A Few Thoughts

In the morning, on the train, I read The Twelve Kingdoms Sea of Shadow by Fuyumi Ono. The copy I read was an uncorrected proof. This was a wonderful story about a girl transported to a mythical chinese fairytale land consisting of twelve kingdoms. There she acquires the spirit of a warrior, fights demons, and goes through a variety of hardships; getting her money stolen, almost being sold to a brothel, almost being captured by the local magistrates, and wandering the roads near starving. The characterization is wonderful.

I rather like the character Rakashun who spends part of his time as a rat person, and part of his time as a human. There are wonderful fairytales elements like people being born from fruits, and each kingdom having a god king. I am not giving this book a full review because it is an uncorrected proof and I am not supposed to. I am however suggesting that the book be purchased for our young adult collection.

The cover on the finished book is slightly different than the cover on the uncorrected proof. I also think, some of the content will be different, so if I quote things in the book, I will make a mistake. There are two page spread manga style black and white illustrations throughout the book.

Over 15 million copies of this book have been sold worldwide. It is part of a 7 volume series. Tokypop, the publisher mainly sells manga. So, this is a slightly different thing for them to do.



When I got in to work, two books were waiting for me. Michael Chabon's Maps And Legends Reading and Writing Along the Borderland. The dust jacket is very nicely designed, it is three sections of layered images. I really like it a lot. However, it does not completely cover the whole book which some people may not like. The cover art is by Jordan Crane. Jordane Crane has some pretty interesting looking art. http://reddingk.com/

The other book that came in for me is The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. The Algebraist was nominated for the Hugo award. I am looking forward to reading both of these books.

I have been trying to figure out what the Second Life Library is all about. I took a look at the Info Island blog which explains events related to libraries in second life. http://infoisland.org/
I also looked at the various Youtube videos on second life libraries. There are a lot of them. Quite frankly, I have always found virtual worlds to be rather odd. Putting a library staffed by librarians in a virtual world is somewhat perplexing. I find the idea of stepping into second life, a virtual world, to visit a library quite frankly mildly scary. I wonder if it will be like World of Warcraft for librarians.

It seems that everything is changing really, really fast with library technology. We are getting the same treatment in libraries as the web is with web 2.0. Now there is the concept of library 2.0 which is a very vague technocentric ideal. I am a concrete person. I prefer to touch and feel what I am reading.

I have started reading The Haiku Handbook How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku by William J. Higginson with Penny Harter. This book appears to be an in depth overview of Haiku. I was hoping to pick up a book so I could learn the basic form of Haiku and write a few Haiku for the next poetry open microphone. The book has started with Japanese masters of Haiku. I am going to read it on the train home.