My wife was out of town for the weekend, and a good friend of mine just so happened to be going to DC for the annual American Library Association conference. He had an extra bed in his paid-for by work hotel room and invited me to join him. One bus trip later, and I’m in DC.

Something many people don’t know about me: I was a teenage librarian. In high school I spent a year working after school in my high school’s library, and then two years working in my town’s public library in their children’s department. It was a formative experience that definitely helped set me on my future career path as an educator. Given that, I spent the $25 for the exhibits floor pass.

In a lucky coincidence, I saw that Melissa Techman was going to be in DC on Saturday for the conference. A year ago at NECC, I went down for a day and had lunch with a bunch of special educators and a few other “friends of sped,” Melissa being one of said friends. In some nice symmetry, this year I got to go out to lunch as a friend of libraries with Melissa, Diane Cordell (a long-time Twitter friend that I finally got to meet in person), Gretchen Caserotti, Cathy Jo Nelson, and Kathy Ishizuka. We had plenty of good food and better conversation, as was the case last year.

Kathy is the Technology Editor for the School Library Journal, and later wrote me an e-mail asking for my impressions of the conference. Here’s what I wrote in reply:

It’s funny, this is the second year in a row that I’ve been to the Washington Convention Center and only been able to see the exhibits floor for a conference. The floor is pretty much like the floor of any other large convention: it’s heavy on the free stuff and phony marketing interactions. On the plus side for ALA, this convention didn’t seem to have any strange cult-like booths like the SMART booth at NECC last year.

As a special educator,I was really disappointed on the floor by the assistive technology pavilion, which didn’t seem to really have much in the way of assistive technology at all that I could see. I’d imagine that people with reading difficulties are one of those underserved populations that could stand to have more opportunities for access, and there wasn’t much of that there.

I noticed a definite trend toward making friendlier spaces for the visiting public. Lots of furniture and shelves that look cozy and inviting. I noticed in one booth they were featuring gaming stations to try and get the teenage demographic back into libraries. In the same tone, it was nice to see a good-sized presence of companies that produce comic books and graphic novels there.

On a side note: I’m somewhat surprised by the number of companies that specialize in moving libraries.

Just from the bits and pieces I picked up on from talking to some people and listening in on some others, it’s interesting to see many of the same shared anxieties that teachers and librarians share right now. Increasing technology and decreasing tax revenues are big stressors on both groups, and I very much get the feeling that we’re in the midst of a major reordering of the way the world works for all of us. I think the concern for both groups at the moment is to get out in front of the changes to help guide them in a positive fashion.

It all started during Spring Break. I took with me two books: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame Smith. Both books made me fall in love with reading all over again for very different reasons.

Little Brother is a blisteringly-paced story in post-9/11 America about a bunch of hacker kids who band together to rage against the machine following a terrorist attack when the government’s heavy-handed tactics victimize them and their city. I burned through the book’s nearly 400 pages in 3 days of beach reading.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, on the other hand, is a delightful mashup that’s just like it sounds. It takes the classic Austen text and throws in a smattering of Zombie mayhem to liven it up a bit for those of us who would otherwise avoid that sort of thing. My wife greatly enjoys Austen’s work, and so we both found great excitement in being able to share our thoughts on Pride and Prejudice. The conversations we’d have as I read the book were very interesting to me. Sometimes I would just quote the fun zombie bits to get a feeling from her how the scene differed in the original text. A greater portion of the time, though, we would actually discuss the stuff that was all Austen, with me lamenting Elizabeth’s travails with Mr. Darcy, or my shock at finding out how much of a scoundrel Mr. Wickham really is, or how badly I felt for Lydia as she was ignored by Mr. Bingley.

From there, I spent the summer reading first The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman’s Hugo and Newbery Award winning book for children about Nobody Owens, a boy raised by ghosts after his family’s murder while he was a baby, and then I read the complete Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. It makes me wonder sometimes if part of the draw of Middle School for me is my great affection for books written for children in that age group.

I then moved on to Homer’s Odyssey by Gwen Cooper, about a blind cat. I’m currently back on Austen with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. I can’t believe the nerve of how Willoughby treated Marianne in Sub-Marine Station Beta.

But that’s only half of where my love for books comes from right now.

The other half comes from audiobooks. My listening habits are very different from my reading habits. I prefer to listen only to non-fiction books and essays on my morning and afternoon commutes. This past year I’ve listened to the large portions of the  works of David Sedaris and David Foster Wallace, Bonk by Mary Roach, The Last Lecture by Randy Pauch, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, and several books that reminded me why I love history so much: A People’s History of the United States: 20th Century by Howard Zinn, The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell, and Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

I felt compelled to write this post because of my completion this morning of Team of Rivals.

The biggest problem with attempting to teach history out of a textbook, is, by far, the inherent dryness of textbook writing. Too interested in statements of fact, not interesting at all. But Goodwin is interested in good storytelling. She paints a picture for the reader of Lincoln and his cabinet as passionate people who debated and oftentimes strongly disagreed with each other about how to handle the issues of the Civil War. The book is almost entirely about Lincoln and his inner circle, so the villains of the piece aren’t the Confederates, but those on the Union’s side who stand in the way of beating the confederates due to their own insecurities and lust for power. At some points, I couldn’t believe the Union actually ended up winning. I got chills from The Gettysburg Address, practically shouted at Lincoln to not go to Ford’s Theater, and got a little teary at the outpouring of emotion by those closest to him on his death.

At the very end of the book, there was one specific passage that blew me away, and reminded me that the storytelling of history is what can grab the interest of even the most surprising sort of person. Everybody loves a good story, even more so when the story is real. In the passage, Leo Tolstoy was describing a visit of his to the North Caucasus, where he became the guest of a tribal chief and regaled them with stories of great men of history.

When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock…His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”

Who wouldn’t want to hear about that man?

Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over two million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.

I have been proud to donate in the past, and am proud to contribute yet again.  Last year they added my local Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. This year the children over there will see the following books from me:

• Where the Wild Things Are
•  Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
•  Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

So if you have it in your hearts and wallets, I encourage you to donate even a small amount to this great charity that really contributes to better quality of life for children stuck in hospitals.

Books:

• Our Dumb World by The Onion – This has been bedtime reading for a while now.  It’s great parody of an atlas, as it’s very dense but often hilarious.  For example, this bit on Hong Kong:

An exotic seaport off the coast of China, the Hong Kong province is plagued by massive, well-choreographed brawls that break out almost daily on every street corner.  The dazzling, high-speed, and acrobatic violence puts every citizen at constant risk of being thrown off a two-story balcony onto a pile of cardboard boxes.

• The Incredible Indoor Games Book by Bob Gregson – I haven’t looked at this book in years, and it reminded me of some fun games that I was able to play with my students for PAT on Friday.

Comics – I read almost everything, so some highlights and low points:

• Countdown #1 -  I already trashed this.
• Fables #72 – Cinderella is awesome.
• Mighty Avengers #12 – If you’re reading Secret Invasion and not reading everything else Bendis is writing at the moment, you’re nuts.
• New Exiles #5 – I already trashed this one, too.
• Ultimate Spider-Man #121 – The only Bendis book you don’t need to read if you want to keep up with Secret Invasion, and it, too, is great.  This is a nice done in one story that wraps up the typical high school baby project for health class.

TV:

• How I Met Your Mother – More Robin Sparkles?  Thank you!  Bonus for The Dawson balding.
• 30 Rock – Some delightful continuity this week that’s going to lead to interesting places, and, even better, more Will Arnett on my TV.  It also had my favorite line of the week.
• Lost – Poor Sayid.

Games:

• Just Cause – While it’s certainly not a great game, it was worth the $15 I spent on it.  It’s a fairly simple open world game overall, but I just find the concept of freeing tiny villages from tyrannical rule very appealing for some reason and always want to do just one more.  A grappling hook and a parachute both go a long way to making the typical open world experience more fun.
• Crackdown – This was another $15 game, and it was way more enjoyable than I thought it would be.  I finished up the co-op campaign with Brian, and it was pretty fun.  Again, having a fun way to move through the open world with awesome jumping abilities definitely improved the open world gaming experience for me.