Books Read in 2010

I read more books than last year and averaged more than one a week! Of course the majority of them are children's fiction; five Newbery Award winners. My favorites were "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever", "Still Life", "The Lonely Polygamist", and "The Help". My favorite REreads were "A Little Princess", "Winnie the Pooh" (surely I had read this) and "Straight Man". I read books in print, on my kindle, on my itouch, my iphone, and my ipad. I have a long plan trip next week and I am determined to read "Watership Down" and "The House of the Spirits". There, I've made a public commitment.

1. Pollyanna
2. A Little Princess
3. Stuart Little
4. The Doll's House
5. The Chisselers
6. Henry and Beezus
7. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
8. The Summer of the Swans
9. The Big Steal
10. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
11. Freaky Friday
12. Winnie the Pooh
13. Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
14. The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
15. Straight Man
16. The Corrections
17. The Hills of Home: A Vermont idyll
18. Five for Sorrow Ten for Joy
19. Digging to America
20. Adam of the Road
21. Little House on the Prairie
22. Plainsong
23. A Candle for St. Jude
24. The Botany of Desire
25. The Railway Children
26. Bergdorf Blonds
27. The trumpet of the Swan
28. Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
29. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
30. The Devil Wears Prada
31. Winter Solstice
32. The Lightning Thief
33. It's Like This, Cat
34. Breakfast at Tiffany's
35. My Side of the Mountain
36. The Urban Hermit
37. Pretties
38. The Wanderer
39. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
40. Sizzling Sixteen
41. Tangled
42. Every Last One
43. Uglies
44. The Graveyard Book
45. Too Much Money
46. The Lonely Polygamist
47. Mostly Good Girls
48. Savvy
49. Brave Girl Eating
50. Dark Song
51. One More Theory About Happiness
52. Listening Is an Act of Love
53. Charlotte's Web
54. Wicked
55. The Professional
56. The Ballad of West Tenth Street
57. Howl's Moving Castle
58. Siam
59. Mrs. Mike
60. George's Marvelous Medicine
61. The Help
62. Ginger Pye
63. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
64. Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
65. Blue Willow
66. Looking for Alibrandi
67. Still Life
68. Warriors #1
69. A Year in the Merde

Tweets by Undergraduates on the library

I've collected (in an extremely unscientific sample) comments on the library and books by the undergraduates I follow on twitter. Lots of procrastinting especially in Gleason and lots of comments about food!

should change her permanent address to somewhere on the academic quad... class/lib-ing it up is really taking a toll on my drunk bitch time.

Lazy day in Gleason with Camille, the Brownie, and the Bear. I love my life. Oh and James brought me steak...beeeyatchesss!!

Too tired to function at the moment. My shift ends at 6 and I still have to lib it up today. Can someone please shoot me?

Once again in the lib...so this makes it over 2 weeks of my life. Anyone up for a euthanasia?

@ Let me know when you want to do that quick walk through Rush Rhees

@ thanks katie haha I'm just sleep deprived from the late nights at the lib...it's awful.

Cracking up at the fact that our library is on the cover of the Princeton's Review top college book. Our lib must be so baller

Me + Garrett + Lib+ Late Nights = why the hell am in the library on a Friday night? What the hell has happened to me?

In the lib trying really really really heard to do this French workbook. It's not really working for me...shiiiit.

yeah sitting in gleason and I really need to find a table. PRONTO.

After waking up at 3, I'm finally in the library. Wooo!

It's so quiet in the Art and Music Library that I can actually hear the silence... maybe I should just stick to Gleason.

Is doing anything but studying. Thanks, Gleason.

doing nothing at Gleason like a TRUE U of R student.

In Quieter Study Area of Gleason with Julia and Christina :D... @UR_FASA study session!


The library is so full on a Saturday night, it's hard to find seats #onlyatuofr


Added "Gleason Library" to my places on twitter because it's basically my home and deserves to be repped.

girl with obnoxiously loud ringtone at a quiet study area got stares from everyone #learnyourlesson

I get to make a pyramid out of books and take a picture of it for 15 points extra credit. #awesome

Is it weird that I love using books but hate using online sources when I write research papers? Stuck in the 20th century, heh.

super quiet library. super loud stomach growls. match made in hell.

Restless in Gleason. Methinks I need Chinese food to concentrate on my readings for "Politics of Insurgency and Terrorism."

Why yes, I am that crazy girl who brings a bag to library to hold the 30+ books that I need to check out.

To all the engineers that go to UofR, please stop thinking that since you have a "hard" major you can play Blink 182 loudly in library.

The library is incredibly peaceful right now.

Procrastinating in the Wells-Brown Room. Typical finals week.

Curled up in the Wells Brown room, editing a book review on "Lying Awake," and drinking a fantastic cup of coffee. Life is good.

sitting in the library. no noise other than someone quietly hacking up phelgm and someone else cutting their nails. awful awful awful.

I've rekindled my love with Carlson...yes, Carlson Library <3

apitlyk I think that the only thing that I'm going to miss about the U of R is Rush Rhees (the library, not the tombstone of the man).

Not happy that the PRR and Great Hall will be closed for #meliora. Three midterms in the next two weeks AHH.

Waiting for the Mail is Old School

When I was a college student our mail boxes were inside the front door of our dorm. We checked them several times a day -- when we left for classes, when we came back from classes, walking by on the way to the television (no, we didn't our own televisions in our room...) etc. Fast forward. University of Rochester students each have a CPU box in the university building that houses the post office, but not in their dorms. They rarely get print mail. Their parents call them and text them. They facebook and text their friends. They almost never GET mail so they almost never go and check their CPU boxes. As one student told me, they're mostly filled with chinese take-out menus...

So why does the University still send *important* notifications in print to CPU boxes?? As an adviser, I get copied in on these official letters. I immediately scan the letter and resend it by email with a follow-up on facebook. On more than one occasion, my email is the first time that the student has learned that they are in danger of failing, being expelled, etc. etc. Yikes!

Why on earth do we insist on communicating with students the way we did when we were undergraduates?

We need stack locations

I sat next to Stephen a few weeks ago in a Stackmap demo. He pointed out something to me that I had never registered in TEN YEARS. Sigh. Our catalog records don't include a floor location for Rush Rhees library. This isn't a problem for art books with the notation "Art Stacks - Art/Music Library". However this is a HUGE problem when you're looking for a book on one of the thirteen floors of stacks in Rush Rhees. Users have to take the call number, go to a little map on the wall which translates to the floor and then go to the floor. Not only are our stacks scary (lights on timers...), we make it really hard to find things. I over heard a campus tour guide the other day announce to her group "books are really hard to find". I'm afraid I would have to agree.

I'm sure there was a good reason for not include floor locations originally, but I think it's time to revisit that decision. Yes, we do shift books from floor to floor. But we don't shift them every day. While the current arrangement makes OUR life easier, it makes finding the books really really difficult for users.

Checking out Print Journals

I've been following a conversation on the PAMnet list serve about policies for checking out bound journals from an annex. I feel out of sync with the general sentiment which is to limit circulation anywhere from no circulation at all to just a few days. Last semester under my direction (pressure?) we standardized our circulation policy for bound journals; we now circulate all bound journals for two weeks. This is a huge change for us. Our circulation policies differed from library to library and even from journal to journal. The loan period ranged from two hours up to two weeks. Obviously the policy was confusing to users. But the more compelling argument was looking at the circulation statistics and noting that they were very low. With a commitment from our fantastic Inter Library Loan department to get, without question, articles from any volumes that may be checked out, we took the leap and all our bound journals now have a two week circulation period. To *my* knowledge, there hasn't been a single problem or complaint. (I hope I'm not cursing myself with that statement.) I predict than in a year or two, we'll have the same circulation period for journals that we do for books.

More textbook prices

I pulled up one of my advisee's course listing for this semester and looked up the cost of textbooks. It turns out that the bookstore has an online site, of course. The only question I have is why does anyone buy any books from the bookstore???

Biology 113
Biological Science by Freeman - package
Bookstore New $76 Amazon New $70
Bookstore Used $57 Amazon Used $20

Chemistry 132
Chemical Principles - package (used for fall and spring)
Bookstore New $335 Amazon New $237
Bookstore Used $ 251 Amazon Used $119

German 102
English Grammar for Students of German
Bookstore New $19 Amazon New $17
Bookstore Used $14 AmazonUsed $13

Na Klar
Bookstore New $222 Amazon New $109
Bookstore Used $167 Amazon Used $30

Math 165
Linear Algebra
Bookstore New $148 Amazon New $99
Bookstore Used $111 Amazon Used $15

TOTALS
Bookstore New $800 Amazon New $532
Bookstore Used $600 Amazon Used $197

The Cost of Textbooks

The use of reserves is on the rise this semester. There are more books being put on reserve and they are being used more often. Why? So during a fire alarm I went over to the bookstore to see how much textbooks actually cost. Unfortunately the textbook area was roped off, but the student behind the desk was bored and happy to look up prices for me.



Introductory Biology - $76
Introductory Chemistry - $300 (used for both semesters)
Calculus - $228 (used for the whole calculus series)
Physics 114 - $200 (they actually use two text books)
Mechanical Engineering 120 - $163



Yikes! A freshman science major could spend more than $500 their first semester on books? Of course, it would be much less the second semester, but that's a lot of money even to me. I need to go back with a real course schedule and see how much the textbooks would cost.



By sophomore year they know to buy their books on Amazon. I'll have to check that out with a list of real books to see how much money they save.

Sophomores

What a difference there is between freshman year and sophomore year. I met with one of my sophomore advisees this week.

1. She has learned she can save a lot of money by buying her textbooks used from Amazon rather than full price from the campus bookstore.
2. She is choosing a subject matter she loves as her major even though the classes are hard and her grades aren't the hardest.
3. When she has papers and exams in the same week - she gets the paper done a week ahead of time.
4. She's in a sorority but knows she often has to say "no" to parties because she needs to study.

Yes, I take some of this with a grain of salt, but in general I don't think they have much to gain by impressing *me*...

Advising

Advising goes in spurts. Weeks go by and I do nothing and feel guilty that I'm being paid (yes, that is correct) for doing it. Then I have a week where I think I'm not being paid enough.  Letters of academic probation??  Another steep and fast learning curve about that topic.  I've decided I need to go to some sessions on getting into medical school.  I have so many advisees who are "premed" and I don't think I'm giving them good or honest or realistic advice. And that's all I'm going to say on that topic.

More Reading on the Kindle

Now that I have my *own* kindle, I have more to say about the reading experience. At my nieces recommendation, i bought the first book in the series, "The Warriors". The book is about cats, with very similar names - firepaw, moonpaw, starpaw, etc. etc. If I had read the book in print, I would have occasionally flipped back to the beginning to review the list of characters. I think you can do it on the kindle, but I don't know how and it's not intuitive. The barrier is too high for me to bother to figure it out. There is also a map in the front of the book, that my niece went out of her way to point out to me. I never even thought to look at it on the kindle. The resolution was poor and again I was flummoxed by how to flip to the front of the book.

I also find it difficult to *find* books on the kindle. It's not made for browsing, which is surprising, because the Amazon site is all about browsing.

On the plus side, I *love* being about to download a sample chapter for FREE. I downloaded at least a dozen sample chapters over the weekend. I will try them and if I like them, I can just buy them while I'm travelling. O.K. That's the best thing about the kindle - I can buy a book almost anywhere, anytime!