Persepolis: One Book?

The community of Sarasota is voting on its "One Book" selections, and this year, the candidates were a nice mix of young adult and adult works, such as The Hunger Games, In Defense of Food, Fahrenheit 451, Nickeled and Dimed, and more.  For those of you that are unaware, the "One Book, One City" concept, which started in Seattle and has since spread worldwide (and has also spawned mutant offspring on Twitter), essentially turns the town into one giant book club.

It's nice to see that in a community so heavily skewed towards the retirement demographic, there are so many choices that are accessible to a younger audience.  In fact, if I had my druthers, Persepolis, the acclaimed graphic novel, would be in the running next year.  This is not so far-fetched: aside from being an intimately-told and elegant personal history, Marjane Satrapi's book is timely, relevant, and grants an insider's view into the troubling recent history of Iran.  Among its zillion other accolades, Persepolis has won the Printz Award, an honor given to books that are written for adults but that also appeal to young adults.  And the chances for Persepolis as a potential Sarasota One Book are bolstered by the fact that there is a precedent: this graphic novel has already been the choice of a major metropolitan library system.

So yeah, I love Persepolis,  I love the movie it was turned into, and I'd love to see my town adopt it for it's big book club.

Teenage Wildlife

I was tapped as one of the young "guybrarians" (man, I really don't like that combo word. Worst. Portmanteau. Ever.) to do some outreach to the local polytechnical high school. Together, myself and two others made a presentation to several classes over the course of the last two days. My piece of the show was a demonstration on how to download audiobooks; showing them the OverDrive iPhone app actually seemed to get many of them interested and engaged. When several of the kids whipped out their iPhones to try it, you could see how it made the teacher, clearly from the old school of confiscated devices, a little twitchy.

There were a lot of cool kids in the group. One of the girls was wearing a faux vintage Labyrinth t-shirt, which I commented on after the presentation was over. She says to me "Oh yeah, I love David Bowie, even though he's, like, 70 YEARS OLD."  Ha!

I know it's popular to bag on Hot Topic, but I tell you, when I was in high school, there seemed to be absolutely zero pop cultural memory (outside of the rare punk), so I think it's pretty awesome that contemporary 14 year olds are sporting Bowie and Velvet Underground tees.