Tag: books
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How I Got to Now: A Librarian Year
This week I celebrated my one-year anniversary of librarianship. In my application essay for library school I wrote that I’d been a frequent library user for most of my life, yet had never considered working in one until recent epiphanies changed my outlook. Perhaps I thought of it like working at a movie theater—another regular…
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Here, Rodgers & Pencils
1) Here by Richard McGuireI was not a comic-book kid and I don’t know why. I had tailor-made qualities for it—tendency toward nerdery, introversion, being in band—yet I’ve only recently scratched the surface of recent popular graphic novels. One I heard about from the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast was Richard McGuire’s Here, which plants itself in the space…
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DDC 440-449: Foux Du Fa French
A Teach Me How To Dewey production This Is How We Dewey: 440 Romance languages; French 441 French writing system & phonology 442 French etymology 443 French dictionaries 444 Not assigned or no longer used 445 French grammar 446 Not assigned or no longer used 447 French language variations 448 Standard French usage 449 Provençal & Catalan…
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How We Got to Now
I couldn’t put down How We Got To Now, Steven Johnson’s six-part book on “innovations that made the modern world.” The book is an exposition on the theory of the “hummingbird effect,” which occurs when “an innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.”…
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So Runs the Man Away or (The Unexpected Virtue of Synchronicity)
The theme that has defined my 2014, I only now realize, is synchronicity. That Jungian concept (“the occurrence of two or more events that appear to be meaningfully related but not causally related”) bubbled up several times this year, especially in what I was reading, watching, or listening to concurrently. For instance: To name only the…
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Einterstellar
My new definition of cosmic irony: to be in the midst of Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe as I went to see Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, a marvel of a film that directly references Einstein and his theory of relativity. I had a chuckle during the film when that moment arrived, not because I…
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Three Oatmeal Truths
Today at the library, I read Matthew “The Oatmeal” Inman’s The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances, an extended version of his original web comic about ultra-running. It’s of a piece with his usual ardent and absurdist takes on varying topics. In the book he illustrates a few tips for becoming a…
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The Glass Cage
To never confront the possibility of getting lost is to live in a state of perpetual dislocation. If you never have to worry about not knowing where you are, then you never have to know where you are. —Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage One time the internet went down at the library and it was like the Apocalypse.…
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Destiny of the Republic
In Assassination Vacation, one of my all-time favorite books, Sarah Vowell calls the circumstances surrounding the Garfield assassination “an opera of arrogance, a spectacle of greed, a galling, appalling epic of egomania dramatizing the lust for pure power, shameless and raw.” After reading Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, which details said circumstances, Vowell’s characterization now almost…
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Deep & The Divine Milieu
At one point in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Mason asks his father if there’s magic in the world. Probably not literal magic, his dad replies. But then he asks the boy: if you didn’t know what a whale was and someone told you there was a giant mammal that lived underwater with a heart as big…
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DDC 430-439: Polyglöts Ünite
A Teach Me How To Dewey production This Is How We Dewey: 430 Germanic languages; German 431 German writing system & phonology 432 German etymology 433 German dictionaries 434 Not assigned or no longer used 435 German grammar 436 Not assigned or no longer used 437 German language variations 438 Standard German usage 439 Other…
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DDC 420-429: Nouns and Pronounce
A Teach Me How To Dewey production This Is How We Dewey: While I know a little Spanish, English is (obvs) my primary language. And what a weird language it is. I’m so glad I didn’t have to learn it later in life, because in some ways it makes no sense. Especially pronunciation: this well-known…
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DDC 410-419: Linguistics alfredo
A Teach Me How To Dewey production This Is How We Dewey: 410 Linguistics 411 Writing systems 412 Etymology 413 Dictionaries 414 Phonology 415 Structural systems (Grammar) 416 No longer used—formerly Prosody (linguistics) 417 Dialectology & historical linguistics 418 Standard usage; Applied linguistics 419 Verbal language not spoken or written Regarding the post title: what…
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DDC 400-409: Learn ALL THE WORDS
A Teach Me How To Dewey production This Is How We Dewey: Gotta admit this up front: I friggin’ love words. As an English major, a writer, a reader—pick the reason. I love them so much that I keep a list of cool words I’ve encountered that I want to remember. (*pushes up glasses*) So…
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DDC 390-399: Emily Post-Its
A Teach Me How To Dewey production This Is How We Dewey: This section is a bit of a grab-bag. I suppose customs, etiquette, and folklore fit together under the broad category of culture, but on the shelves this looks like that one drawer in the kitchen where you throw all that miscellaneous crap that…
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DDC 380-389: We built this city on rock and roads
A Teach Me How To Dewey production This Is How We Dewey: 380 Commerce, communications, transport 381 Internal commerce (Domestic trade) 382 International commerce (Foreign trade) 383 Postal communication 384 Communications; Telecommunication 385 Railroad transportation 386 Inland waterway & ferry transportation 387 Water, air, space transportation 388 Transportation; Ground transportation 389 Metrology & standardization Honestly,…