Cindy's blog

Have you ever experienced reading déjà vu? You’re reading along in some great new novel your friendly neighborhood librarian suggested (of course!)… and you get that fuzzy, peripheral-vision feeling that maybe you’ve read this before. The characters or the setting or just something feels familiar.

Here in libraryland I have several coworkers who won’t re-read favorite novels.  Some won’t re-watch favorite movies.  I am utterly perplexed by this non-practice.  Aside from a familiar smell or visiting the home of my childhood, nothing fills me with the warmest of warm nostalgia like some of the old movies I watched as a child.  My most vivid memories involve being propped on the couch, home sick from school, while I listen to the whirl of the VCR rewinding videotapes.  Like a jet engine about to take off, tha

As you undoubtedly know by now I am a fiction reader.  Ninety percent of what I read is fiction.  The few exceptions to that rule are usually memoirs, which we must admit are a type of fiction, too.  The facts and the truth are not always the same, but that’s an opinion that could only be held by a lover of fiction.  I love nonfiction readers and their thirst for the facts.  They read to learn, and they want to learn the real story.  Most of the time, I don’t have a lot of use for the real

I’m a firm believer that the gateway to fact is often through fiction.  At least it is for me.  No disrespect to the nonfiction readers out there, but I tend to learn about social and political events, people, and places through novels.  I compare this to the moment in college when I discovered that I loved history when it was accompanied by pictures (i.e.

It happens once a week at choir practice on Wednesday evening.  Reading through a new piece of music will undoubtedly raise the question of whether or not to modify gendered language.  There’s only so much you can do with the words “king,” “father” and “lord” before you’ve made a piece of music entirely absent of lyricism.  Typically, the director will ask how strongly we feel about changing the language and a few eyes will dart to me, wondering what the most vocal resident feminist will suggest.  Ty