altlovesbooks

I'm slowly working my way through all the polar expeditions that have gone awry. Turns out there's a lot of them, and they always seem to go poorly. Can't imagine why that is... it's a bit cold, sure, and there's not a lot of food to be had, but surely this one will turn out differently!

It doesn't.

Shackleton puts together a crew to reach the South Pole, but doesn't make it. They get stranded in ice long before they reach their goal, and end up drifting with it for quite some time until they send out a party to go for help. In the meantime, we get to know (some of) the crew of 27, and what it took to survive on the pack ice they were stuck on for so long.

I've read quite a few arctic expedition books at this point, and while this one was a great read, it lacked some of the flair and panache of some of the other books. Part of it is because this was originally written in 1959 from diaries and first hand accounts from the survivors, which is great, but some of the writing is a bit stale. I like that Shackleton actually seemed capable of leading his crew (unlike some others... *coughcough*Stefansson*coughcough*), and the crew actually seemed fairly capable and steady when compared to some of the other disasters I've read about.

This was really an interesting read, a bit stale in the writing, but otherwise kept my attention.

”Bean paste is all about feeling, young man.”

A weirdly calming read about an ex-convict’s dorayaki shop and the mysterious elderly Tokue he hires for basically peanuts. I say weirdly calming, because this book went places that I wasn’t expecting from the summary. I had some serious mood whiplash moments while reading this short, sweet, ultimately sad little novel.

Ex-convict Sentaro runs a dorayaki shop to pay off a debt. He’s making a rough go of it initially, because while he makes the pancakes from scratch, he buys pre-made sweet bean paste (name drop!) rather than make it from scratch. As a result his sweets are middling at best, and he doesn’t get much foot traffic as a result. Tokue, elderly woman with strangely twisted, ugly hands, starts hanging around his shop trying to get Sentaro to hire her. At first he refuses, but it’s only when she names some minuscule sum of money as her wage in exchange for making her sweet bean paste from scratch for him that he reluctantly hires her on. What follows is the two of them turning the shop around–until we start learning more about Tokue and her past.

I went into this blind, so when Tokue’s big reveal came, I was sort of floored. Leprosy was definitely not on my list of potential baggage. I was thinking more like dementia or homelessness or something. Regardless, this ended up being a pretty touching read for something so mood whiplash-y. I do sort of wish we find out how Sentaro ends up; I was rooting for him to open his own shop modeled after Tokue’s sweet bean paste, but the book ends before we get that far.

Still, a good, quick read. I sort of wish I had my own dorayaki to eat while reading this.

Well, I can finally check this one off my “I really should read this” list. There’s a handful of books I feel obligated to read as a librarian and just never get around to, because there’s only so many minutes in a day, and new books are shiny. I was mostly pleased with this, and I think my only real hangups center around it being a novella and not a full novel. Things felt rushed in places, but when you only have under 200 pages to tell a story, things get streamlined.

The “shy murderbot” shtick is mostly funny and relatable, but I will say that towards the end it felt layered on a little heavy. Like the joke had been told just one too many times, and you’re left thinking “yeah I get it” rather than being amused. The ending was especially on-point with the MurderBot character, and I liked that the author played it the way she did.

So, only a very minor complaint to a short, enjoyable read. Definitely will read more in this series, especially to pad out a Goodreads Reading Challenge at the end of the year.

I'm heading into a much-needed weeding project at my library, and this book was really helpful in many different ways in how to tackle things. Not only does it go section-by-section and talks about topics you may need, what can stay, what can be weeded, etc., but it also includes several helpful tips for the things around weeding projects that you might not think of. Messaging for the masses, getting your staff on-board, interviews with actual librarians at actual libraries about their weeding projects, some (full) example collection development plans with annotations to consider, it's quite comprehensive. One of my favorite things I pulled from here was a sample weeding schedule, which breaks down a collection by month, and gives you target areas to review/weed each month. Obviously it needs to be tailored to your specific collection, but it's a handy jumping off point for a large project like mine.

It does try to state absolutes in a field where, as we all know, nothing is absolute, but if you're able to read critically and understand that things may be different in your specific collection and how to apply the knowledge, there's a lot of good here.