A girl I drew for a poster competition on “The Benefits of Reading”! 

The skirt is a photo of an actual real-life book btw.

@certifiedlibraryposts

Brilliantly designed and executed. I love this! ALA should license the hell out of it.

counterpoint to that poll: what was your favorite assigned reading in high school??

Fahrenheit 451.

We also watched the 1966 movie adaptation starring Oskar Werner - moody and alienating, if not as poetic as Bradbury’s text.

The Importance Of Being Earnest

Henry IV Part 1.

I'm still hacked off that my favorite Shakespeare company locally just refuses to stage this one. (They did a Part 1/Part 2 mashup half an age ago. It... didn't work.) They'll do fucking Pericles (and to their credit, very well indeed) but not this?

STAGE THE BEST HISTORY PLAY, YOU COWARDS. STAGE IT. (Yeah, it's tighter and better-constructed than Henry V, I'll die on that hill. So to speak.)

Angels, demons, language, and culture: part 3

(Part 1 and Part 2 for those interested.)

This is just. Creepy and awful and so, so wrong for a quasi-omnipotent being. Ugh. Good Omens!God is an abject horror.

But if you're one of the poker players at that table, what do you do? You try to figure out the rules and mark the cards, naturally. Especially if leaving the table only happens via swan dives into burning sulphur, or getting kicked out of the only home you've known into a hostile desert with lions in it. While pregnant, yet.

One way humans use books is to explain each other to each other — to explore both society and an individual’s struggle within it, to explore relationships — so your argument makes sense to me: Aziraphale reads so he can understand people. Other angels (and demons) don’t have that curiosity, so they don’t read.

I don’t know that he’s looking for rules, though. He’s got to have been around humans too long to think that; he has to know the rules change all the time, and are different at the same time but in different places. He’s looking for guiding principles, more like.

I mean, I can’t believe he really thinks there’s a rule that a person must attend a ball in order to realize they’re in love. A ball is a venue of forced proximity which presents that opportunity… Personally I don’t think Aziraphale hosts the ball in order to follow the rule which will cause him and Crowley to mutually realize their love for each other. He’d be more confident — less manic — if he was following a known rule. I think, like a human, he’s just desperately hoping it’ll do the trick.

I do think Aziraphale's looking for rules -- just rules aren't the only things he's looking for, and he finds many other things he likes about books in his ongoing search for rules. He doesn't just collect etiquette manuals, after all. (N.b. that's my headcanon; we have zero onscreen evidence that Zira has a thing for etiquette manuals. That's not what Mrs. Beeton is, though that book certainly does have a lot to say about etiquette).

Eh, preview of part 4, why not: it's not so much that Aziraphale and Crowley and Muriel think everything they read is a rule, it's that they have this habit of reformulating everything they read as rules, because they're so damn desperate to understand how things work, and to have reliable guidance in dealing with their world. How relatable of them, right?

Jimbriel, actually, figures in here despite his functional illiteracy. He verbalizes every discovery he makes about how the world works, and every instruction he is given about how to deal with it! He's sense-making in real time!

So we get vavoom, and we get "it takes a few days because that's how it works" and we get the ball, and we get "but they're always such a little ray of SUNSHINE!" (note, of course, that Beez has already broken this so-called rule, unbeknownst to Crowley).

They can definitely look for rules in books, test rules, try haltingly to express rules... without ever arriving at The Rules. Kinda what most of us do, really.

based on a true story

I don’t think Fortnite is to blame for kids nowadays not reading…

That’s the joke. It’s the authoritarian overbearing parent.

He was being sarcastic lol

Reminded me of these

That violin one hit close to home.

I remember doing homework once, asked my grandmother if she was proud of me. “Do some thing for me to be proud of.” That hurt.

That comic up there – I witnessed almost that exact scenario. Teacher wanted the kids to all pick books. One kid spots something on the shelf and gets visibly excited. Pulls it out and starts reading. Teacher sees it, snatches it off him and tells him that this is a book for 8 year olds (the kid was 15ish) and tells him to get a book more appropriate for his age. Kid slouches around the shelves for about 10 minutes, finally picks up a book at random and sits in his chair tucking the edges of each page into the binding to make that looped-page look. He didn’t read a word. He sat there and did this to his book for the remainder of the reading session:

He had been genuinely excited about the 8 year old book he’d picked up. It was a new one in a series he used to read as a younger kid. He’d been actively sitting and reading, and then he was embarrassed in front of his classmates, told off for reading a kids book, and voila. He lost all enthusiasm for reading anything else that day.

What’s worse? That kid had been hit by a car like a year and a half earlier. Severe brain trauma. Had to re-learn a lot of basic things, like how to speak and how to read.

An 8 year old book would have been perfect for him. Easy enough to read that it would have helped rebuild his confidence in his own reading ability. A book meant for 15/16 years olds? A lot harder to read than a book for 8 year olds. Especially if you’re recovering from a relatively recent brain injury.

And yeah, the teacher knew all about his brain injury, and the recovery. He just seemed go be of the opinion that the kid was 15, so he should be reading books for 15 year olds, irrespective of brain injury.

Reading this thread I’m reminded of Daniel Pennae’s The Rights of the Reader, which can be found in a lot of bookshops and school libraries: 

The child speaking at the bottom in Quentin Blake’s distinctive spiky handwriting is saying ‘10 rights, 1 warning: Don’t make fun of people who don’t read - or they never will’

I still to this day remember getting yelled at for teaching myself cursive and being told that I wasn’t allowed to have that skill yet.

I was in 1st Grade.

I taught myself to read off of Peanuts comic strips, of which I remained fond. I was “too young for first grade” when I read children’s bios of Joan of Arc and Marie Curie and wrote little crude book reports on them, because I wanted to go to school. The local librarian made a fuss when I got my library card, saying I was the youngest person in the county ever to get one. I was told more times than I can count in “reading groups” not to “read ahead,” despite the fact that I’d had exactly the same reader the previous year. 

I also liked comics. When I was ten (at that age I managed to dogear a paperback titled “The History of Surgery”), someone who probably noticed my bibliophilia asked me father what he thought I’d study in college. “Peanuts and comic books,” he said dismissively.

One of my college classmates became one of the most respected writers in the comics world. I shoulda gone for it.

I try not to be a harsh instructor, but one of the times a little ill-temper can be constructive is when my future librarians display scorn toward library users (both actual and potential) on ANY BASIS WHATEVER.

That's both professionally unproductive -- and profoundly harmful for all the reasons discussed in this thread. NO, NO, a thousand times NO. Be the person who meets others where they are, and shows them the universe.

Even patrons who challenge library materials out of bias or hate -- and this is a scenario no librarian loves dealing with -- are still patrons and must be addressed with professionalism (which is not quite the same thing as "respect" always). The goal of such an interaction is that the patron stands down the challenge... but remains a patron.