So It's Been a While...

Random Note: I will be running the 2012 New York City Marathon!!! :D

My last post was over a month ago. I have been so busy with school and internships and such. Now, I am still busy, but procrastinating, so of course a blog post is in order.

I have still  been a reading fiend, but I can't say I have enjoyed all of what I've been reading. Waiting, by Ha Jin, for example, was quite a downer. I followed Lin and Manna over their 18 year love affair while Lin attempted to divorce his wife. Their relationship developed, feelings changed and evolved, and eventually, after waiting 18 years, the divorce was obtained.
Manna and Jin marry and have twin sons, but alas married life is not all they had hoped. Manna falls ill and does not seem to have long to live, and Lin realizes, oh hey, I loved my first wife all along. Lucky for him Manna is going to die soon, so he can re-marry wife #1. Until the last sentence, which is Jin's observation that Manna seems to be doing much better and speaks with a voice that is full of life. Waiting was a very appropriate title for this novel.
Oh, and it won some sort of literary award, as many depressing books do.

After remembering the book and writing that sloppy summary, I am suddenly unmotivated, so I'll just list other things I have been reading:

-Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Started, didn't finish yet)
-The Girl in the Gatehouse by Julie Klassen (for a Christian Lit assignment)
-The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (for a multicultural assignment)

And now, I will jump without transition into one of my school assignments. This way I will feel like I'm doing work, since I will be writing about what I should be doing at the moment.

I have to write a weeding plan for a library collection. I chose the biography section at the library where I intern. It's a small library, and in my humble opinion it is not necessary for a library of that size to have 24 biographies on Lord Byron. Especially when there are only 2 fiction works by him listed in the online catalog. Also, the library specializes in fiction, so really having that many biographies isn't even in keeping with the collection development policy or library mission.

Anyway, I will be deciding what to keep and what to toss (by toss I mean put in the used book store), and why. I also need to recommend suitable replacements, should books need to be replaced. If anyone knows of any good, reputable biographies about Hemingway,  Henry James, Jane Austen, Fitzgerald, Byron or D.H. Lawrence, let me know!

Again, without a transition, I was very surprised by which authors the library had a lot of books for, and which there were a small number. Casanova had 7 biographies and Shakespeare 3. Joseph Conrad 12 and Walt Whitman 4. Hawthorne and Angelou had a reasonable about with 5 each, And Virginia Woolfe had 6.
Going through the shelves, I kept asking myself who bought these books and why, and what do they have against authors whose names come towards the end of the alphabet? Seriously? The Bronte sisters get 7 each and W. B. Yeats gets 2?

And now for an abrupt ending.