Lari's Bookshelf

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie My rating: 5 of 5 stars As someone who was born in Spokane and raised for a time in Coeur d’Alene, I really connected with the geography of the place in the book. Junior is a Spokane Indian and he makes the hard decision to leave the school on the reservation to go to Reardan many miles away. He has to hitch-hike and occasionally he misses school because his family is poor and has no money for gas. He deals with being an outsider both with his tribe and in his new, mostly white, school. The relationship between him and his best friend on the reservation becomes strained, and many in his tribe view him as a traitor, especially since he also plays on the rival school’s basketball team. But as the story progresses, Junior discovers things like what it means to be a part of a tribe, and how he personally comes to terms with the enormous amount of grief in his life. Beautiful book! One of my favorites for always. Will rea

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg My rating: 5 of 5 stars Sandberg's experiences, thoughts, and pontifications regarding women as leaders in today's job market are relevant and insightful. As a woman who is trying to find a job after staying home to have and raise a baby, I found some of her recommendations regarding how women should use language in a job hunt to be helpful. Some of the statistics were quite shocking and disillusioned me a bit. For instance, she talked about a striking salary penalty many women pay for choosing to leave work for home for even just 1 - 3 years. (Yikes.) It's helped me reassess a few things as I've been looking for gainful employment. I also liked her call to action for supervisors and leaders to make adjustments in how they conduct business and meetings so as to give women more opportunities for equal representation. Overall I found it to be more engaging and interesting than I thought it wou

Web librarians, ebranch librarians, cybrarians and other similar terms are proliferating the literature of the library world. What exactly do these terms mean and when will librarians stay ahead of the curve and finally be able to provide the finished product of the best library website ever? There's the rub. They can't. What is relevant now will be obsolete before you know it. Technology changes a lot in just a few years, and sure, there are ways for librarians to create websites that can stay relevant longer (especially when taking UX and accessibility standards into consideration). But if websites aren't quick to adapt to what users want and when they want it, they will fail to provide a friendly user-centered experience. We have to start thinking about library web services as always evolving. Websites aren't buildings. When we think of a library's website in terms of a digital branch, we might think of the old brick and mortar concept of a library bra