Notes
Deborah works as a trainer for Teaching Books, which includes a Book Resume for each title that librarians can use to justify inclusion of books in their collection, especially helpful responding to book challenges. #aisl25
Deborah suggests pairing informational texts with graphic novels. For example, kids who love Ben Clanton’s Narwhal and Jelly series might be interested in Candace Fleming’s Narwhal: Unicorn of the Arctic. #aisl25
Prolific author Kate DiCamillo’s Orris and Timble series has a new book coming soon. #aisl25
Deborah says there is a trend of middle grade books with parents/adults having mental illness and kids having to keep secrets to keep siblings together. #aisl25
Deborah shares 2 books about whale falls, providing an environment for an ecosystem after a whale dies. These could be good for lateral reading, having students read one and then the other. [Life After Whale] (https://school.teachingbooks.net/tb.cgi?tid=94746) and Whale Fall. #aisl25
Looking at highly awarded, favorite authors and illustrators, variety of genres, cultural representation, and fan favorites. #aisl25
Deborah introduced Kari Lavelle’s Butt Or Face? series.
📚💬 “…surely ghosts will follow wherever there is bad record keeping.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
Today I’m attending my first Association of Independent School Librarians institute, Booked for the Day: Reading, Reflection, and Revitalization. I’m planning to live-blog. Posts should automatically appear on Bluesky & Mastodon.
📚💬 “Here, then, is a central paradox in the way that ghosts work: to turn the living into ghosts is to empty them out, rob them of something vital; to keep the dead alive as ghosts is to fill them up with memory and history, to keep alive a thing that would otherwise be lost.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, writing about the dissonance between Richmond’s history as the home of slave trade and torture and the fact that all Richmond’s ghosts are white 👻
Finished reading: Kiss the Girl by Zoraida Córdova 📚
This is such a perfect move of Disney’s The Little Mermaid to contemporary romance. There is so much perfection to be had here, such magic work taking movie moments and making them part of our world. If you’re an Ariel person, you should read it.
Finished reading: By the Book by Jasmine Guillory 📚
A sweet Beauty and the Beast retelling.
North Carolinians, use this tool from EveryLibrary to contact your state senator about H636, a bill that “threatens student rights, undermines local control of school libraries, and risks costly censorship battles across the state.” I’ll try to do a detailed breakdown of the bill soon. 📚
📚💬 “The contemporary attitude toward Spiritualism as a particularly ridiculous belief stems in no small part from the misogyny with which it was attacked in the second half of the nineteenth century.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
“If Emerson could find God in a forest, why couldn’t a medium find departed loved ones in a darkened room?” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Ghosts, you could say, flock to women left alone.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Even though the soles of her feet felt like she was walking on broken glass, she glided across the greenroom and stood face-to-face with her father.” Zoraida Córdova bringing a little Hans Christian Andersen to her Disney-inspired Little Mermaid romance retelling, Kiss the Girl 🧜♀️
📚💬 “Live in a house for any length of time, and you make it your own memory palace.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Uncomfortable truths, buried secrets, disputed accounts: ghost stories side out of the shadowlands, a response to the ambiguous and poorly understood.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “Those aspects of a life that are discontinuous, fragmented, or unexpected, are made whole through the ghost story.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻
📚💬 “A haunted house is a memory palace made real: a physical space that retains memories that might otherwise be forgotten or that might remain only in fragments.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻