moonvoice (ravenari)

 I had a good run there for awhile and then... here we are on a Wednesday. Well, at least I'm consistent. 

As I may have mentioned before, I have struggled to read traditional physical books since the first Trump administration. My concentration got shot by the firehose of disaster. I've continued to be able to consume graphic work, such as manga, and I've largely been supplimenting with audiobooks. I've had a couple of break-throughs in the past several months in which I actually read physical words on a non-illustrated page. I do, just to be clear, feel as though audiobooks and graphic works are REAL books, but what I'm talking about here is about my own sense of my ability to concentrate. Anyway, the exciting news is that I read The Calico Cat and the Chibineko Kitchen by Yuta Takahashi this last weekend in a single gulp, which is something I don't even do when I'm not feeling broken in my ability to concentrate (because I am dyslexic.) 

It's a dumb little book? I express uncertainity there with the question mark because I don't mean to discount the emotional weight of this book, but the narrative style is very light and, while the issues it tackles--people reconnecting with dead loved ones over shared food--often carry an emotional impact, the whole "flavor" of the book, if you will, is very light, almost breezy. 

And it was apparently exactly what I needed.

Yesterday was another one of those days at the library when I showed up to work and there was exactly ONE cart of children's picture books to shelve that took me less than a half hour to put away. That meant that I had three and a half hours to fill with "wanding." Have I explained wanding here? Basically, all the books in the library have what is called RFID (Radio Fequency IDentification) card glued (usually) onto interior the back flap of the book. There is a device that the library calls a wand, but which basically looks like a flat, thin square  (with a center square cut-out) on a stick. This stick is connected via wifi to a computer and the two of them, in tandem, search for and read the RFID card to see how it is catagorized. Basically, it's looking for anomolies and when it finds them it beeps and highlights the book on the list on the computer. I then find the book on the shelf and pull it to do whatever needs doing to it (usually just run back through the AMH [automated materials handling] machine.)  99.9% of the books get read as "available" which is how a book on the shelf should read. However, every once and a while I will get an exciting little beep that identifies something that is considered "missing" because it somehow ended up reshelved without being first checked-in.  There are other things that make it beep, including being requested for a hold by a patron and a bunch of other reasons. But it's still a rarity if the thing actually beeps. So much so that I jump every time.

The work is somehow, despite this cool technology, extremely boring. Probably because most of it is just finding books being exactly where and in what state they should be.

Although, yesterday, I did come across a book that had been weeded (aka removed from the library) that a patron attempted to sneak back onto the shelf. This is apparently a THING at Northtown Library. In fact, the shelf readers are instructed to also check for books that aren't actually part of our collection because patrons decide we don't have enough Moby Dick or whatever classic they decide is missing from our shelves and will "donate" them by just shelving them. I suspect that this happened at Ramsey County, too, when I worked there, but Northtown is PLAGUED with this problem, apparently!

I kind of find it charming, even if it's annoying for us circ staff.

But, the point of this rambling story (and I do have one!) is because wanding is kind of dull, I ended up spending a lot of time just looking at the books in our collection because I also took the opportunity to straighten and tidy the shelves, and so then all of sudden I had about five books that I needed to check-out. In the same vein of The Calico Cat... I bought home We'll Prescribe You a Cat and We'll Prescribe You ANOTHER Cat by Syou Ishida because: cats. Plus, I just think I could use some little heart-warming stories about cats making people's lives better. Then, from Shikazu Kawaguchi, who wrote Before the Coffee Gets Cold, which I remember was hot several years ago (but I never read), I picked up Tales from the Cafe and Before I Knew I Loved You. This is more adventures with the time-traveling coffee shop, so I am hoping these will be more of the cure for what ails me. 

I will say that I only ended up doing maybe an hour and a half of wanding before some more filled carts appeared, which is probably good or I would have come home with many, many more of these. For some reason, our library has a ton of these Japanese novels in translation and I am currently here for it.

Oh, and for all of you mathematicians out there, the fifth book that I took home is probably aspirational and is likely to return unread, but I also checked-out Daryl Gregory's When We Were Real. I really liked his book Afterparty and not just because the protag's name is Lyda. Anyway, maybe if my brain actually makes it through all four of these heart-warming jaunts, I can tackle some science fiction. We'll see. I have some faith in myself, but I mean... ICE did just kill two more people in broad daylight and somehow Mitch McConnell isn't dead (or is he) and we're still bombing Iran and there's explosive diarrhea in Michigan and on and on...  so my nerves are still generally jittery, shall we say.

Wish me luck!

What about you all? Reading or watching anything interesting?

P.S. I just finished watching both the third and final installment of Good Omens (which, meh, but also more than that--probably deserves a post,) and the second, extremely weird but deeply delightful season of the live-acton One Piece.

P.P.S. Apparently, I *did* explain wanding already? Ah well, this description is slightly clearer so I will leave both for your amusement.