I bought the Short Stories!

How Dr. Seuss helped the Berenstains with their bears.

I'm looking for recommendations for a friend. She just read, and loved, Jo Walton's "Tooth and Claw". Previously she's like Connie Willis' "To Say Nothing of the Dog" and Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere". Any suggestions for what else for me to send?

Thanks. She's got a very busy month coming up and needs something to look forward to when the month is over.

Night Circus.

Night Circus.

YES, I AGREE WITH THIS RECOMMENDATION.

In my diamond shoes are too tight problems: I have an ARC of Gail Carriager's new book, Espionage and Etiquette. I'm three or four chapters in, and ... it's fun, but it's not grabbing me like the Parasol Protectorate books did.

Flavorwire's top ten fictional libraries in pop culture.

Flavorwire's top ten fictional libraries in pop culture.

I heartily approve, and wish to browse them all.

The only library I can think of they didn't include but really should have is the desert library guarded by a gigantic sentient (and very stern) owl in A:TLA. It's probably not pop enough to be a major pop culture fictional library, but God above it's magnificent.

The "Gaston has probably never read a book" dig in the last one doesn't really work, since the Beast never read one until the movie either. He didn't know how.

Looking at that library list got me thinking. And you know, we've actually lost data with the move to digital, first with electronic checkout, and now with ebooks. Oh, the info is still there, just no longer visible to us.

I wish I could still see, with a certain amount of wonder like I used to, how long ago the last person checked out this book. And how often it was checked out. I used to love to run my finger down the line of stamped dates on the card, and think about who might have been reading it, and what they thought.

Or the alternative! To discover I was the first person to check out a dusty tome from the deep recesses of an academic library's back shelves, maybe for over a decade! I was the only one privy to its secrets for an age.

Stamps. I miss stamps.

I miss card catalogs. For whatever reason it was easier for me to track stuff down paging through one card at a time than calling up a web page with a million options on it. Plus, the visceral feel of handling the drawers and cards was nice.

Concur with you both. I always enjoyed - particularly at college - looking through the card stamps and seeing a friend read that book a couple years previously. And learning how to use the card catalog gave me a sense of mastery at an early age. I knew how to find things at the library without asking. And I used it a lot.