Books Are Crack. Ask a Librarian and Share. #FridayRecommends

Friday RecommendsWhat Does Immersing Yourself in a Book Do To Your Brain? this article on Literary Hub asks. TL;DR: Lots of good stuff. Not only does it engage a lot of parts of your brain, strengthening connections between them, it puts you behind other people’s eyes, in other people’s circumstances. There’s more. Go read.

Kinda-sorta remember a book, but can’t remember the title or who wrote it or the names of any characters? There’s an app for that, and it’s called librarians. Here’s a job I would love to have: tracking down half-forgotten books for people.

And who works this magic? The superhero librarians at the New York Public Library. In fact, you can ask them pretty damn much anything. I bought a copy of their Desk Reference. Haven’t used it much, ’cause I already know almost everything (get up off the floor and stop making a spectacle of yourself!), but I have it.

ANYWAY, here’s another thing:

I got an email from makeawebsitehub.com pointing out that I had, in a previous Friday Recommends post, linked to a post that linked to them. They wondered if I wouldn’t prefer to link directly to them. So I added them to that post, and now I’m directing you to them, specifically to this Social Media Image Sizes Cheat Sheet, which they update any time Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media sharing site changes their image size recommendations. MOST useful!

A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: Write about a half-forgotten book.

MA

About

I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, but now live in the woods in southern Indiana. Though I only write fiction, I love to read non-fiction. The more I learn about this world, the more fantastic I see it is.

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One thought on “Books Are Crack. Ask a Librarian and Share. #FridayRecommends

  1. Dan Antion

    August 17, 2018 at 8:40am

    I have stockpiled books. I may eventually starve to death during the apocalypse but I won’t be bored.

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  2. pm laberge

    August 17, 2018 at 9:57pm

    Imagine. Books real books. Not those electronic things.

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    • Author

      Marian Allen

      August 18, 2018 at 10:57am

      “Those electronic things” are books, too. I must say, I prefer “real” books, myself, because I own the physical books I buy; Amazon books are only leased, even though they SAY you buy them. Unless you happen to be a geek, and know how to off-load them to another storage device that Amazon doesn’t have access to….

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      • pm laberge

        August 18, 2018 at 9:08pm

        Well, I like the smell of Old Paper in the morning. The smell, the sound, the touch….

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        • Author

          Marian Allen

          August 19, 2018 at 11:42am

          Yes, I agree. And the feel and heft of a book you’re rereading is like shaking hands with an old friend.

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          • pn laberge

            August 19, 2018 at 1:25pm

            Indeed. The heft and feel are important contributions to reading.
            Besides if you throw a book at someone, the book usually survives.
            The ereader does not!

            And somehow, I see enough “screens” during the day. I like a real book to curl up with and fall asleep to at night.

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  3. Mitchell Allen

    August 18, 2018 at 8:17am

    I would never get anything done. Every five minutes, I would be pestering the Librarians about another half-remembered snippet of dialogue or setting. Holly recently helped me to remember Force of Habit, just from my desperate, wildly inaccurate description:

    [t]he lovely novel about travelers to another planet? It was wildly funny. I was reading MA’s post about the Aardvark and it dredged up a dim memory of a heroine, some (robotic?) passengers, running through the town or something, arrrgh! Characters spent the first part of the book in a train station cantina or something like that. An alien mobster was involved and there were other aliens trying to bring this mobster down. The traveler was a scientist, or something and got caught up.

    All I knew was that one of you had probably written it. Because of the way Holly had acquired the book, I guess it was more deeply imprinted in her memory.

    Cheers,

    Mitch

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