I have a to ask. Is the woman picture pictured below hot?

The reason I ask is that my friend Mike finds One Eyed Angelina to be a hottie. He doesn't like Regular Angelina or Tomb Raider Angelina or Married to Billy Bob Angelina. But One Eyed Angelina is another story. How weird is that? Slap an eye patch on a lady and you can't keep Mike away. No wonder his wife is worried.

Then again, who am I to throw stones? I think Worf is a hottie. Although that isn't as bad a Jennie. She'd be all over Data in a heartbeat. Yeesh.

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Believe it or not, E! is now taking applications for E! True Hollywood Story. Finally Jennie can have a THS of her very own! One of the hard hitting questions on the application: Which celebrity's True Hollywood Story reminds you of your own?

For me the answer is obvious: Shannen Doherty.

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This week's picks are from authors I have read and loved in the past. Enjoy!

For Young Adult Readers...

Barbarian (Sons of the Dark Book #1) by Lynne Ewing
Escape (Sons of the Dark Book #2) by Lynne Ewing
Available August 31, 2004
A bad-boy spin off to the best-selling teen series Daughters of the Moon. Four guys living in Los Angeles: A rock star, a rebel, an artist, and a shaman. Like most students at Turney High School, they're just trying to survive. But for these four--Renegades on the run from the sinister world of Nefandus--survival means learning how to control their powers and fulfill their destiny as The Sons of the Dark. The teens at my library love the Daughters of the Moon series, and I expect Sons of the Dark to be just a popular with them. Hopefully snag the interest of our boys as well.

For Adult Readers...

Hawkes Harbor by S. E. Hinton
Available August 31, 2004
Back after a twenty year break, this is the author's first novel for adults. An orphan and a bastard, Jamie Sommers grew up knowing he had no hope of heaven. Conceived in adultery and born in sin, Jamie was destined to repeat the sins of his parents - or so the nuns told him. And he proved them right. Taking to sea, Jamie sought out danger and adventure in exotic ports all over the world as a smuggler, gunrunner, and murderer. Tough enough to handle anything, he's survived foreign prisons, pirates, and a shark attack. But in a quiet seaside town in Delaware, Jamie discovered something that was enough to drive him insane and change his life forever. For it was in Hawkes Harbor that Jamie came face to face with the ultimate evil.

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Over the past few weeks I've developed a really bad habit. When I wake up in the morning I have this uncontrollable urge for something cold. Really cold. We're not talking Special K with milk here. Oh no. I'm talking about food that is ice cold. Popsicles, Italian ice, and (gasp!) ice cream. After fighting it for the first two months of summer, I finally gave in to my urge at the beginning of August and have been eating ice cream (or something similar) for breakfast every day. I know it's horrible to do this, but I just can't stop myself.

Proof: When my mom was in for her birthday extravaganza, I didn't even bother to hide and/or disguise this bad habit from her even though I knew I would get grief for it. When questioned by her I even tried to rationalize it by saying that ice cream is another dairy product, so it is no different than eating yogurt for breakfast. Yeah, I know. Pathetic.

But then I realized this weekend that it's not my fault. Seriously. I've been brainwashed into craving ice cream, and I can't be held accountable for my actions. How was I brainwashed? So glad you asked. I was brainwashed by the ice cream man that visits my apartment complex with his demon truck eight to ten times a day. I'm not exaggerating, as it is impossible for the truck to be anywhere in your vicinity without you knowing the truck is around. The truck plays a series of songs to lure little children to its ice cream that you can here whenever the truck is nearby. I wake up to the truck in the morning, and it is usually one of the last things I hear outside my building before going to bed.

I didn't realize how much I'm harassed by the ice cream man until this weekend. Not only did he wake me up at the butt crack of dawn on Saturday, but when I returned from running errands that morning (a mere ninety minutes later), the ice cream man was visiting us again! When I walked past his truck to get into my building, I gave him the look. The mean look. Not the mean look I use on the gang kids who come into the library to recruit, the meaner look. The look that is so mean I only break it out for special situations. And do you want to know what the ice cream devil did in response to the look that makes people back away from me? He smirked. AAARGH! It took everything in me not to smack him.

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On Wednesday I mentioned my dislike of the Accelerated Reader program. If you want further proof of how incredibly wrong this program can be, take a gander at an email I received this morning from one of my listservs:

In our elementary school, we run a Nazi AR program, where every student is required to read 100 points a year. If they fall behind on their weekly quota, they must stay inside from recess to read. They're graded on their AR test results. Every student who gets his 100 points gets a t-shirt, and they all wear them on Wednesdays, so every Wed, everyone knows who does not have their 100 points yet. Students may not read anything that is not AR until they've read their 100 points.

Doesn't that sound like a barrel of fun? I was an insatiable reader as a child, but I'm pretty sure that if I had been forced into and AR program like this it would have killed any joy I had in reading.

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Today is my favorite day of the year. School is in session, and we welcomed our middle school students back with open arms. Okay, some of us on staff welcomed them back with open arms.

The thing I love about the new school year is getting to see the kids again. It cracks me up how much some of them change over the summer. Especially the girls. The first few weeks are like a fashion show around here. Today I've already spotted three new hair colors and four new individual styles. The most striking change was the girl who I would describe as being painfully shy and quiet, who is now rocking a loud, Avril Lavigne look. And she is pulling it off pretty well to boot!

That's the one thing I miss about school. Debuting a new look was the best part of the year. Except for that one time Erin Cooley wore the same outfit as me the first day of school. Not that I'm bitter. Much.

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I deliberately waited until later in the day to share this, and after reading it this morning I'm still kind of icked out. Today I got an email from my friend Jennie about an incident in her library. This is by far one of the most disgusting things I've heard of in recent memory, so consider yourself warned. Jennie writes:

So I was checking in some skeezy guy's books, and he was standing there staring at me, and the books *reek* of smoke. I can't even imagine how many cigarettes he had to have smoked around them to get them to smell like this. Anyway, so I get to the middle of the stack of the books, and there's *toenail clippings* on top of the books. I kind of expect the guy to apologize, but no. So I glare at him, throw the clippings in the trash, and he's still sort of smiling. I had to run to the bathroom, wash my hands, and let the full-body shudders work their way out of my system. Gah!

Are you as grossed out as I am? Jennie is such a nice person. I'm such a bitch I probably would have dumped the clippings into an envelope and returned them to him. That's probably why she is the director of her library and I'm the lowly reference librarian.

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Let me apologize first, as I'm going to rant. A lot.

While trying to decide what I was going to blog about today, my favorite former student sent me the link to this article: Why Teachers Love Depressing Books. After reading the article about Barbara Feinberg's Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up, I'm now irritated as hell.

At first I was ready to be on the author's side. One excerpt of the book notes, "We can't ever say we don't like the books," Alex tells his mother, because, according to his teacher, "if you're not liking the books, you're not reading them closely enough." While I think there are teachers out there who want to foster the love of reading in kids, to me it seems like it's just not happening. I think (and I'll probably get flamed to death for writing this) that schools kill the joy of reading for kids. A perfect example of this is the Accelerated Reader program. More and more I see kids being told what books they can and cannot read (by their teachers) because the books they want to read are below their AR level. While I understand the need to evaluate a child's reading ability, I also think too much emphasis is placed on comprehension. I've seen some of the AR tests, and they can be incredibly nit picky. I can't fault a child for not remembering some teeny tiny detail from a book I know I wouldn't remember either. The end result is we have kids who equate reading with misery and subsequently do not want to read. Argh!

But that's not was has me irritated. Later the article states, "She (the author of the book) sees the memoirlike problem novels as symptoms of "the drastic fall from grace that the imagination has suffered in popular understanding" and her generation's insistence on "making our children wake from the dream of their childhoods." Adults, she suspects, secretly resent the sheltered, enchanted world children inhabit and under the pretext of preparing them for life's inevitable difficulties, want to rub their noses in traumas they may never actually experience and often aren't yet able to comprehend."

I admit it. I resent children and want to shatter their worlds by exposing them to realistic fiction. I've been known to stand outside preschools and distribute copies of Speak and Martyn Pig to all the little children. It wasn't enough to tell them that there was no such thing as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Oh no. I'm not happy unless I'm making a child cry about how messed up the world can be. It's just my jealous nature. Damn you Barbara Feinberg, you've found me out!

Puh-leese. Did it ever occur to the Ms. Feinberg that these kinds of novels can be a help and not a hindrance to the students who read them? We are talking about middle school students here, not second graders. At that age, what "sheltered, enchanted world" are we waking them from exactly? I work next door to a middle school, and I see these kids everyday. Those kids left their "enchanted world" long ago, and I'm not about to blame the books they've read for that. On the other hand, I've seen how realistic fiction (including problem novels) can open a dialogue between these kids and the adults around them about some very serious problems. Also, kids as they grow are continuously learning about themselves and the world around them. What better way to expose kids to worlds that they are not familiar with than through books?

Some (many) may disagree with me. But at least I feel a better getting that off my chest.

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Since this blog touts itself as being the "best book gossip in town," I figured it was high time that I made with gossip. So today I am starting a new feature: New Book Tuesday. Each Tuesday I will feature two new or upcoming releases that I am looking forward to reading (one adult, one young adult). This week's featured books:

For Young Adult Readers...

Fat Boy Swim by Catherine Forde
Available September 14, 2004
Fat, bullied and the worst player ever to lumber onto a football pitch, it's no wonder that teenage Jimmy Kelly lacks confidence. But life isn't entirely hopeless. Jimmy is an amazing cook and often has a mysterious dream that he is destined to become a swimmer. With the unlikely help of tough sports coach GI Joe, Jimmy decides to explore his hidden depths and discovers a surprising secret about his past along the way.

For Adult Readers...

You Slay Me by Katie MacAlister
Available September 7, 2004
The first book in a humorous, paranormal thriller series featuring Aisling Grey. Aisling finds her true calling when she travels to Paris to deliver a medieval object that is part of a set sought after for the power it wields. There she meets the Drake, a man who is not at all what he seems. Implicated in the circumstances of two murders, Aisling, the demon she summons for help (and subsequently can't get rid of) named Jim, and Drake find themselves caught up in a web of lies and confusion that could well result in the demon lords of hell ruling the mortal world.

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As some of you might know, my scary birthday is coming up (less than six months now - yikes!). I've been planning for a long time to do something special to help ease the pain, but I haven't been able to decide on exactly what I want to do. Initially I thought I would have a big bash in Las Vegas. After all, where else is it totally acceptable for a person to be drinking at 9:00 a.m. in the morning? And if I have to have my scary birthday, there's going to be a lot of drinking.

But then I thought that Las Vegas in February would be too cold. I want to be sitting on the beach somewhere under an umbrella sipping a girlie drink with a cabana boy at my beck and call (a girl can dream, right?). So that got me thinking about warm weather locals that would be nice in February. Spot the problem yet? Any place I can think of will be crowded with Spring Break kids. Yeah. I'm on the slippery slope as it is, and I'm pretty sure one look at the Spring Break crowd is all that I'll need to send me over the edge.

My friend Jennie has suggested the Bahamas, which is definitely one possibility, but I don't want to stay at a huge resort like Atlantis. I would rather stay in a resort in Jamaica like the one Stella stayed at. Which led Jennie to ask me, "Are you a 40-year-old black woman?" I feel like I am sometimes.

If you could do something fun for your scary birthday, what would it be?

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That's what I have for the next 31 days. Sweet, sweet freedom. Yesterday I turned in the grades for my summer class, and now I do not have to think about assignments, lectures, or grading for an entire month. What shall I do with all my free time?

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In this morning's mail I unexpectedly received two books. I knew both were coming, but I wasn't expecting them to arrive so fast. One is an ARC of The Bane Affair by Alison Kent. The other is Somebody Wonderful by Kate Rothwell,who asked to send it to me after reading my blog. How cool is that?

Now for my dilemma: Remember when it was your birthday and you would get all these really cool toys that you were dying to play with, but you had no idea where to start? That's where I'm at right now, just substitute the word book for toy. What makes the situation even worse is the fact that I have a really great toy (Doing It) that I'm playing with right now, as well as a stack of other toys that I've been neglecting.

I know, I know. There could be worse problems to have.

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Last night I was on the phone with my married friend (Single Girl Rule #1 - You are only allowed to have one married friend), when her husband gets all whiny about my lack of blog posts for the past few months (Single Girl Rule #2 - When on the phone with your married friend, realize that you are also on the phone with your married friend's spouse. Which leads to Single Girl Rule #3 - Assume anything you tell your married friend is also told to your married friend's spouse and can come back to bite you on the butt.). But I digress. Mike is the king of making me feel guilty. I don't know how he does it, but he just does. I think he might even be better at it than my mother. So here is a post just for Mike, and I am including a photo of Mike's favorite musician just to make him smile.

Happy now Mike?

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Say it isn't so! Last night on The Amazing Race, Charla and Mirna were eliminated. Even though they were probably the most hated team, I am sad to see them go. Who will make me laugh out loud in glee? Chip and Kim can make me chuckle, and I can even get a good cackle going when Brandon starts praying to God or Colin gets all intense. But no other team fills my heart with as much joy as Mirna and Charla did.

Goodbye Charla and Mirna. You will be missed.

Episode 1 - Episode 7

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Right now I'm reading Doing It by Melvin Burgess, and it is taking me much longer to get through than I anticipated. To be fair I've dropped it several times to read a couple of books that I had been waiting for months to come out. I do wonder though if the subject matter and/or the realness of the characters is slowing down my normally frantic reading pace. Even though I'm not finished with it, I just know that this is a book I am going to be talking about and recommending for quite awhile.

Why am I so impressed? First, the book began with the characters playing their own version of Death is Not an Option (which I took as a shout out from Melvin Burgess to me). I think this snapshot of the boys' lives and attitudes was the perfect way to begin this book. I'll admit that I flinched a couple of times while reading those first few pages (must be getting prudish in my old age), but it was a perfect start for the story. Also, the authenticity of the characters has me completely absorbed in what I'm reading. I feel like I went to high school with these boys. I knew someone just like Dino, and I dated someone just like Jonathan. Finally, the concept of this book (teen sexuality from the male perspective) is completely engrossing, since it is not a perspective we really see in YA literature. I've been trying to think of other books like it, and the only thing I can think of is the Diary of a Teenage Stud Series by Jonah Black (which doesn't even come close). Any ideas?

If you would like to read another opinion on this book, check out: Filth, Which Ever Way You Look At It. And in case you were wondering, the reviewer did not like the book.

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I'm not a huge sports fan, but I do always try to check out the big events like the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup, and of course the Olympics. Last Friday I dutifully tuned in to watch the opening ceremonies, but ended up spending a good portion of the night on the phone playing Find the Hottest Olympic Team with Audra. And I must say that a good time was had by all.

For overall hotness I went with Team Denmark. Audra settled on Team Australia, which I think might have been the better pick since Ian Thorpe has to be the hottest person at the Olympics (taking a moment now to contemplate the hotness that is Ian Thorpe). I think I might have been blinded by Team Denmark's shiny blonde hair and bright white smiles.

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That's right people. I'm back, and I'm sitting on some potentially huge news that I can't share yet (damn it). But until I can share, let's play catch up.

What the heck have I been doing in the past few weeks? To be honest, nothing that exciting. I've spent way too much time messing around with Dreamweaver MX trying to lower my suck rating on it from a 10 to a 7 (I'm hovering around an 8 or and 8.5 right now). I've also been teaching an online class (say it with me: "Oh the pain!"). These two factors combined have made me want to spend as little free time on the computer as possible.

But now with one week to go in my class, and a whole month of free time to look forward to, I missed blogging. So over the next few days I will strive to make up for six weeks worth of missing posts. Should be fun! :-)

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