THE AMBIDEXTROUS LIBRARIAN

#somethingwickedthiswaycomes It seems I may have been dwelling these last few days on innovative ways to get people reading.  After the comments I made in my previous post about possible future iterations of "the book", I stumbled across this example whilst aimlessly surfing the Googles: Macbeth is #killingit  (link to Booktopia) Yep, it's #Macbeth.  And apparently #Macbeth is #killingit. This is somewhat stretching my idea of what I was talking about in my previous post, i.e. innovative ways to engage kids in reading.  I dunno, this just seems somewhat... lame.  I mean, on the cover Lord and Lady Macbeth appear to have their heads substituted with emoji.  With. Emoji.  And they are checking in to their various locations and presumably hash-tagging their adventures whilst snap chatting the latest #epicdeadbody or #crazylady.  Students can see though this guise pretty  quickly, they are very wise to these adult attempts to appear "cool".  The fact that I

SUNSHINE, DECKS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS So, that's another year out of the way! I hope you enjoyed the school holidays.  I certainly did.  For me, it wasn't so much bookish as practical.  I cleared some land, levelled it, landscaped it and made a deck.  Not much time for reading in between all that but it was therapeutic to get out in the sun. Because all this practicality left me little time to actually read, I decided to focus on something a little less wordy, but no less relevant - the graphic novel.  Now, I did read a few but they are a little too adult to be termed YA so I probably won't review them here (one was an excellent memoir of growing up in Yorkshire when the Yorkshire Ripper was on the loose - highly recommended, but not particularly YA friendly). Devouring these graphic novels made me realise that literature comes in so many forms these days.  Traditionalists may find it easy to dismiss the graphic novel, but having read several excellent examples thes