Kimberly Hirsh

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.

📚💬 “…surely ghosts will follow wherever there is bad record keeping.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

Starting off #aisl25 with Deborah Salyer talking about What’s New in Books for Children.

Deborah introduced Kari Lavelle’s Butt Or Face? series.

Looking at highly awarded, favorite authors and illustrators, variety of genres, cultural representation, and fan favorites. #aisl25

📚💬 “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.

📚💬 “Romantic heroes are the greatest cryptids of all.” Zoraida Córdova, Kiss the Girl 🧜‍♀️

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. 📚

Finished reading: By the Book by Jasmine Guillory 📚

A sweet Beauty and the Beast retelling.

📚💬 “Ghosts, you could say, flock to women left alone.” 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 👻

📚💬 “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 👻

📚💬 “The past we’re most afraid to speak aloud of in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.” 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 👻

📚💬 “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 👻

📚💬 “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 👻

📚💬 “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 👻

📚💬 “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 🧜‍♀️

Finished reading: If the Shoe Fits by Julie Murphy 📚

Super cute modern Cinderella retelling.

🔖 Read Should You Ditch Fixing Your Weaknesses And Lean Into Your Strengths? by Nicole Aherling (The Good Trade).

My top 3 strengths are either Input, Learner, Communication or Love, Curiosity, Creativity. Either way, I’ve built a life where these strengths lead the way. 💗

💬 “I feel like I’m spending half my work time managing my mental and emotional ability to navigate a situation where I can’t confidently apply what I learn to what I’ll do next.” Kim Werker on Canada-to-US book tariffs feels applicable to a lot of us right now.

Finished reading: Deep Blue (Survival Instincts, #0.5) by Adriana Anders 📚

Finished reading: Between the Devil and Desire by Lorraine Heath 📚

Thank you @cygnoir@social.lol for pointing the way to this beautiful thread about the power of connections we make online. 📚💬 “She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.” ― Lev Grossman, The Magician King