Book Orders

We just received our first shipment of books yesterday. We submitted this order on August 24, and we just received the first half of that order yesterday. That means there's another half of the order that we still don't have. This is why we order books that are in high demand or that we think will be really popular from Amazon with our book fair profits.

Graphic Novels

One of the first projects for this school year was to weed the reference section of the library, consolidate what is left of reference to the shelves along the front wall of the library, and then move the graphic novels out of the nonfiction section (dewey decimal 741.5) into their own section.

 

If you look closely, you can see that my Millennium Falcon cockpit from working at Toys R' Us has a new home (by some miracle it still lights up even after being stored in my basement for many years). The chairs used to be in two parallel lines in front of the magazine racks, but we wanted more of a cozy reading nook feel so we arranged the chairs to be more in a circle, added a bean bag chair and have two more bean bag chairs on order. There was a Snoopy flag stored in the back, so we got that out, and I made a little graphic novel sign out of a "graphic novels" poster advertisement that was in one of the catalogs we got. It's the small sign to the left of Snoopy with the blue arrow pointing to it.

Summer vacation recipe experiment - vegetarian "crab" cakes

Having off time in the summer is a great perk of this job. I've definitely been doing more cooking with all my free time. Last week I made experimental vegetarian zucchini "crab" cakes, and they were a total success! Because of the amount of zucchini we've been getting from the farm, I've been trying all sorts of zucchini recipes to keep from getting bored. I found seceral recipes online for zucchini sliders, so I mixed and matched from those recipes based on what I had in the house. They came out pretty well. As a side comment, Mike mentioned that they kind of had the texture of crab cakes, so I thought, why not change up the seasonings and try to make vegetarian "crab" cakes? Here it is...adapted from several zucchini slider recipes for the base plus ideas from the "Vegan Brunch" tempeh "crab" cake recipe.

1 cup grated zucchini (approximately 1 cup after squeezing out excess moisture, seems to be one large zucchini or two smaller zucchini)
1/2 cup grated or finely chopped carrot (I used my Magic Bullet to chop)
1/4 to 1/3 cup grated or finely chopped onion (see Magic Bullet above)
1 flax "egg" (1 tbsp ground flax seed plus 3 tbsp water mixed - made in the Magic Bullet) or 1 real egg
1 tsp plus a few more shakes of Old Bay seasoning to taste
A pinch of salt to taste
A few shakes of kelp granules
1/4 cup flour of your choice - I used whole wheat
1/4 cup goat cheese (the slider recipes all called for feta, but my mom got me a ton of goat cheese from Costco, so I used that instead and it seems to work. I think extra firm tofu might work too)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. After you grate the zucchini (I used a small hole grater) squeeze out as much moisture as you can. You can do this with cheese cloth or I just did the best I could with my hands. In a medium sized mixing bowl,mix together the zucchini, carrot and onion. Add the seasonings until evenly mixed. Add the egg or flax "egg" and mix in. Add the flour and mix in completely. Add the goat cheese and mix until evenly distributed throughout. Regrigerate for a half hour or so. Prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper and spray with olive oil spray. The mixture will be very sticky and wet, but that's ok. Divide into eight equal balls and form into patties on the baking sheet. Spray tops with olive oil spray. Bake for 20 minutes. Flip patties over and bake for another 15-20 minutes until tops look crispy.

You can probably pan fry them instead of baking, but I was scared my patties would fall apart.

Serve with your crab cake sauce of choice..cocktail sauce, remoulade sauce, or whatever.

I really liked the flavor of these. Mike asked me how many zucchini it takes to make them and how much effort, which appears to mean he liked them enough that he's thinking about making them for himself.

Book Makeovers

Whenever we have a little down time in the library, we've started giving some of the older books makeovers to make them look a little more appealing.  Sometimes this just means taking off the old mylar dust jacket cover and putting on a new one, but sometimes it means peeling lamination off the cover (whoever thought it was a good idea to laminate dust jackets was wrong), removing stickers, putting on new stickers, and covering with a new mylar dust jacket cover.  Removing the stickers is often a lengthy process involving scraping with fingernails and then using rubbing alcohol on a q-tip to get rid of any extra stickiness as best as we can.

A lot of our older books have bar codes and date due stickers on the front of the book, so often our makeovers involve taking these stickers off the front and putting new ones on the back.  Here's an example that I worked on today:

Before

After

As you can see, sometimes there's not much we can do about ugly or cheesy covers (like The Lives of Christopher Chant above), but they do look a little more appealing without stickers covering the pictures, and if it makes a student more likely to consider the book, it's worth the effort and time.

Skype visit

Today we had our first virtual Skype author visit for our book club with Adam Selzer.

I think it went pretty well. We had some technical glitches with the call dropped a few times during the first lunch, but the other three lunches went without a hitch, and I think the students really enjoyed it!

Dystopias

The books that everyone is reading right now are the Hunger Games trilogy. These are the books that have made the dystopian genre huge. Here are the book trailers for each book in the trilogy:

Because these books are so popular right now, I've been reading a lot of other dystopian YA novels in order to be familiar with books to suggest when students come in looking for the Hunger Games. We have multiple copies of all three books, but there has been a wait list for the first book since the beginning of the school year, and off and on for the other two books. We don't like students to walk out empty-handed, so it's good to have alternate suggestions if the book they want is checked out.

Here are two other dystopian novels that I've read and like just as much (or more) than the Hunger Games trilogy.

Winter Display

Work continues on. This week has actually been a slight lull in what has been a very busy few months. Nothing particularly exciting is happening, but here's a little winter/snow/ice themed display we threw together quickly.