I realize I actually can't keep track

I tried to keep track of everything I read once in high school too. It's a losing proposition.
Yesterday I finished the Maland book on Seventeenth Century French Social Culture that I was reading. It was fab. Probably a lot of people wouldn't enjoy it, but social and cultural history supports my basic conviction that history is gossip about people who are dead so they can't gossip back.

Snyder, Midori. Hannah's Garden.
A very respectable entry in the now-large field of "fairies and modern (usually artistic or musical) humans mix. Some very eloquent language and a more-or-less satisfying ending (I like it better when the narrator is required to lose something directly, but the trend in the genre is certainly for someone near and dear to pay the required price.) I was a bit reminded of Nina Kiriki Hoffman's very excellent Past the Size of Dreaming and the other related books. Those I think are a little bit more my thing, but they don't have fairies so I suppose it's a toss up for most people.

I finished an issue of the Young Adult Library Services Association magazine that a nice children's librarian lent me. My name was in it! since I just joined YALSA this winter. The theme of this issue was graphic novels. It mystifies me when so many YA librarians seem to like and understand graphic novels, why the Chicago Public Library has about 8, and not that fabulous a selection at that. Pretty much no manga (not that I like it, but it *is* popular). No complete runs of the few series they do collect. With a heavily narrative story like Books of Magic or Sandman, reading just a volume or two from the middle is not as satisfying as being able to read the whole series. Our branch finally has all of Sandman, I think. Well, I guess that's an issue for the future.

I've been reading my various library listservs, and they're talking a lot about representing abstinence as a viewpoint now. I actually (and this might surprise people who knew me in my young and wild days) think this is a great thing. I don't know if I ever would have actually looked at a teen non-fiction book on abstinence, but I'm realizing that our culture really is much more sexualized than it was even a decade ago when I was a high schooler. Cable has finally penetrated even the rural areas (only a few kids had cable when I was growing up) and people see all sorts of stuff from a young age. Complete ignorance can be really protective for some children, because it can allow you to not notice and engage in stuff that could hurt you but requires your participation. However if general media exposure means you can't be ignorant until you want to learn, then it's probably good to have access to books that talk about how to say "no". Personally, I think teens have the right to enter into a thoughtful, meaningful sexual relationship if they want, but as a woman my experience is that if you think you might want to say "no" to a sexual relationship, you need to plan that out in advance and have thought about it. It is hard to come up with a reasonable "no" and stick to it in the middle of a new, unfamiliar or uncomfortable sexual situation.

aghhh! quarter to eight! must run shower/iron/make lunch leave. bye!