Tis the season for snow, sugar, santa, and charity. Whether it is because the spirit has moved you or you are looking for a way to up your karma and stay off the naughty list one more year, there are a ton of ways to get involved with organizations that support literacy and education.
One of my favorite ways to give back is by going through Donors Choose. Donors Choose is an organization that enables school teachers to reach out to the public and ask for donations for individual and specific projects that they can’t obtain funding for. What I like about it is how personal the process is. There are a ton of ways to search through open projects if you feel like giving based on specifics like location, need, materials, or intent. You can give partial donations to suit your own budget or pay off a project in full.
The main page can be found here: Donors Choose. And if you’re looking for a creative gift this year for someone they have some really cool gift cards which the receiver can then “spend” on the website. Instead of a shopping spree, it’s a donate spree. Pretty niffty in my opinion.
Just to give you an idea of what some of these projects entail, here is one I found on Donors Choose from a teacher looking to expand her curriculum to include graphic novels as an alternative to the required reading.
Location: NYC
Materials needed: 30 copies of Maus by Art Spiegleman
“With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility” I teach Special Education English in a Charter High School. We are in a low income neighborhood, and most of my students have been left back or are over age for the grade they are in at the school. They have talents, and this project is geared towards what they love to do and accomplish what is required of them for school.
“The pages of the book are not coming to life for me…so I don’t read.” This is how my students feel, and the wall I am trying to climb to get through to my students. I would like to substitute a required reading with a book that they would find enjoyable and hopefully want to read. I will also create a project based on their talents and likes.
School bells are ringing and all across the nation, kids everywhere are massively bummed out. It’s that inglorious time of year when it’s time to pile onto the school bus once again and truck off to academia. Hopefully you got your required summer reading out of the way, and hopefully you got to read books you might actually -want- to read.
A few of my friends went to more progressive high schools than my own where this was already the case. I, however, spent my adolescence in podunk north Georgia where this was anything -but-. Nor had it changed much in my younger brother’s time in the county school system three years later.
Today though I want to give a shout out to a rural school system that is doing it right. My best friend was looking for a job in education, and excitedly e-mailed me the summer reading list for Dawson County high school. Dawson is a fairly small county in the North Georgia mountains that abuts my own hometown. Amongst the usual suspects like Dickens, Faulkner, and Wells, there they were the works of Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Dude! I never thought I would say it, but GO DAWSON!
To be fair this may only be true of teen fiction, but it seems like vampires these days are impervious to well…everything. Would the Corey’s have stood a chance against Keifer Sutherland’s band of lost boys if they had been Cullens? What the hell happened to vampires who exploded on a sunny day like a decent creature of the night should!? -I’m- more allergic to garlic than these young, modern vampires are! Argh!
I’ll confess, I really liked the whole “sparkle in the sun” thing in Twilight and I could buy that as a sort of evolutionary advantage left over from the primordial times. (like how fish are attracted to shiny lures) But now, more and more it’s seeming like -the standard- that vampires are unfazed by their traditional weaknesses. The only weaknesses these new vampires seem to have are those of the heart and psyche. To apply the old Superman argument, what fun is it when your hero is impervious to bullets? These new vampires seem to be blest with all the perks (immortality, lightning reflexes, beauty, grace, magic yadda yadda) but little of the baggage. Just think of how much more interesting it would be to see the human protagonists deal with the full weight and consequence of becoming a classic vampire. Bloodlust and heightened sensuality is only the tip of the iceberg. Really think about what it would be like to -never- see the sunlight again. What would that do to you? What if you were a christian and could no longer pray on a rosary or on holy ground while these changes were happening to you? There is a lot more serious and psychological ground that -could- be covered in vampire fiction that isn’t (particularly in YA fiction).
Oh, ho ho. I am so happy that such a thing exists. Though I still haven’t gotten around to picking up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I’m glad to see that Quirk Books is rolling forward with this series. And now without further adieu, I give you Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.
So I finally talked myself into buying into the Barnes & Noble membership program four months ago. You know the deal. Pay $25 dollars annually, receive 10% off all your purchases plus access to exclusive member coupons and the like. I always shy away from those programs where you have to buy into the rewards program because inevitably I forget to renew or I don’t earn back my money.
Well since getting my member card, I’ve made one purchase: a $9.99 manga from Tokyopop. Yay, a savings of a whole .99 cents! I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I”m probably not going to be earning back my membership fee within a year’s time. Meanwhile at Borders, I’ve spent about $40.00 so far this month.
I don’t have anything against the company. I have to admit, Barnes and Noble usually has a wider selection than Borders. I also feel that they do a better job of keeping books in stock. The Border’s at Penn Station and Columbus Circle are notorious for never having the book I’m looking for in stock. B&N locations are also, in general, more convenient. In fact I believe that was why I purchased that one manga back in January. It was cold, and I’d rather walk next door to Barnes and Noble than up to 59th. The difference between Borders and B&N is that B&N is not usually able to get me into their retail outlets like Borders can, and the reasons for that are the differences in their e-mail alerts and coupons.
That 10% that B&N offers helps, but it’s such a trivial amount that it doesn’t convince me that I need to buy this book -now-. Logic wins out every-time. Why save 10% when I could save 100% by not going into the bookstore to begin with. Whereas at Borders, when I see anything over 20% off in my inbox, my palms start sweating.
25%? That’s a whole $6.25 off that new hardcover. Hmm, maybe I should get it now instead of waiting for the mass market. Oh and it’s only good for two days. Hmm, no time to thing about this; off to the bookstore I go.
And once I’m in the store, they’ve got me. It’s very hard to walk out having only bought one book at a discount. Those front tables sing to me like Sirens. Another great thing about Border’s Rewards is that -every time- you receive an e-mail from them, there is always some sort of coupon attacked. From 15% to 40%; it’s always a surprise and one that I enjoy. They make it fun to receive consumer spam.
I really do love Borders, as far as retail chains go. The store is always clean, I’ve had better experiences with the staff, and the incentives are grand. I hope the company will be able to pick itself up by the bootstraps.
Another thing that I think Barnes & Noble does a poorer job of is the content of their e-mail alerts. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the interviews on B&N.com. I’ve found a lot of interesting books through the supplementary content on the website referred to me in those e-mail alerts, but I don’t take that information to the next step of actually purchasing the books from B&N. There is a disconnect between B&N Studio and the “Buy Now” mindset.
I have one other minor beef with Barnes and Nobles that’s personal in nature. I just don’t respond well to the green color scheme. I know that’s their image, but I don’t. It makes me think of money, the money I’m handing to the cashier. The money I don’t have.
Belle of the Books did a neat little mash-up of Pride and Prejudice book coversfor Weekly Geek, since it’s one of those books that will forever be reprinted and there are a ton of covers to chose from. It was a neat little exercise showing a lot of variety, and I’ve been meaning to do my own since I absolutely love book cover design. Pride and Prejudice would have also been my top pick (because it’s one of my favorite books) but alas, for not. So I’ll be going off the beaten path to bring you one of my favorite translated works: A Wild Sheep Chase.
Before I get to the eye-candy. I encourage you to check out Belle of the Books. It’s a really cute blog, one of the many which I still need to add to my sidebar. >.< Maybe I’ll get around to that this week. It’s been on my To Do List for a month but ever time I log into my RSS feed reader it’s just…so…daunting. Gaaaah. Anyway, COVERS!
That last one is probably my favorite, it’s just a sheep standing besides a hastily drawn tree beneath the red sun. It’s got a very Shel Silverstein “Where the Sidewalk Ends” feel to it, which is highly appropriate for this book/hunt. It’s a really bizarre book, but so unbelievably satisfying.
I believe it was Murakami’s debut work in America. Now this may sound strange, but it always reminded me of some fucked-up form of the Matrix sans the hard-core sci-fi elements, where Unamed is the very passive (seemingly either out of place in regular society) Mr. Anderson character that get’s swept up in this giant government conspiracy/hunt. So maybe from there the similarities degenerate as the hunt did into a completely twisted adventure involving a very snarky Sheepman…or prophet, eh?, but I still think of the unamed character in this way. Konnban wa Anderuson-san.
It’s one of my favorite translated works.
And if you’ve read the book. This is going to make perfect sense:
I had a birthday this week, and as is my custom, I allow my self a mini shopping spree at Borders. I admit, it helped that I got a 40% off one book coupon in addition to my birthday coupon. So here is what I picked up:
I love the Artemis books. I’ll go into that more when I review them, but for now I’ll just say that I love Artemis for being the persnickety little bastard that he is. I felt the progression of his character especially in the first three books was fantastic. The third book had me near tears when he made that certain sacrifice for his dad. I can’t wait to read Lost Colony. I must force myself to finish the other three books I’m in the middle of right now though. The disappointment that was Breaking Dawn has kind of put a dent in the recent reading binge I’ve been on. Granted it is because of the disappointment that was Breaking Dawn that I bought these two over other books. I believe the first words out of my mouth when I finished (if you don’t count the string of nonsensical curse words I let loose) were “And to think! I could have been reading Artemis Fowl instead of this crap!” So thank you, Renesmee? I guess.
For nostalgia’s sake and because it has been a long time since I’ve read a Star Wars book, I decided to pick it up. And hey, one of the Solo twins is in it! Maybe I’ll actually continue this series. The Star Wars expanded universe has grown so much since I fell out of the fandom. I hope this will be a good place to pick it back up again.
So, I had sworn I’d take a break from YA fantasy titles for girls for a while, buuuuuut that didn’t happen. I hadn’t realized that Wicked Lovely was finally in paperback. I’ve been wanting to read this book since the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival when I heard Melissa Marr speak for the first time. I absolutely adore her. She seems like such a nice woman and one of those authors that is very approachable. I regretted that I didn’t have the money on hand to buy her book that day, a fact that I still regret. I saw her again at Comic Con NY as well, to talk about the experience of having one’s work adapted to graphic novel format. Actually, I don’t believe that was the focus of the panel, but I don’t really remember the other panelists. I was glad though that an author was there to speak on that process. I attended the Jim Butcher/Dabel Brothers Productions panel for much the same reason.
