Comments for MFRL Blog

Comment on Student Edition by apderlaga

apderlaga — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:41:13 +0000

I haven’t had a chance to help a patron with this database yet, but I certainly will recommend it in the future! Definitely a great tool for those ‘last-minute’ researchers.

Comment on Virginia Memory (part 1) by Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 16:58:01 +0000

This is fantastic Emily! Thanks for yet another wonderful blog!

Comment on Reckless by Yanni

Yanni — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 19:48:15 +0000

Darkness, danger and bad endings are really nothing new in children’s stories, especially fairy tales. What’s (relatively) new is the happy ending, the neatly wrapped up tale with good triumphing and everyone living happily ever after. The Brothers Grimm are probably the most well known “offenders”: much of the tales they re-wrote to make them more palatable so that their books would sell more. A small example, in many tellings of the original Hanzel and Gretal they didn’t just put the witch in the oven, they ate her as well.

However this is by no means the only contemporary children’s book w/ a dark theme. Take a look at The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, which has won several awards, including Newbery last year. The main character’s parents are murdered in the opening chapter and he’s adopted by ghosts in a graveyard. Also worth a look is Summerland by Michael Chabon in which the protagonist’s father is not just kidnapped but brainwashed into working for the bad guys in a fairy world where plenty of bad things happen. Summerland is much less dark than Reckless or The Graveyard Book but it’s also certainly not the light fare one might expect from a book so strongly centered around Baseball.

Comment on “Snook Alone” (Juvenile fiction) by Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:28:01 +0000

Yanni, at first I thought you were surely kidding with this comment. But no, you’re not. I think the word was used appropriately…another definition is “to destroy a large part of.” Maybe the author desperately wants to lead little readers astray and have them using words incorrectly, but I don’t think so.

Comment on “Snook Alone” (Juvenile fiction) by Yanni

Yanni — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 23:48:38 +0000

I wonder if she used decimating properly. That it one of the most misused words. It’s often used when someone wants to say “destroy” or “rout” when actually it means to kill or destroy a tenth of something.

Comment on Fragile Beasts by Yanni

Yanni — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:31:34 +0000

The quote is very striking. For me time almost always seems to go by too fast except for the rare occasions where I am extremely bored or in pain. I’d heard it rumored that time went by faster as you got older, but never that it slowed down again.

Comment on MLIS/Spring 2010/SLIS 5429/Module 10 (book 1 of 1) by Yanni

Yanni — Mon, 03 May 2010 19:36:23 +0000

Interestingly, Darwin wasn’t really a fan of the term Evolution, preferring “descent with modification”, rather it was popularized by other biologists…

Comment on MLIS/Spring 2010/SLIS 5429/Module 8 (book 2 of 2) by Yanni

Yanni — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:53:09 +0000

I’m not sure I’d call this Science Fiction… It’s alternate history surely (it’s set in the past, but not our past) so fantasy might be a better genre designation. I think the proper term would be Steampunk, though not having read the series I couldn’t say for sure… but airships generally do figure large in the steampunk genre.

Regardless of all that, this has been on my to-read list for a while… and I think it’s bumped up a little closer to the top of the list now. (:

Comment on MLIS/Spring 2010/SLIS 5429/Module 10 (book 1 of 1) by Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 02:51:11 +0000

Yanni, Darwin’s theories of evolution are very much part of the story. Darwin is one of Grandfather’s friends. Excerpts from Darwin’s “The Origins of Species” introduce each chapter.
Thanks for your comments and for reading the blog!

Comment on MLIS/Spring 2010/SLIS 5429/Module 10 (book 1 of 1) by Yanni

Yanni — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 22:21:28 +0000

It does sound interesting, though I wonder if the word evolution was in the common parlence of the time… that is of course assuming it’s even used within the book.