I miss Spring; Troll by Sinisalo

The heat! 99 and humid. That's all I've got to say about that.

All staff have to work on this self-study narrative from the accreditation board so I spent yesterday writing the library part. Today I'll enhance it and turn it in. They ask awkward and weirdly worded questions. What information technology do we have? How broad do you want that? What is your definition of it, accreditation board? How many titles of the collection are business related, how many are on general education, and how many are other? Do you want an exact figure? Do you think I have them marked that way? That I've divided them up by that classification? What evidence is there that the resources are up-to-date and course related? You mean other than the library catalog? What "evidence" do you want? What are the procedures for students checking books in and out? Accreditation board, you don't actually know what librarians do, do you? Or do you mean you want to know what my loan policies are? Bah. I'll answer but it's very hard not to be sarcastic.

We had an HR training session yesterday with our new HR person. Who is actually the director of admissions so she's going to have a busy time. We had to go over the student catalog and come up with questions that might be good for a FAQ page on the website. Then we got a crossword puzzle based on the catalog as homework. I finished it pretty quickly.

Today I'll work on the narrative and put call numbers on books. Good times.

I read a book called Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo. Hah. Well, it was interesting. This photographer finds a hurt troll cub and takes it in to nurse it back to health. There are four other characters that he interacts with because of his need to help the troll. Each character's thoughts are told from their point of view so you might have a paragraph or a page with their name at the top telling their side of a scene. These alternating POV scenes are intercut with book excerpts and news clippings about trolls. The main character, nicknamed Angel, grows more and more infatuated with the little beast until his actions totally center around it. Angel is a beautiful young man who a lot of people want and he uses that and gets used in return. He didn't have much personality though. The ending was kind of abrupt. I was left with an unfinished feeling, like it cut off right when the next part of the story should have started. However, the read as a whole was whimsical and different and rather enjoyable. I'm not quite sure what the Filipina mail order bride was doing in the story. She could easily have been cut out.