Life, Litsy, and Banned Books: A Random Post

Good morning, blog, it’s Wednesday. This blog post comes to you in 3 parts.

Life

Man, I feel out of the blog. This is my 5th post this month, and my average for the past few months has been around 11. Though with everything going on, 5 is pretty darn solid. Here’s what’s going on:

• Grad school: Surprise! Grad school is a lot of work! Who knew!?
• Work: I got a new job this summer, so that was an adjustment, but I’m really liking it. I only work 25 hours a week so I can take a full course load. But because I work at the reference desks 99% of the time, I can have my homework readings up on my screen and get some stuff done between helping people. It’s a beautiful thing.
• MuggleNet: I got promoted! I am now the Assistant Manager of the Content Team, which is pretty snazzy. The Content Team is in charge of making sure all the pages on MuggleNet look good and have relevant, updated content. On top of that, though, I’ve also been added to the Creative Team. The Creative Team is the team you all know as the writers of the articles on the site (not the news articles, but the editorials, listicles, etc.). Ever since my review of the Cursed Child took Facebook by storm, you can now view all my MuggleNet writings right here. 2 of the posts were originally from this blog, 2 are from last year, and 2 are new. I’ve started a Wizard Rock Spotlight, which will highlight a different wrock band each month; for September I got to interview Harry and the Potters! Go check it out!

My lack of blogging is a result of grad school, as is my lack of any sort of pleasure reading. I also apologize for my lack of activity in commenting on y’all’s posts. I have managed to write 5 of my own, so take THAT, time management!

Litsy

I got a Litsy today! If you don’t know what that is, it’s a social media app for book lovers! It has been on iOS for a while now, but they just released the Android version last week, after long anticipation. I’ve explored it a bit and get the gist of what it does, but I must ask, if you are a Litsy user:

     How do you use Litsy???

I have Goodreads for TBRs and lists and challenges and stuff. I have this blog for…blogging. So what do you use Litsy for? I’m not quite sure I’ve nailed down its purpose, because Goodreads is a much better organization tool. Litsy seems just like a glorified Instagram of books, so I’m not really sure what to do with it. There’s so many social media platforms out there, and I want to make sure all my platforms actually have a purpose, or else I get rid of them. Any guidance about Litsy would be much appreciated!

Banned Books

It’s Banned Books week! I unfortunately will not be celebrating by reading a banned book (see: aforementioned “Life” section), however, I am taking a class this semester entirely on Intellectual Freedom and Censorship…sooooo, I’ve pretty much been celebrating banned books week for the past 6 weeks.

This class is amazing: it’s teaching me exactly what “censorship” means and how to deal with challenges in libraries, as well as stuff about privacy, policy, and many other related issues. I will leave you with an excellent quote from one of the weeks’ readings:

“Free speech is not a political party or a political spectrum issue. It is neither conservative nor liberal, neither right nor left. In a self-governing society, free speech is the foundation of all political discourse and all political principles. A free people should never authorize the officials that it elects to censor, for this diminishes the people’s capacity for self-government. To act otherwise is a failure of nerve, an abdication of the sovereignty of people over themselves and an abdication of their commitment to personal responsibility for their actions. Free speech, like its offspring democracy, is indeed a risk, even dangerous. But the alternative to risk and danger is the gradual death of the human spirit. No people can be saved from themselves. They can only save themselves from the tyranny of silence by asserting and defending the human instinct for freedom and self emergence within community.”

-Alvin M. Schrader, “Why You Can’t “Censorproof” Your Public Library”

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