Woo hoo! Strike one for free scientific information!

I stumbled across an article in The New York Times this week about Blogs in the Workplace. Seems it's not just for slackers anymore...

In a weird bit of Weekend Reading Synchronicity, I finished the book No Logo and started Jennifer Government on the same day. Warning: trying this at home may lead to extreme cynicism.

The Friday Five was tailored for librarians last week, I see:

1. My favorite childhood stories were fairy tales, no question. Though in the ones like Robin Hood, I always wanted to be the male characters instead of the female ones.
2. My Treasuries of children's stories and children's poems, as well as just about anything by Alan Garner and Susan Cooper. For older kids, my favorite YA novel, The Changeover, by Margaret Mahy.
3. I'm not usually surprised by the early childhood stories, but I am often surprised by what I missed in books I read and loved as an older child or early teen. For example, a religious relative gave me a book for christmas called Crispin's Castle. It was, of course, about a young boy finding God, but when I read it as a child (and I read it multiple times), that aspect did not seem prominent to the story. When I went back to it as an adult, I saw that Crispin's conversion was in fact central to the story. Don't ask me how I missed that...just goes to show how much the act of reading is informed by the needs of the reader, I suppose.
4. I started to read before I started school, thanks to extremely literate parents and a healthy dose of natural aptitude. The first thing I clearly remember reading on my own was an Exit sign in a store. I was, I think, around 3.
5. The first "grown up" books I remember reading was the first 13 books of the Xanth series by Piers Anthony. They passed for really sophisticated literature at that stage...I was in grade 4 or 5 I think, so say somewhere between 10 and 12.

Finally, click over here for news on the technology that could resurrect the medieval Chartres library.