At the moment the Mystery genre is getting a lot of love from everyone from middle school to adult and a lot of great books are being released. Since we’re in a middle/high school library I w…

At the moment the Mystery genre is getting a lot of love from everyone from middle school to adult and a lot of great books are being released. Since we're in a middle/high school library I wanted to showcase the mystery books that are not too spicy / intense. In our G8 core library we have "We were liars" and "The Naturals" which is probably at the upper level particularly in the later books in the series.

The following slides are part of a presentation Katie Day and I made for the 2025 ISLE librarian conference in London. (Note: Although I am the one "publishing" or "blogging" this discussion the credit equally goes to Katie Day as this all originates in our many discussions on reading, nonfiction, librarianship and more. ) As we prepare for our presentation at the wonderful…

I've just finished reading the really well written "The Many Meanings of Meilan" by Andrea Wang. Having spent 16 of the last 20 years in Hong Kong, Singapore and China it was a reminder of so much of my time there and the discoveries of the language, literature, poetry and idiom. There's a lot happening in this book, but what I enjoyed most is the idea of naming and meaning and the ambiguity of sound and meaning in the homonyms of the Chinese language.

I'm busy trying to decide what to do with very old blogposts as I was an avid blogger from 2003 to 2011 before I became a librarian. I literally have 1000s of posts that I'm not sure what to do with, so I'm going to selectively add posts that have to do with literature, language, librarianship, reading etc. From November 2014…

I've been meaning to write this for a while. A friend died in February. She was not just a neighbour but someone who had been a part of our lives ever since we started coming here. Being back for the summer means that her absence is a constant presence. We have been fortunate in our lives to not lose many people on a permanent basis along the way.

Last year I wrote about my initiative with our core collection and engaging our middle school teachers in "adopting" a book and helping to promote it. During the analytics for our annual report and to justify repeating the exercise in one of our last staff meetings this year, I put together some stats on the results. Core Collection Summary Given the dire…

We've been on summer break for just over a week now and I'm feeling sufficiently rested to sit down and write again. Book returns The end of the school year is always a busy time for librarians with the dual task of getting overdue books back and making sure that students have enough of the right books in their hands to entice them to do some reading over the summer.