while. Eventually they end up in the Regina library collection or on my "Rural shipping" shelves (yes, plural). 

As I said, I have procrastinated a little in sending out rural material. The reasoning behind this is because often I process one rural book at a time and it's very cumbersome to send out only one book at a time. So I often wait until material piles up a bit to send it out.

What ended up happening this time was material started piling up then several new boxes of books arrived. Furthermore, a few other projects within the office ended up taking up more of everyone's time. Eventually my shelves will empty a little. Enough for me to make them look clean before the big "December" order arrives and the shelves become full once again!

As you can see from my pictures, some of the rural books have spilled out onto a book cart because they were taking up too much space. Hopefully they get sent out soon (I packed a box yesterday, I swear!) but our office is currently pretty busy.

Something that came in this week which I find quite interesting is old appeal case law reports from the early 1900's. They are mostly in mint condition and will replace some of the volumes in our collection. They are quite pretty to look at and we all know exactly what old books smell like (heaven to some librarians/techs). So pretty awesome add to our collection overall.

Our shiny new publication (Queen Bench Rules Annotated or Big Red Binder) is also on my "Waiting for labels" shelf so our new fourth edition will soon be in our collection! Our patrons have been waiting and calling for the QBRA for a long time and will soon be able to use our new edition.

I have to say, making this post was really annoying. I really hate how blogger manipulates pictures. They generally don't appear where you want them to and text doesn't adapt around pictures very well. /rant

Social Media Challenge #2: Pinterest

Ok, I had huge reservations about Pinterest before I even really knew anything about it. All I had seen or heard about it was that it had lots of pictures of braids or crafty projects and that didn't really interest me at all.

I decided to not judge a book by its cover (which I totally do , by the way) and dive into Pinterest. 

The basic principle of Pinterest is that you follow boards made by other users. Those users have collected pins that can be taken from anywhere on the internet and categorized them into things like "books", "recipes", etc. You then build a personalized home page that organizes pins by the date they were added. The home page has similarities to Facebook in the sense that it amasses the things you like on one page. If you then wanted to take a closer look at a pin, you just click on it.

 As expected, most of the boards I follow are book/library related but there are a few surprises. A few examples are: books, Lord of the Rings, typography and lettering, tv and movies, recipes, etc.

I have to say this website is very well done. There is almost no learning curve so you   can navigate boards quick quickly. The layout is great and even if you might have a lot going on on your home page it feels very simplified. Their use of colour is sparse but when used really reinforces the brand. This might be the library tech in me but sometimes I wish the pins were organized less randomly, but I get that it's supposed to be like a pin board with things not exactly equal.

One thing that really bothered me was something I discovered while writing this post. I tried to make a list of the boards I was following and thought there would be a page that listed them. What I ended up finding was a page listing the people I was following instead. On your homepage each pin lists what board it came from, but obviously each user posts at different times/days and older pins would not be at the top of your home page. I got as much information as I could, but I could still be missing some of the board titles from my list.

My favourite board would have to be "books" because the user really goes out of their way to post a lot of material that is interesting and relevant. Some of the pins are a little silly (mostly the memes) but still interesting.

I can kind of see how libraries could use this in an interesting way. They could build boards for library programs, new books in their collections, library shelves around the world, etc. It would be interesting to see if this catches on, but I think for the moment Facebook still has the monopoly due to its sheer number of users.

I'm realizing that I have a lot of pre-conceived notions of what these social media platforms are actually like. I really need to take a step back and use them before judging. Also, to be a complete hypocrite, one of the boards I most often look at is actually pictures of braids.

Reciprocal library & archives tour : Regina Public Library (Prairie History Room)

I was surprised to find out a few weeks ago that some of the libraries/archives in Regina were organizing tours so that library staff could visit each others facilities and learn more about what collections we have. I thought it was a wonderful idea and signed myself up as soon as I could. Something that definitely needs to be worked on more is communication between different organizations so that we can not only have better service, get to know each other a litter better and in most cases try to avoid duplication of materials. 

The first tour I went on was at the Regina Public Library, specifically the Prairie History Room.

May P. Chan, the Prairie History Librarian, was our tour guide and brought us through a quick tour of the central library before going on to the Prairie History Room. We quickly browsed through the reference, business, law and government documents sections, and learned that although they might not have an extensive collection, it is general enough that patrons can go and start their research at the public library. When members of the public come into our library looking to do research they often mention they had been to the public library first and had been advised to come look at our material.

Next we were brought into the Prairie History Room, which was the focus of our tour. The location is small but contains a lot of information. It is not climate controlled and is also placed directly under public washrooms on the second floor, May said that this was one of her primary concerns. If there was ever a disaster (fire, water, etc.) we would lose a lot of valuable resources.

"The Prairie History Room is a specialized collection of non-circulating community history and genealogical materials focusing on the history and peoples of the Northern Great Plains (Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan) from pre-settlement times to present day. The room is located at the Central branch of the Regina Public Library." RPL website

Their primary focus is to collect as much information as possible about the prairies, mainly Saskatchewan. They have a microfilm/form/fiche collection of various journals and historical documents that the public can view with the help of staff, in fact as we were finishing our tour two people came in to view some of these documents. They have a small, but very interesting, yearbook collection that works by donation. May showed us a picture of Shirley Douglas (daughter of Tommy Douglas, mother of Kiefer Sutherland) from one of the yearbooks in the collection. May had prepared a few other things to show us, including the oldest book in the library, oldest book published in Saskatchewan, the illustrated was news (very cool!) and a book of war hero's clippings.

It was a great tour, and as I had never been inside of the prairie history room it was quite interesting to find out what they had there. May obviously loves her job and was very welcoming to the participants.

Social Media Challenge #1: Twitter

The first website I challenged myself to use last week is Twitter. Twitter lovers beware, I'm going to trash talk it for a few sentences.

Now, Twitter is my most scoffed at social media website. I have never liked the basic premise of it or how people seem to use it: to be whiny little babies. To me, it had always been a website used to be really egotistical about yourself, and let everyone constantly know what you're doing (I'm looking at you "I'm going to the bathroom" people). I created an account a few years ago, during what I call my "obsessed with FOB, MCR, PATD" phase to see what musicians were posting. If you don't know what those acronyms mean, then you probably weren't as obsessed with emo bands as I was in my teen years, pat yourself on the back. Even then, I still had a problem seeing the validity of this website.

Well, I officially take my statements back after only a week of using it on a regular basis. I still have some problems seeing how it can be useful personally, as I don't really like to post a tonne of random shit about my life. Alternatively, I can see it's use for networking (business), keeping up with people you admire (celebrities) or getting news in a speedy format.

I actually regularity check my Twitter feed now to keep myself updated on the people I follow. I use this handy feature Twitter added in 2009 called "lists" so that I don't overwhelm my self with information, as some of the people I follow tend to constantly update (I'm talking live tweeting of conferences and such). As of now I follow 60 people and have 8 lists: Actors/Actresses, Comedy, Fransaskois, Law, Libraries, Music, News and my private list called Friends.

For the moment what I find really interesting is my Law, Libraries and Music lists, as those are the people who seem to post the most often. I have three people in my Law list: two law librarians and one in legal instruction. My library list has Regina Public Library and Saskatoon Public Library who both utilize their Twitter in great ways. Finally, my music list has all those acronyms I mentioned earlier plus a few more recent Canadian ones.

Twitter is simple, easy-to-use, doesn't have a huge learning curve to it and is a quite enjoyable way of connecting with people. I still have things to discover as I really haven't explored that much into my interests or more into libraries, which I what I would really like to use Twitter for. If anyone is interested I'm @sroussellewis, not that I'm particularly witty or funny, but whatever.