Gastronomica Reader

One of the first titles I chose to purchase for the library was The Gastronomica Reader by Darra Goldstein.  At lunchtime one day, I read one of the essays from this collection in “The UTNE Reader” (an awesome  magazines my library subscribes to. I highly recommend it!)

The essay was fascinating and I immediately put The Gastronomica Reader on my wishlist for the library. I love the cover image!  I haven’t had a chance to flip through this book more just yet, but I think it would be of interest to anyone interested in sociology, cooking, cultural history, green living, ethics, environmentalism; or just anyone who likes to cook or eat!

~ Kelsey Keyes

New Direction!

I’ve been contemplating this blog in a different direction.  I had been posting with little anecdotes from working at the Reference Desk at a large University library, but was bad about keeping up with that version of the blog.  Now that I have a new job — as an academic librarian at a small college — it seems like the perfect time to re-envision this blog.

One of my new duties at this job is to purchase books for the library.  As an avid reader, whose lust for books far exceeds my budget, it’s a dream come true to get to purchase hundreds of books on someone else’s dime!

So, what I plan to do is to start posting about the books I buy on behalf of the library.  When it’s relevant, I’ll post what prompted me to buy the book (i.e. where I heard about it, who recommended it, etc.) Perhaps this will help people choose a book to read, or maybe it will be of interest to other librarians working on collection development. Or maybe it will be a way for students at this school to keep track of what new books are coming into their library.

Or maybe it will just be a fun way for me to keep a list of the books that I’m responsible for here, which would be fine with me!