How to use this Page

I’ve just finished reading a great children’s book, Nathan Fox Dangerous Times by L. Brittney. The book is about a 14-year-old actor in Elizabethan times who is asked to become a young spy. He is friends with a young Will Shakespeare in the early part of the book and the story includes little nods to his plays with Nathan becoming caught up in the tragic story of Othello. Dangerous Times (published by Macmillan) is the first in a planned series (the second Traitor’s Gold is also available) and has been shortlisted for the 2008 Branford Boase Award. I enjoyed the part where Nathan is trained up best of all and it looks like that will continue in the sequel. Nathan Fox is also the second children’s book I have read in the last few weeks to have been written by a woman who uses her initials (the other being M.G. Harris) Of course J.K Rowling is the most famous example. I read ages ago that Joanne Rowling was told boys wouldn’t read a book if it was written by a female and that was why she was told to use J.K. If true that’s a real shame and I wonder if that still applies after her phenomenal success besides you often only have to look inside the cover to see from the short biography or photo that the author is a woman. Do boys really judge a book from its cover? So how would I feel about being S.M Humphreys rather than Susan Humphreys? I think the Susan version looks friendlier and there’s not much difference in length. What do you think?

I’ve been getting pretty bad at doing advance notice for some of the public speaking that I’ve been doing and have a resolution of sorts to get better about it. So, this is a few days advance notice that I’ll be in Montreal at the end of the week — have I mentioned lately how much I LOVE Canada lately? I am so lucky it’s close by — to do two things.

1. Chitchat with McGill students on the evening of the 14th. Yes, I have a date with the McGill School of Information Studies (quick, Google still shows the L word in the school’s name) on Valentine’s Day and think it will be great. McGill is home to The Marginal Librarian which I linked in librarian.net when most of this current group of students would just have been entering high school. How hot is it that their URL still works? Answer: very hot.
2. The next day I’ll be giving a talk at a “Workshop for Information Professionals” called Web 2.you. There are a bunch of nifty people speaking on topics ranging from the predicted death of Boolean to libraries in Second Life. I’m speaking late in the day about the Library 2.0 idea and social software and their place in libraries generally. If you’re in the Montreal area, it’s a cheap and fun day of talks you might want to check out.