books – Coral Sheldon-Hess

some bread on a cutting board, cut open and looking tasty

Get that bread

Published on February 24, 2020

I want to tell you about my take on the New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day recipe. The things I have to add to the discussion: 1) a couple of hacks for people who, like me, do not have a kitchen fan that vents outdoors (I promise I’ll explain why this matters) and who like at least a little bit of whole grain in their bread, plus 2) photos of some of the steps they don’t show as clearly in the book. I’m still experimenting (always!), but I have a base recipe/approach that I like and that I think is good enough to share.

An atypical user

An atypical user

Published on August 24, 2017

Librarian colleagues, sometimes I find I have been wrong, and when that happens, I feel like I owe it to the profession to confess and recant. Some statements I have made about (primarily academic) libraries, that I will take back, or at least modify heavily, here: “If you own the…

A book list and a trip update

Published on August 28, 2014

Book stuff I complained on Twitter about The Name of the Wind, which I’ve had sitting in my Audible library for a while and decided to finally listen to, now that I’m finished with Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (which is fantastic!). TNotW is clever, funny, well-written, and well-performed by the…

Role Models in Fiction

Role Models in Fiction

Published on July 15, 2013

The fiction we read as children, pre-adolescents, adolescents, and possibly even as adults has a lot to do with who we become. I can directly map the books I read (and a little bit of TV and movies) into the person I am, and as a geek feminist and a…

Book Review: Lean In

Published on May 5, 2013

Confession: I’m a little stressed about writing this book review, because I think I lack some of the grounding in feminist theory to react “correctly” to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and because reaction to the book has been so very emotional. As has…

Book Review: Creating the Customer-Driven Academic Library

Published on November 11, 2012

I think I’ve mentioned that I asked my Web Team to read Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think together. We talked about a different pair of chapters at each meeting until we were through the book. And I’ve heard that another group on campus, also working on a website, is taking…

Alaska Digital Resources – Week 3 – Reader’s Advisory

Published on March 26, 2012

The preliminaries I sometimes admit things, in my blog, that I probably shouldn’t. Case in point: I didn’t know there were actual resources for readers’ advisory! I just thought we were supposed to know these things off the tops of our heads, or cheat by going to GoodReads or LibraryThing…

Book Club and Readers’ Advisory

Published on December 6, 2011

I know that Rule 1 of Book Club is “You do not talk about Book Club.” So I mostly won’t. But I like the idea of experimenting with a little bit of readers’ advisory on this blog, since I don’t get to do a lot of that at at my…

Part of the Solution

Published on August 29, 2011

Due to a confluence of events, I’ve come to realize that I have become part of the problem, at my library, when I initially set out to be part of the solution. That’s a short, trite, and unfair characterization of what’s going on, but that’s why I’m blogging about this,…

Public Libraries Should Continue to Exist

Published on May 20, 2011

A non-librarian friend of mine (ooh, name drop much? :)) shared an article, “A Country Without Libraries,” from the New York Review of Books, in her Google Reader feed. I started to write my long comment there, but then I thought “Why else do I have a blog?” While I…

Category: books