This seventies stack of concrete is my regular library branch:
It's closed for renovations until mid-September October (looks like something went wrong in the reno schedule). Last year they replaced the carpets upstairs and for a couple of weeks the heady smell of glue distracted me from the rearrangement of the stacks. Not so sure what they're tackling this year but I suspect that it's self-checkout machines.
So far the reno caused a weird disruption in my schedule. I'm no longer shopping at the mall next to the library so lots of small errands are piling up and money is going unspent. More striking though is the change in my borrowing habits.
Instead of dashing in to pick up the books I've requested, now I go to the main branch to pick up requests. Not so bad, really, in terms of transit time. The problem: the main library has many, many more books and I'm hauling home 6 or 7 each week. It's murder on the back and shoulder and I'm not getting through them all. So this weekend I decided a temporary moratorium was needed: library run until I catch up a bit.
I've given up on the John Bell and have finished a stack of novels. Serendipitously the McCaughrean and the Brockmeier arrived at the same time and both feature Antarctic (sub)plots. White Darkness does a good job of teasing out adolescent female attraction to unattainable figures, in this case Lawrence Oates. Oddly I thought the non-Antarctic half of Brief History of the Dead stronger and more compelling than the re-capitulation of the Cherry-Gerrard journey to Cape Crozier.
The Deaver and the Ferris were amusements that didn't leave much of a mark.
Phoebe Gloeckner's Diary of a Teenage Girl--a mix of novel and comic--was compelling but not exactly pleasant in it's unflinching account of 1970s adolescence. It's horrors are more typical than Lynda Barry's Cruddy but there's something similar about the underlying tone.
That puts me about half way through the borrowed books and leaves me still way behind on reading what's on my own shelves.
Heather
