Tidbits (of cheese and other literary goodness)

I'm sorry, two loyal readers, one of whom I'm pretty sure is a spambot! I've been super busy - ALA, work, other job, other things...but in good news, I do have some recipes and reviews forthcoming...errrr...as soon as I get the chance to write them.  I have, however, been hoarding up way, way, old news and things.  You've probably already seen them, but I don't care!  Enjoy them or not; as Captain Planet would say, the power is yours!

Food

• Behold, the greatest post I have ever seen: author and cheese pairings.  I mean...does it get any more fantastic than that?  But I have to ask, why no cheddar cheese pic for Ernest?  
• Do you want to make a chocolate loving librarian very happy?  Give them a library of exotic chocolate bars.
• Enjoy this map of the United States of Burgers, just because it is summer, and you are thinking about BBQs, right? 

Art

•  This artists description says it all ("art inspired by and made from books"), but her method of delivery - finger prints - is really cool!  
• Just because I loved it so much when I came upon it, I'm going to share the best, loveliest watercolor prints that would be great in a kitchen.  Speaking of making a librarian very happy, I happen to know a librarian who loves the olive oil print...

Movies

• Stills from The Maze Runner!  I'm not even in a tither about how much the actors are not 13.  It looks great! 
• However, the kid who just got cast as Jonas in the Jeff Bridges adaptation of The Giver?  He does not look like a preteen.  Just sayin'...
• There's a run on Jane Austen on the interwebs this week!  First, check out the trailer for Austenland, which I'm really, really looking forward to, because OBVI.  Then, check out this gigantic waterlogged statue of Colin Firth's Darcy.  Wouldn't you love to know what he thinks? And more importantly, what happens when birds poo on that super white shirt?

Books

• This is olllld news at this point.  John Corey Whaley - he of the dipples who shared his woodpecker tattoo with us - is coming out with a new book! YAY! The cover art was released, and now haunts my dreams.  #creepydolls
• Best. Manicures. Ever. 
• Are you a demigod?  Do you want to be one?  Good thing we had this talk.  There's a Camp Half-Blood you can attend! Percy Jackson camp, y'all!  Is there one for grownups?  I want to go! (I think I may have posted about this a million years ago, but if I've forgotten, so have you!) 
• There was an EW issue about Divergent!  There were lots of pictures for your eyeballs to feast upon, and the trailer is being released at Comic-Con.  But I've posted the most important information below:

PAMUKED!

Tidbits

• If there is a stronger case for why Kate Middleton might be the world's communal bestie, I'd like to see it.
• Please meet your potential husbands from YA, kids.  There's some solid choices, but where are Logan from Babysitters Club, Will from Saving Francesca, Judah from Jellicoe Road, Finnikin of the Rock (duh, name in title), Po from Graceling, Sean Kendrick from Scorpio Races, and the only age appropriate one I can come up with, smokin' Joe Solomon from the Gallagher Girls books?!
• Oh hello, badass library predecessors.  Especially you, original sexy librarian with the handlebar mustache.  You work that card catalog!
• If my only quibble is that she's not as blonde as the Tris in my head, then I think I'll survive.  First photo from Divergent, squee!
• Yay! The trailer for Tiger Eyes looks pretty great.  (I totally thought that was Nina Dobrev for a hot minute). 
• I wish I could say I felt less eh about Graceling & co. being optioned...but some things are just so much more enjoyable inside my head, Hollywood.  TBD!
• You guys know my feelings on Little Libraries...so you can imagine the squee that emerged from my heart when I saw the adorableness of this library of miniature books.  Kind of maybe want to join the Miniature Book Society now.

Tidbits:

Movies/TV

• Chuy from Star Wars, I knew I always loved you. 
• If we ever see the Selection on any sort of screen other than my imagination, I will be delighted. (And some other adaptations I've not heard of)
• Divergent is filming already.  I am beyond beyond excited.  

Books

• Even better, the last book in the Divergent trilogy will be titled Allegiant (meh) and will be out in October!
• Here be a cover, another bumped back release date, and an interview with Diana Gabaldon regarding the slightly melodramatically titled Written In My Hearts Own Blood.  Bad that I forgot Jem has been trapped in a mine since like...2009? I just want to read it already!
• A first look at Patrick Ness' new YA book!
• Ugh, the messes the Nazi's are still being sorted out, even in the antique books world. 
• Please meet my new favorite thing: Literarily Drunk.
• Curiouser and curiouser: Jason Segal is writing a YA novel.  Dubious about the whole celebauthor train, but not as dubious in this case?  If that's not enough for you, pour yourself a Game of Thrones Cocktail! I'm all in for a Vodka Implet.

Design

• Bookshelf and home design mixed?  Oh, hello, feeling of nirvana.  (Incidentally, that little boy is such a snatchable little minx!)  But seriously, I want this. 
• Bonus round: a really cool library design, and it's an international library!

Tidbits

Books and Libraries

• Yesterday the Youth Media Awards were announced.  An as per, I have never heard of the Printz winner at all.  But I am glad that the supremely delightful This is Not My Hat won the Caldecott, and that my fav from 2012, Code Name Verity, scored an honor - so YAY.
• I know libraries have to be innovative in marketing and services to lure in patrons (see below for more examples)...but pole dancing is a new one.
• I think the real question here is how do we get invited? The Netherfield Ball! 
• Since tea + books = <3 nbsp="">it's only natural there is a pairing guide.
• There is no way to read this story about how a small branch library in NYC is checking out an American Girl doll and NOT feel there is something right in the universe.  
• Fact: even puppies love libraries. 

Movies

• So many books turning into movies, guys!  Publishers Weekly has ten of them listed as the most anticipated (3 of which I've never heard of, so...)
• Did not even realize that If I Stay had been optioned, let alone cast!  
• Anna Dressed in Blood was such a false start of a book (started off terrifying, ended with warm fuzzies) that I'm not really that pumped to hear it may be a movie...even though it would probably be decent.  Maybe.  
• After seeing this tidbit about a certain Titantic star taking an interest in Divergent, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the news that she'll be playing Jeanine Matthews.
• The Selection may be a pilot TV show.  Again.  I'm still here, waiting, CW!

Tidbits

Books

• It took me long enough BUT.  Best news ever red alert, via your, my, everyone's favorite Melina Marchetta:
  They’ve also come back into my life at an important time for writing because 24 year old Jimmy Hailler is camping out in my head.  It’s not just his story, but a bit of a four hander and it will definitely be an adult one rather than YA.  It’s interesting that I didn’t know where Jimmy and his life was until I played with circumstances in Froi and Quintana’s life.
  
  JIMMY HAILLER.  JIMMY HAILLER.  Plus, word on the street is soon even us Yanks will be able to hang tough with our favorite knocked-up pink taffeta dress wearing exiled princess, Quintana.  2013 is looking up!
• Meta alert! These works of art (books) have been turned into works of art (sculptures)!
• Things I am maybe embarrassed to totally get: Texts from the American Girl dolls (the OG's not these new poseurs).
• Somehow, I missed this most exciting news about Patrick Ness and the new books he's going to drop on us!  
• I'm one part jealous, one part judgmental (it's a private home, also she spit-shone his grave), and one part sorry for the people who live there now this is up on the interwebs - a blogger visited E.B. White's house in Maine.  But mostly...I want to live there?
• If you enjoyed Partials and want more, check out this preview of the sequel, Fragment.  
• Thank GAWD, DGabs. Fall is just around the corner, right?  Alls I'm sayin' is you best not Robert Jordan us, mmkay?
  
• The thievin' thugs of YA (Elizabeth Wein! Shock me, shock me, shock me, with that deviant behavior!)

Movies

• Divergent casting news about Four (Let's just say I saw a lot of Alex Pettyfer in Magic Mike that I can't unsee in picturing him as Four...)
• Don't really want to jinx it, but Y: the Last Man has a director.  Still think it would be better as a mini-series!
• I had no idea that Robopocalypse had even been optioned as a movie, let alone optioned by Spielberg.  
• Whhaaat? EW has some pictures of Catching Fire up (like four), but all you need to know is this:

"People are just worried that I'm not going to be as sex god enough as Finnick should be. I've literally had four months of eating nothing but chicken and asparagus. I just want a burger and a beer."

He's hungry behind the eyes, guys.  (Incidentally, does this picture remind you of anyone else? A certain pasty, Civil War era YA vampire, perhaps?)

Tidbits

• Perhaps the best literary map I've seen this year: The United States of YA.  
• I'm not even going to sugarcoat my huge disappointment that Ann M. Martin did not also feel that her Super Specials were super special enough to make her Babysitters Club Top Ten...
• My fellow Masshole Librarians are tatted, fierce, and fundraising!
• Out of this list of 21 classic opening lines in books, I'd like to give big snaps to the one of the only two children's titles that made the list for having the best opening line in my humble, totally correct opinion (The Graveyard Book).
• Everyone knows that the only wetsuit Finnick needs is his skin (and your imagination). 

Tidbits: I was not in the Netherlands on Tuesday...

• The real question in the art theft I did not commit in the Netherlands is Monet, Matisse, Gauguin...Picasso?  As our friends on Sesame would say, one of these things is not like the others!  (Also, I got $20 and a space on my wall for a Monet, art thieves...)

• The worlds largest floating bookstore (hint: not my bathtub). 

• One Direction fan fiction - face, meet palm.  

• Harry Potter textbook covers. 

• Things I want to eat: Totchos.  Exactly what they sound like.

• Author Crush Melina Marchetta's Quitana finally got a new dress:

 

And I like it.
Except I'm resoundingly convinced she wants to
shank me with that piece.

 

Tidbits

I am only what is best described as incredibly behind, so enjoy this collection of links you've probably already seen elsewhere, while I enjoy sleeping past 6 am for the first time since my 9 day first week of school back started, 9 days ago.

Business:

• Four different people have sent me the link to Mental Floss' roundup of 11 Amazing Librarian Tattoos.  So I think now is as good a time as any to reveal that I have a tattoo of my favorite misogynist Melville Dewey's face in a very secret location.  Not.  But there are some awesome additional photos in the comments, so scroll down when you visit! 
• The Atlantic Fall preview of YA lit is fairly decent - I've read and will write brief reviews of three (let's just say I liked two).  
• In news that is not news to librarians or booksellers anywhere, sales of YA literature to adults account for more that 55% of total sales - and we cold, hard, selfish adults aren't buying for our disenfranchised teenage friends. 
• With that said, I'd also like to vote negative on this whole new 14-35 year old "New Adult" labeling. Stop trying to make it happen, Guardian.  If you want to raise that age bar to people who can drive cars, and lower it to people who can't afford to buy new cars because of their student loans, maybe I'll reconsider.  
• In a sweet twist of irony, Amazon is basically the only winner in the publishing anti-trust brouhaha, which makes total sense in trying to prevent monopolies, right?  Good work, team!
• Oh Wikipedia.  You are the best friend of iPhones and dinner party debates, but not Phillip Roth! Mwahaha - no way I'm not using this in this years research orientations!

Design:

• OhEmGeeWhiz you guys! Tablescaping based on literature.  I think I'd like to go to a Game of Thrones dinner party the most. 
• In addition to work, I've been furniture shopping. Okay, so it's just for a kitchen table.  But whatever whatever.  I found these instead.  Please enjoy my new bathtub and my new lounge chair.   I think they'll go well with my new candles. 

The Talkies:

• Did I black out and miss the news that Divergent is going to be a movie?  Because now it has a release date.
• Also, we're still talking about Y: The Last Man being a movie.  Can't HBO or FX or somebody just get on board and adapt it to the miniseries it would do so well as? (Not that I'm complaining - this news excites me).
• The Wuthering Heights trailer makes it seem almost endurable.  Unlike Heathcliff. 

PrE-view:

• Daughter of Blood and Shadow!  Which apparently has had its movie rights optioned too.

Bonus:

• Kind of hoping POTUS uses the white folks soundbite during debates... 

Tidbits: Olympictures and other such bookish things

I'm going radio silent (unless Finnick is cast or Dumbledore comes out of the closet again) for about the next week, as I will be frolicking through the rolling hills of North Carolina, like our girl Katniss (except I will not be playing Fight Club for kids - just eating a lot of popsicles).  So until then, keep yourself busy with some of these links:

Make this a poster already, J.K. Rowling!

• Why isn't this a poster already? I want it every Harry Potter chapter illustration on my wall, yesterday.  I'm totally serious, I would spend money on this, J.K. Rowling.   You know, in case your children need another very expensive tree house (that I would like to live in as a real house). 

• Don't let Mo Willems drive the bus, ever stop writing fantastic children's books, or ever stop sharing his adorable fan mail with the Internets.  EVER.  

• The dames over at ForeverYA have created a Code Name Verity inspired cocktail.  I think James Bond would approve.

• Do you like to read, and find yourself in need of a bathing suit? These two seemingly unrelated interests, can, in fact, pair well.  Best website of the summer contender. 

• Today, I tuned into the Olympics at just the wrong moment, causing my jaw to drop like a gymnastic judges when, during the USA v. China women's volleyball announcer shouted "Destinee Hooker was stuffed out of the middle!"  I mean...I am a boy of fourteen trapped in the body of an adult woman.  There was no way this would ever fly under my radar.  And then someone sent me this link, to the best best names of 2012 Olympians (totally some Cases of the Terribles amongst them).  Some I think are a stretch, but I am delighting in numbers 10 and 16. 

• After seven or so misguided years spent playing girls basketball in my youth, I was delighted that the BBC Olympic body match quiz would finally prove to my parents what all 5'2" of me has known for years: I was not a basketball player.  I was pleasantly unsurprised to be assigned a category I'd long suspected: gymnastics.  And then, mid fist bump, I realized it was...men's gymnastics.  Yep. 
   
• If you are in London, and are one of the many people blowing up my feeds with spoilerz of Olympic proportions, I think you owe it to both of us to go and visit this maze of books while you take a time out from the spoiling.  Additionally, not a chance I wouldn't accidentally knock it over.  None.  

Tidbits: A cassoulet of movies, talents in South Beach, other things

Below, my friends, is a hot mess (of links)  I believe the French call this a cassoulet.  Touche!  I have been le busy - I made the brilliant plan to run a book a week book club, and train for a half marathon allll at the same time.  Miraculously, I survived both!  I have a goal to eventually write review and recipes for Middlemarch (preview: it wasn't enjoyed), Slaughterhouse Five (preview: not easy, but powerful stuff), and a few other things I've been ripping through, chiefly CODEREDOHMYGODREADTHISNOW: Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein.  Yes, it is good enough to demand all those caps and no spaces in between.  It may be the best thing I've read all year, and it made me cry on a park bench normally inhabited by a hobo (so you know it's good!).  I'll write more - if you promise to read it.

• I defy you to deny that Lebron James, has, in fact, taken his talents to South Beach.  Behold, the photographic greatness, spotted on Jezebel:
  
  
  YESS.  Please get more boys to read!
  
  
• Have I told you, lately, that I love you, @Queen_UK?  This is all that is right with Twitter and the Interwebs.  My favorite of all the twitter feeds in all the lands, "The Queen" always brings a self aware silliness to the table.  Articles like this don't hurt either.

• I am a younger female faculty member in an environment with lots of teenage boys, commonly know of by its formal name, a high school.  This means it is always high comedy to ask me to the prom.  Somehow, it never gets old to anyone besides, oh, me.  In case the whole "being an adult" diagnosis wasn't enough evidence of why it's a bad idea, some lady proved it.  "[S]he went to last month's Condon High School prom with a boy from the track team because the boy felt bad about not having a date and had been struggling in English class." Struggling in English? Why didn't you say so? That TOTALLY makes it not weird! This is too terrible to even earn a Case of the Terribles rating (Spotted on Jezebel).
  
• The Great Gatsby trailer is out, finally!  And yet...I have no recollection of this story.  Except for Daisy.  And I don't remember much about her, other than that she was flighty and blonde and tragic.  And I like what I'm seeing:
  
  
  

  If the trailer soundtrack is anything like what the movie soundtrack will be like, I'm sold.  And please oh please where can I get me some of those dresses? More importantly, when does the next Bright Young Things book dropping already?
  
• The trailer for The Perks of Being a Wallflower drops soon!  FINALLY.  June 3, during the MTV Movie Awards, which I probably haven't been able to sit through since 2002.  That's why I keep you around, Internets. 
  
•  Word and art lovers, check out this super cool cut paper artwork by Annie Vought.  I would love to see famous letters of bygone days or love letters or clandestine paperwork with redactions get this treatment (can you tell I have Code Name Verity on the brain still?) - but can't actually pull an example for my brain.  But still, this is super cool.  (Spotted on Colossal)

Tidbits: Good vs. bad ideas by Hollywood, pr-E-views, mini-mashups

• Queen Mary had a thing for dollhouses, and as everyone who is someone knows, no house regardless of size is complete without a library.  QM's library redefines the term pocket book, and answers a very important Zoolander question.  These dollhouse books are unbelievably cute!  And also, how did they make them so tiny?!??  Read about it at the first link, or tour the dollhouse library at this link.   [via Parathentical]
  
•  Have you always harbored a secret desire to replace steal Gilbert from Anne? Hear Captain Wentworth tell you that you pierce his heart?  Rest easy, daydreamer.  You can now special order a copy of a classic book with your name, and that of your friends/family/part-time lovers in the place of the characters.  BONUS: the company also does romance novels.  Best gag gift ever?  Bonus BONUS:  Oh, snap.  They also have a category called "vampire."  I can't even...[via GalleyCat]
• 
  
• The first twentish pages of Maggie Stiefvater's newest book, Raven Boys, is up on EW for your perusal.
  
• Ditto for an pr-E-view of  The Book of Blood and Shadow, by Robin Wasserman (who I met once, and who was very very nice!).
  
• Bad idea by Hollywood:  Robert Pattinson as Finnick Odiar?  Please, no.   
  
• Good idea by Hollywood: Oooh, I have spotted the moste curiouse tweet from Patrick Ness regarding the script for The Knife of Never Letting Go (I'm still nervous about it, even after Hunger Games didn't stink):
  
  
  CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER.  
  
  

A Discovery of Witches (and Vampires Who Do Yoga, Fondle Books, and Sniff Wine), by Deborah Harkness

A Discovery of Witches
by Deborah Harkness

New York: Viking, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02241-0

Guilty confession/secret shame: occasionally I read books for adults in addition to books for kids.  While there are some respectable titles in the mix (a recent brush with The Road comes to mind), more often than not they happen to have less literarily lofty ambitions.  Yes.  Are you ready for this jelly?  I'm coming out of the I-love-epic-time traveling-paranormal-historical-romance-fiction-novels closet.  It is true.   I love Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.  But this is not a post about an awesome book about a WW2 era English nurse who trips and falls through a mini Stonehenge and time and into the arms of a be-kilted ginger Scot that you should read.  It is about another saccharine-y fun book for grownups that I read just the other day!  

When I saw a review for A Discovery of Witches in Booklist that compared it to Outlander, I felt I owed it to my freak flag to read it.  Abandon ye all hope of getting any sort of respectable, scholarly review below.  Pull up a couch and pour yourself a mouthwatering glass of red wine.  Appropriately, anytime I use the word mouthwatering, I have an overwhelming urge to say it like this:

Thanks for nothing, Twilight!  But why, why is this urge to talk like a ridiculous vampire in Twilight so appropriate?  Well, let me tell you all about it.

Ladies and ladies (since I doubt the gents picking this up are few and far between), this book is a mouthwatering mashup of Twilight, Outlander, The Historian, and The Da Vinci Code.  Yes.  Seriously.  Though nowhere near as insane as Outlander, it is epic, it is fun.   Our heroine is one sweet young thang, Diana Bishop, a witch hailing from a long line of other witches, including an infamous one in infamously witch-loving Salem, MA.   Since her parents bit it suspiciously on a trip to Africa when she was a kid, Diana has been denying herself and the world of her magical powerz through a combination of pensive pre-dawn rowing sessions and a historical study of alchemy.  Alchemy being the ye olde science equivalent of magic.  Clearly she's doing a great job!  On sabbatical to Oxford to fondle some dusty old books in Bodlean, Diana finds and promptly returns a freaky enchanted book, and immediately stumbles into the arms of a hot Doctor.  Suspect! Double suspect, he is not just a Doctor!  Oh ho! He is a hot VAMPIRE doctor!  Matthew Clairmont is impossibly fast and strong, his skin is pale white and ice cold, and sometimes he speaks like he's from a different time!  His powers include being hot, being a badass predator, being a doctor, being ascetic, being immortal, having lots of secrets, being part of a vampire gang, and having a penchant for fine wines.  If it weren't for the last, I'm pretty sure the Cullen's would have adopted him by now.  But I digress!  

Turns out a ancient pact of Witches, Vampires, and Ghouls want the book real bad - it may or may not have the secret to magical life tucked away inside and it has been MIA since nigh on forever - and now that everyone knows Diana fondled it, they're all after her.  To boot, said secret society also has a rule on intermagical species dating.  As the Germans say, VERKLEMPT! Oh snap.  But they are not the only secret ancient society out there, and lines are drawn (to steal yet another Stephenie Meyerism) irrevocably.  Our heroes are on the run to places near and far, bourgeois and swank, denying their love, proclaiming their love, doing yoga, and sipping wine throughout.  Will Diana ever embrace her magical powers?  Will Matthew ever not be hot?  Will you be able to avoid craving wine while reading this book?

This book is filled with many things you would expect of anything that has been hit with the romance or paranormal genre sticks:  hot vampires, breaking in to watch people sleep (aka studying at the school of Edward Stalker Cullen), longing looks, pensive walks in the woods, near death fights, surviving near death fights, dudes carrying girls, girls sitting on dudes laps all the time, declarations of true love, opulent vampire lifestyles, hot baths, etc.  But it failed majorly on one count.  I was expecting it to be much more smutty.  I love smutty books!  In fact, there is no. sex. at. all.  I'd have given you a spoiler warning, but consider this your sex disappointment warning.  What up with that Deborah E. Harkness?  No excuses!  What is this, Twilight?

At times the story can drag; there was probably way too much scholarly debate in the first half and not nearly enough action.  It also becomes clear with 200 pages to go that this book is going to be the first in a series.  However, there is a lot to redeem it and judging from the fact that I devoured this book, it's relatively captivating.  If you are anything like me, you will probably be amused by the ridiculous wine sniffing activities (turns out Ms. Harkness has a wine blog), Vampire yoga, convenience of Matthew knowing every historical figure mentioned, inclusion of gay primary characters, occasionally clunky dialogue, and (antiquated) semantics of (vampire) marriage. In short, this post is not short and neither is the book.  But if you at all like reading series or epic paranormal-time traveling-historical fiction books, this is a strong recommendation!