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.