New Utrecht Branch 5/8/17
1743 86th St. at Bay 17th St.
Brooklyn, NY 11214
Well, this isn’t the Red Hook branch, but there are still fucking teenagers and brats with Tinkerbelle dolls watching iphones with the sound on. The world is over.
Really, little fucker, turn that off.
Apparently 60th and 16th street is a Jewish neighborhood. Most of the people on this block are women in dark shaggy banged-wigs wearing unfashionably long skirts with sensible shoes and nude hose, leading around children in matching outfits. Few of them seem to frequent the library. Instead the major section next to the periodicals on the first floor is an area the size of all the books at the Red Hook Branch of Chinese language books. This area has as many people in it browsing as the entire RH branch on a good day, which means this is a well used branch, and the library knows who uses it and what books the neighborhood wants.
On the other half of the L shaped room, past the librarians desk is a room with desks and student needs, the regular selection of SAT and AP books, a small wall of Manga and graphic novels, and a large wall of YA fiction. Next to that is a wide DVD library, including a bunch of Chinese language movies. I didn’t check them out.
WHAT I READ: AARP Magazine
Feature story on Michael Douglass, “Michael Douglass: On Love, Second Chances, and a Life Well-Lived,” from March of 2016. Not that great of an article, but due to a recent History/Cinematography piece I wrote about the history of the fictional portrayals of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, I have a new found interest in Kirk Douglass, who is about to turn 100, and is the father of Michael Douglass. Mikey as he’s called by his pals, (I know this not due to our long friendship, but from reading this article and a quote from “his good friend, the founder of Rolling Stone Magazine.”) acting has always been smarmy, we think, because of Fatal Attraction, War of the Roses, Wall Street, and even Romancing the Stone, and I refused to see The Wonder Boys for ages because I disliked him , but now that I’m older, I think he really plays a man how a man is: interested in himself and adventure and money and sport and women-as-sport, but women-as-love or women-as-human-equals-to-man only exists for someone to mother them with love and fresh laundry while of taking care of the rest of that adventuring.
WHAT I CHECKED OUT:
MOUREEN DOYLE MCQUERRY, Time out of Time
YA with what looks like a flying dog and a kid who looks like Harry Potter. (I wrote more about this but stupid MacBookAir deleted it, piece of shit that apple products are.)
Rachel Cohn, “Very LeFreak.”
Looks like YA pretending to be about college but is really a Go Ask Alice cautionary tale about catfishing online and not living a real life. Front cover has a Blake Lively beauty but with surf-freckles for extra Manic Pixie Dream girl
Nick Lake, There Will BE Lies.
“I am going to be hit by a car in about four hours, but I don’t know that yet.”
Yellow cover. 2013 graphics, but good, with some car lines and Monument Valley in the back ground.
Adi Alsaid, Never Always Sometimes.
“*this is a great one.—Kirkus Reviews.”
It’s set in Morro Bay were Dave and Melissa used to live in the most beautiful house ever. Then they moved to Portland, like everyone else. This is about two best friends, like a whole bunch of other teen novels.
Cassandra Clare, The Clockwork Angel. The Infernal Devices, book One
When I was a kid, I thought fraternal twins were “Infernal twins.”
I don’t know where I learned it, the word infernal or that there were fraternal twins. Everything I knew as I kid I got from a library book; we didn’t watch a lot of tv and other than Kleckner, I didn’t have a lot of kid friends. Don’t know why.
During a hung-over afternoon sometime in the last four years, I flipped channels into whatever movie they made out of part of this teen series. It was terrible, but I could tell somewhere there was a good story. I’ll probably never read this, but as long as I’m library book hoarding, I checked out this new first in a series.
Are there grownup books here? (which are not written in Chinese.) if so I can’t find them.
(When looking for a bathroom I heard there was an upstairs. Also,that it was closed.)
Anne O'Neil 