Author Archives: Alicia Abdul

Yesterday I worked at my school library.

Then I left work and went to my local indie book store, The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, to pick up a book I ordered and fill a bag with $150 worth of books to gift for the holidays. Oh, and placed another order for a five-book series that wasn’t in-store.

But before going home I took one last detour to my public library who hosts a two-hour grab-and-go window for your interlibrary loan items to pick up two books that had come in.

IYKYK.

A recent email exchange with a new teacher went something like this:

Me: I always get too excitable and talk to fast. It’s a problem when it comes to books and collaboration, so my apologies for the verbal onslaught. 

Her: No, I loved it! I’m actually the same way, so it was very validating. Your excitement for learning is contagious!

Oxford Dictionary definition for excitable: “responding rather too readily to something new or stimulating; too easily excited.” Well, then call me excitable when a teacher walks into the library looking for books and ideas for collaboration.

Last summer I was given the opportunity to teach a young adult literature graduate course for school librarians. And then if it didn’t rain, it poured, I was asked to teach a similar course for my alma mater this fall during a traditional fall semester. And here I am today, an adjunct professor providing instruction and resources on the very thing that I became a librarian for: young adult literature.

I can only speak for myself, but taking courses in college with professors who were practitioners tended to make the most sense and add the most to my education. Anecdotally, the same can be true for feedback from some of my students. I pushed them to read contemporary young adult literature at a book a week for the duration of the semester in addition to their other work. For the non-readers or those that haven’t read for pleasure (yes, I know they were taking the course) in quite some time, many had a fire light underneath them in discovering the wide world of YA lit. For the avid readers, it was an expansion of their horizons be it format or genre. Either way reading had to the be the foundation in addition to the discussion of the hows and whys in addition to the where it should be organized in the library.

I’m not celebrating just yet, I still have to formally submit their grades, but my takeaways, in addition to adding plenty more books on my TBR was the lightbulbs is the new learning that I took from them and preparing for the course. But more on that later!

What was it about a course you took in college that sticks with you even today?

In the last week, I’ve paid more attention to the topic of seasonal reading. One of our high school teachers who teaches specialized reading was looking to work in some holiday-themed reading for the month of December and it got my colleague and I working swiftly to identify just what she needed for her groups of teens who read well-below grade level.

When someone talks about seasonal reading, only a book like Pumpkinheads by Rowell (a very fall book) pops into my head. But in general I don’t necessarily track books by their celebrations or seasons though I do have a shelf in Goodreads for religion which tends to encompass many celebrations, but obviously not all of them. Well, now I have a seasons and holidays shelf because I’m finding more students requesting books under these cyclical topics. Plus I want to be able to quickly help teachers with similar requests.

Like I said, we went into high-gear to canvass just what she had envisioned which led to two weekend short story collection reads: Stephanie Perkins’ My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories and the combined efforts of Maureen Johnson, Lauren Myracle, and John Green in Let It Snow to see if they might work.

Both had strengths in their setting, planting them firmly as seasonal reads both in title and topic with star power to the writers who contributed.