Chris DeWitt DeWitt itibaren Cherukunnu, Kerala, Hindistan
I've known for a while that I absolutely needed to be reading Roland Topor. After escaping WWII with his Polish-Jewish family, Topor made his way to Paris as an all-purpose artist and writer to co-found the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal, design classic animated sci-fi Fantastic Planet, and write creepy-surreal novels like The Tenant, and this one. Joko's Anniversary is a completely weird and completely scathing story about exploitation. And many other things; like the best allegory, it refuses to completely resolve and suggests many ideas without cleanly conforming to any. And without forgoing a totally gripping story of its own. The novel opens with working everyman Joko's discovery that he can make good money on the side by carrying foreign delegates about his city on his back, despite initial reservations about being the sort of person who does this sort of thing. From there, things get... harsh. The whole is delivered in a kind of deadpan comic absurdity, fast and dagger-toothed, even when entirely horrifying and eventually striking a brutal fever pitch that would seem totally out-of-control were it not for the all-too-real atrocities lurking in the recent historical memory. Basically totally amazing and memory-seering. It's completely shocking to me that this and literally every other Topor book (and he wrote many) is entirely out of print (and mostly unaffordable in the second-hand market). I've been meaning to make myself start reading in French again; perhaps Topor will prove the necessary motivation, if anything else he did is anything like this. Otherwise, it seems like it's time to start hitting more libraries or the ILL system (this copy was extracted from Brooklyn Public's Central Storage, their sole Topor). Anyway, if you like 60s/70s bizarre and want to be totally horrified, you can't do much better than this.
A newfound "cat" person, this was a light and enjoyable tale about a stray cat who makes his home in a small town library.
عشق سالهای وبا
Borrowed from the Kresge professional development collection and skimmed for useful content for LIS490TEL's week on systems analysis and design. My impression is that this is intended to be a textbook for BBA/MBA students, and while I can't pass judgement on its efficacy for that purpose, it certainly provided more than enough depth and breadth of content to apply to my little class. I'm hoping that coming at this content from a business perspective - rather than the often extremely messy framework of libraries - will be useful for my students; it certainly has been for my own purposes. By that I mean - libraries and librarians often have a difficult time balancing their service orientation with the (financial, economic, cost/benefit) bottom line. My impression from my three libraries' worth of experience is that most librarians could benefit from a course - or at least a workshop - in the content covered in this book.