Rad Reads discussion

Hi all,

Ready to start discussing our books about libraries?

I read a manga called Library Wars: Love and War vol. 1 since I saw the movie adaptation and was intrigued. It's about a fictional situation where the Media Betterment Committee (MBC) has started censoring books. They'll raid bookstores and confiscate inappropriate books. As defenders of freedom, librarians create The Library Defense Force to counter the MBC.

The heroine is a young trainee named Kasahara, who's a great athlete and super dedicated, but makes plenty of blunders that her superior berates her for.

More to follow. . . .

Let me know if you need more time.

Hi,

Don't worry if you haven't finished a book. Tell us what you're reading and what you think so far.

I just heard of the Library Wars anime from my brother! Weird!

Anyway, I read two middle grade novels not terribly long ago by Jen Swann Downey from her Ninja Librarians series. The first is titled "The Accidental Keyhand" and the second is titled "Sword in the Stacks." Essentially a tween girl and her teenage brother discover a time/dimensional portal to Petrarch's Library, which has subsumed all 'dead' libraries. From there, you can get pretty much anywhere and any-when in the world. The concept is pretty neat.

Of course, it's not cool enough for kids to read unless there's a villain to defeat, which there is. So these two kids from New Jersey make friends from all over time and space and defeat evil adults with the help of some bad-ass librarians.

If that's not enough to draw you in, these kids also get to train to become bad-ass librarians when they grow up, which might include lessons on stealth and subterfuge from Casanova or sword fighting from Cyrano de Bergerac.