Now that I’ve finished my MLS and am wrapping up my work here in Indiana, it’s time to move on to new adventures: my husband and I are packing up all of our belongings and moving to Connecticut over the next week and a half. My schedule’s just too busy with work and packing and cleaning, and we’ll be without Internet for a while, so Librarified will be on hiatus until early June once things have settled down a bit. See you then!
1 Comment May 25, 2010
In a discussion on my recent post on Facebook and privacy, Erin linked me to “Privacy Is Dead… And It Could Be Great,” which claims that part of the reason we are more willing to give up our personal information is that for the first time, we’re getting value back. When we give our personal information to Facebook, it improves our Internet experience.
My first response was that that perception of exchanged value is what makes handing over our privacy so alluring and why it’s become harder to convince people that they might want to resist giving up that information. I also linked this to the increasing commercialization of society and the transformation of people into consumers.
Erin responded–rightly–that there are people who want this, that being able to go to Yelp and have Facebook automatically fill in your location is a great feature. And while I would rather live more privately and have fewer integrated tools like this, I need to respect that other people will make different choices.
And really, it’s the ability to make an informed choice that is really important to me. I will continue to advocate for caution and reservation when it comes to sharing your personal information, but what is more important to me is that you know what information you’re giving out, who will have access to it, and what it will be used for, and that you will have the ability to control what happens to your personal information.
Earlier this month, David Lee King asked if privacy is really that big a deal. He concludes that the information you share on Facebook isn’t important enough to bother hiding and that a lot of it is already available elsewhere on the web.
But there are multiple facets to privacy: you should think about which people will have access to your information (which maybe isn’t such a huge deal with Facebook), but you should also think about what Facebook will do with that information. While having integration between different websites makes doing things on the Internet easier, companies don’t exist to make your life cooler. They exist to make money, and when you give them your personal information, they’re going to try to figure out how to make money off of it. Will Facebook sell your information to spammers and junk mailers? Probably not–but they could if they wanted to, and they will use their massive store of incredibly detailed information about each user to sell ad space to organizations that want to target a very specific group.
I can’t remember where I heard about it, but Aza Raskin has a great blog post on what should matter in privacy. After a workshop on online privacy, he and Lauren Gelman and Julie Martin came up with seven attributes they’d like to see represented with icons that give users an indication about how the information they give to websites will be used:
- Is you data used for secondary use? And is it shared with 3rd parties?
- Is your data bartered?
- Under what terms is your data shared with the government and with law enforcement?
- Does the company take reasonable measures to protect your data in all phases of collection and storage?
- Does the service give you control of your data?
- Does the service use your data to build and save a profile for non-primary use?
- Are ad networks being used and under what terms?
With privacy online, my major concerns are two-fold: do users know what’s happening to their information? And can companies be trusted with it?
In 2009, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
In libraries, we offer people a place to seek information without fear of having what they’re doing revealed because only then can you seek information freely. Just because you want to do something privately doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing it. If a patron wants to get information on STIs, he or she doesn’t want to do that in a forum where other people might find out–and that doesn’t make the patron a criminal.
In the case of Google and Facebook, when leaders within the company speak so derisively about privacy, you need to be concerned. They don’t care if your privacy is protected because protecting it isn’t profitable, so it’s up to you. Know what you are agreeing to when you accept the Terms of Use. Know what might be done with your information. Demand more transparency and accountability from the corporations to which you give your information.
While I hope people will be cautious about their personal information online, what is more important is that peple be informed and that peple be able to put their privacy settings at a level that is comfortable to them.
1 Comment May 21, 2010
I’ve wanted to write a post about Facebook and privacy for some time now, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to say. Social networking, privacy, and the way people’s behavior changes between real life and online activities is endlessly fascinating. But this isn’t the place for a 5000-word essay (and you wouldn’t read that anyway), so instead I hope this will serve as an introduction to why you should be thinking about your privacy if you use Facebook.
I mean seriously
Erin sees Facebook as being on the cutting edge of integrating social networks into our real lives. While these new developments are exciting because more and more bits of our lives are being connected, and those bits are all being connected to our pre-existing social graphs, our expectations of privacy (even our understanding of what privacy is) and our ability to protect it are slipping away. But why should you care about privacy in the first place?
In “The Newest Way to Screen Job Applicants: A Social Networker’s Nightmare” (2008), Carly Brandenburg reports that 10-12% of hiring managers screened potential applicants by searching for them on social networking sites. And that was when Facebook only had about 50-100 million users–in January it reached 400 million users and is more accessible to more people, meaning recruiters and managers are only more likely to be using it to get to know the real you beyond your resume.
But maybe you’re not looking for a job or you think your privacy settings are under control. Are you sure? How do you know? Default privacy settings on Facebook have been changing over time; in short, more of your data is available to more people than ever before. Matt McKeon, a developer with the Visual Communication Lab at IBM Research’s Center for Social Software, put together a great interactive chart showing just how much things have changed. For example, here’s 2005:
Click through to see more detail and recent developments
Now, by default, your name, gender, profile picture, likes, photos, wall posts, networks, friends–everything except your contact information and birthday–are available to anyone on the Internet. Before, employers would have to know someone in your network or one of your friends to get any real information about you, but now all they need to do is Google you. It’s up to you to manually change your settings to keep anything private.
And that would be bad enough on its own, but what makes it worse is that changing your privacy settings can be tricky. The New York Times ran a piece earlier graphically demonstrating “the bewildering tangle of options” that is privacy in Facebook. They say you have to go through 50 settings with more than 170 options to get it all.
They also point out that Facebook’s privacy statements have exploded in length: in 2005 the statement was a mere 1004 words (two-thirds the length of this post); today it is 5830 words. For comparison, Flickr’s is 384, Twitter’s is 1203 (that’s less than nine tweets), Friendster’s is 1977, and MySpace’s is 2290 words. Have you read Facebook’s privacy policy? What about the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (i.e., Terms of Use)? Surely you read those–you had to agree to them when you signed up for Facebook!
And how do you know if those terms change? They certainly don’t message everyone to let them know. Facebook is slightly ahead of other online services in that rather than reserving the right to change the terms of use immediately and without notifying anyone–making it your responsibility to periodically review the Terms of Use for changes–they at least offer a Page you can follow to be notified of updates. (As of the time of this writing, 1,498,639 people are doing so–about 0.4% of the total population of Facebook users.)
Facebook is also improving its attitude toward intellectual property. We talked a lot in my Seminar on Intellectual Freedom last spring about how Facebook used to retain ownership of the photos you shared even if you deleted them; they’ve since changed their policy so that you retain the rights to your content, but
For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).
So if Facebook wants to create a commercial to air during the Superbowl with photos of you and your friends completely wasted at a party, they have the right to do so–and they don’t have to pay you to use those photos. And it doesn’t matter how you’ve set your privacy settings; just by uploading the content to their servers, you grant them the license to use it. And if your friends copy and share that photo, too, then deleting your copy doesn’t do anything.
There are a lot of people who have no idea that what they share on Facebook is so widely available. Will Moffat created Openbook, which searches people’s status updates for what could be compromising public confessions (e.g., “I hate my boss,” “cheated test,” “stupid customer“–be careful, some of the things other people are searching for are more rude than these examples). So remember this when you post a status update: by default, the entire Internet can see it unless you change your privacy settings.
And even if you’ve managed your privacy settings well, you should still be careful about what you post because as your online social graph more closely mirrors that of your real life, there will be people who have access to your profile that you won’t want knowing everything about you. Failbook collects user-submitted screenshots of drama playing out on Facebook; one of the more serious ones I’ve seen is that of David, a student who posted graphic death threats aimed toward his principal and teachers… and was Facebook friends with his principal.
So you want to better protect your privacy and not ruin your life by what you do on Facebook. With such a complex set of privacy options, you may need some help with the basics. GigaOM recently featured “Your Mom’s Guide to Those Facebook Changes, and How to Block Them” by Matthew Ingram (he quotes a librarian, hooray!). I like that this article doesn’t just tell you what to do, but why you’re doing it and what you’re preventing.
If you want something that’s faster and more automated, use ReclaimPrivacy.org’s Facebook Privacy Scanner (independent and open source!). It’ll check the major ways in which your data might be leaked to the outside world and give you a one-click way to fix most of them. Do note the limitations, though: it doesn’t check your photos and status updates. You’ll have to secure those manually.
If you want it really easy, Untangle’s SaveFace automatically sets your privacy settings for your contact information, search settings, friends, tags, connections, personal information, and posts to “Friends Only.”
Facebook announced yesterday that they would soon launch new privacy settings where users will have “simplistic bands of privacy that they can choose from.” No word yet on what that actually means, but I suppose they’re at least trying in some way to respond to user concerns.
However, whatever advances Facebook makes in its privacy settings, Mark Zuckerberg does not care about your privacy. He thinks you are stupid for trusting him with your data. In an early IM chat with a friend shortly after he launched the original Facebook, he wrote:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb f***s
It’s possible that Zuckerberg’s attitude toward privacy has changed in the intervening years, but after the fiasco of Beacon, the increasingly complex and hidden privacy settings, and the continued expansion of access to your data, I have a hard time believing that.
There are some interesting developments going on in social networking that decentralizes all of that data. Four students at NYU are working on Diaspora* (their punctuation), which has been funded by donations through Kickstarter and will let users keep all of their data on servers they control.
It’s going to take a lot to challenge Facebook, though, so in the meantime, please think about what you’re posting and make sure your settings protect your privacy at a level with which you’re comfortable. And tell other people.
3 Comments May 19, 2010
Graduation photos are starting to show up on Facebook; one of my classmates’ cake included a bookcart, and fellow SLIS-Indy alumna and Oath-swearer Shellie had a cake at her graduation party that was just books books books:
Shellie's graduation cake
(I love her selection–she had me with MOCKINGJAY, but to have the whole pile topped off with the Intellectual Freedom Manual is the best!)
Cake Wrecks normally features reader-submitted photographs of cakes that have gone terribly wrong, but on Sundays, Jen features Sunday Sweets” cakes that are beautiful, clever, or well-constructed. This week she must have been getting our librarian graduation vibe: she showcased “Reading Sweets,” books modeled after or inspired by books. The featured books include the Harry Potter series, the Lord of the Rings books, and WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. About a year ago, Jen had a similar post, “Reading Rocks” with lots of Seuss and other children’s books.
The Swiss Army Librarian recently showed off a due date calendar made by Aunt June on Etsy. I love Brian’s idea to laminate them and sell them as fundraisers.
My husband and my mom both have iPads and it’s been fun to play with them and see the way the user interface and user experience have changed from the iPhone. While I think we’re still figuring out how libraries can use things like the Kindle and the iPad, it’s interesting to see what experiences people are coming up with for books on the iPad. Penguin shows off their vision of interactive books, but even more awesome is Alice for the iPad.
Former supermodel and talkshow host Tyra Banks will be writing a fantasy series about an academy of super-elite models known as Intoxibellas. The first book, MODELLAND, will be out in summer 2011. While the reaction at Bookshelves of Doom is disappointment? horror? exasperation? I don’t think it’s surprising. America’s Next Top Model is still going strong (it’s in cycle 14 now and has been renewed through the 16th and it’s the CW’s top show) and Tyra has been moving through different media (reality television, music, her talkshow, and now books) trying to capitalize on her fame. With such a Tyra following among teens, tweens, and young twenty-somethings, of course a publisher is going to agree to release her books. The only question is, will you buy them for your library? (Related: did you know that former supermodel and ANTM judge Paulina Porizkova wrote a book about a young girl in the modeling world, A MODEL SUMMER? It is for grownups, though.)
The Boston Public Library closed its Chinatown branch in 1956. Tired of waiting for the library system to respond to community demand for a library, Leslie and Sam Davol (of Boston Street Lab) and Amy Cheung created the Chinatown Storefront Library, a collection of donated books, computers, programming, and space that was open for three months at the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010. While it was always intended to be temporary, a second iteration will be open this fall for a projected two years. As Rebecca Miller wrote, “Perhaps most significant, the project offered real alternative insight into how to give the community a place to land and learn when full library service is out of reach.”
Way back when I was first starting this blog, I wrote about library service areas in Indiana. The State Library recently updated that data and provided a new map of those service areas. A few of the contract areas were dropped, but other previously unserved areas are now covered under contracts. While I’ll be leaving the state soon, I hope everyone at the State Library will continue to work hard to get every Hoosier access to a library.
1 Comment May 17, 2010
Earlier this week someone posted to the listservs saying she’d read a review for Wendy Toliver’s LIFTED and thought the cover seemed familiar but couldn’t place it. Other listserv members remembered that EVERYTHING IS FINE by Ann Dee Ellis and SAFE by Susan Shaw both use the same photograph–different parts and with different color treatments, but still the same photograph.
Someone else also pointed out that while THE GUARDIAN by Joyce Sweeney and FUNNY HOW THINGS CHANGE by Melissa Wyatt have different photographs on the cover, they’re the same kid in the same outfit.
These reappearing cover models remind me of the Everywhere Girl, a young woman who did a modeling session for some stock photos and then found herself appearing everywhere–in ads, on book covers, and online. That modeling session was over a decade ago, but her image continues to appear all over the place. She later wrote about the photo shoot. You can see a lot of samples of her work in this blog post from a company that develops image recognition software, or even read the fictionalized diary of the Everywhere Girl herself.
And while we’re talking about book covers, you might be interested in a recent Guardian article about why books have different cover designs in different countries.
Are there any other unusually similar book covers you’ve seen recently?
Edit: Linda at Jacket Whys has another set: Ginger Rue’s BRAND NEW EMILY and Sarah Quigley’s TMI.
4 Comments May 14, 2010
Earlier this semester I submitted some articles for my school’s ALA Student Chapter’s newsletter. Two of them were accepted and the newsletter was published online today.
The SLIS program at IU is split between two campuses: Bloomington focuses more on academic librarianship, rare books, and the information science side of the profession; the Indianapolis campus does more with public librarianship and school librarianship (it’s actually the only place in the state you can get your school media specialist certification). But because each ALA-accredited program can only have one student chapter, the IU ALA-SC (I’m not sure which website is official, this one or this one) is at Bloomington.
The Indy program is starting to provide some similar opportunities and services to its students with ALISS, the Association for Library and Information Science Students, which was resurrected last fall. Erin and Andy and I are stepping down as officers, but we have a great incoming group of officers with high ambitions and new committees and programs planned, and I’m hoping that next year ALISS and the IU ALA-SC will be able to work together more closely.
Anyway, although the IU ALA-SC is headquartered in Bloomington, students in the program at Indianapolis are welcome to submit articles for the newsletter, attend events, and apply for scholarships. I think Indy students have to work a little harder to stay informed about opportunities organized by Bloomington students and faculty, but subscribing to the Bloomington listserv in addition to the Indy listserv helps a lot.
This semester’s newsletter theme was conferences and since the call for articles went out just as I was returning from PLA2010, I thought I’d write a couple about different topics. “Volunteering at Conferences” and “Conferences 102: A Few More Words of Advice” were accepted and published in the newsletter . A third article, “Attending a Conference as a Student,” was not, so I thought I’d post it here.
Attending a Conference as a Student
Ideas in this article emerged in part from conversations with other Indianapolis SLIS students including Erin Milanese and Katie Nakanishi.
Attending a conference while you’re still in school is a great opportunity. Not only will you have the chance to learn a lot and meet other professionals, but your student status confers unique benefits as well. If you’re thinking about attending a conference before you graduate, consider the following.
While you may feel like a cash-strapped student, conference fees will never be lower than while you’re still in school. Registration fees may be half or even a quarter of the regular member rate. There are also travel and conference grant opportunities for students and first-time attendees. Lodging and transportation are also part of conference costs, but your classes are full of potential roommates and maybe even road trip partners.
Your student status also grants you more flexibility once you arrive at the conference. Even if you’re working in a library already, if you’re footing the bill, you get to decide what sessions you attend. While you’ll want to learn about your current or future specialization, if something totally outside of your area looks interesting, go! Conferences are a great opportunity to stretch yourself, and while you’ve been learning a lot of theory in the classroom, it’s at a conference that you can see where best practices and research meet real-world constraints and inspiration.
While you’re at the conference, your primary mission is to keep an open mind and just soak up everything you can. Conferences, especially national ones, give you the chance to see libraries from a multitude of perspectives you might not get just by taking classes. Local and state-wide conferences can also teach you practical, hands-on tips you may not get in the classroom.
Make sure to take advantage of job placement services or resume reviews, too. People are on hand to help you assess your own strengths and weaknesses and help you turn a critical eye to your resume. Even if you’re not looking for a job, these services can help you decide what your next professional step might be.
Your conference experience shouldn’t be all work and no play, though. Plan to go to a social event outside of the official conference schedule. Many ALA divisions and roundtables have happy hours where you can mingle more casually with other professionals. And if you’ve already made new friends during the conference, going out for dinner or drinks afterward gives you a chance to get to know them better and expand your professional network.
Being a student and not having any purchasing power in your library means you’re not a potential sale for vendors in the exhibit hall, but you can still learn a lot from them about the different products they offer. Just be sure to be clear that you’re a student and be willing to decline freebies or to defer to librarians who may be researching a purchase. Talking to publishers can be a good way to pick up books and ARCs if you want to get a head start on writing professional reviews. If you do pick up swag, paying your own way at the conference means that you actually get to keep all of those sweet giveaways (especially the books!) rather than turning it over to your library when you return.
Going to a national conference may seem intimidating, but as a student it gives you a chance to get your feet wet and see how conferences work so that when you attend another one as an official representative from your library, you’ll be better equipped to pick sessions and to navigate the exhibit hall. It also gives you an idea of what presentations are like so that once you have some accumulated wisdom of your own, you’ll be ready to present at a conference yourself.
Conferences are useful no matter what stage of your career you’re in. Being a student means cheaper conference rates, built-in travel partners, flexibility, having your mind blown by the wide world of librarianship beyond the classroom, opportunities for networking, and lots of free stuff. How can you pass that up?
Leave a Comment May 12, 2010
I so enjoyed guest blogging for PLA during the PLA National Conference in March, so I’m excited to announce that I’ve been accepted as a regular contributor for the YALSA blog. Tonight I wrote my first post, Preservation Week: Think Digital.
Preservation Week started yesterday and continues through Saturday and while the official campaign focuses a lot on internal concerns about library materials and on community members’ physical artifacts, it’s important that we also take the opportunity to talk about preserving digital content with teens in the library. Check it out!
Leave a Comment May 10, 2010
Last spring during my Seminar on Intellectual Freedom, Shellie and I were discussing how librarianship doesn’t have a professional organization that controls licenses to practice and that while we have the ALA Code of Ethics (and the Library Bill of Rights and the Freedom to Read Statement and lots of other statements from the Office of Intellectual Freedom), there isn’t an oath we have to take to become librarians like (for example) doctors do.
So once we started nearing graduation, I took the general structure of the Hippocratic Oath and filled in that framework with content from the ALA Code of Ethics and did a little tweaking and came up with a Librarian’s Oath:
The Librarian’s Oath
I swear by Seshat the scribe, Athena, Sophia, and Nidaba, and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witness, that I will fulfill according to my ability and judgment this oath and covenant:I will not advance private interests at the expense of library users, colleagues, or my employing institution.
But I will provide the highest level of service to all library users and ensure equitable, unbiased access to materials and services, recognizing that a person’s right to use the library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.
I will respect intellectual property rights and support balance between the interests of information users and rights holders.
I will uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources.
All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.
In all aspects of my work I will strive for excellence and will maintain and enhance my knowledge and skills. I will support the professional development of my colleagues. I will encourage the aspirations of potential members of the profession.
Both at work and in the community, I will be an advocate for the library and I will champion libraries and my fellow librarians.
If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all people and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my lot.
Professor Japzon (Andrea, that is) administered the Oath to a group of us after graduation today; we raised our right hands and recited it in unison (Shellie and I also held a copy of the Intellectual Freedom Manual). It turned out to be a little long for a public recitation, but I really enjoyed being sworn in and made an official librarian by someone in the field. Along with all of the academic regalia and ceremony and tradition of the day, it made for a very official-feeling way to officially join the ranks of the profession.
So now I’m a real, MLS-holding, Oath-swearing librarian!
6 Comments May 9, 2010
I’m one of the oldest of the Millennials, a generation characterized by our comfort and proficiency with computers and the Internet. And while I’m one of the oldest, my dad’s something of a computer nerd, so I grew up with a computer in the house and my dad introduced me to things like programming and BBSes and the DOS shell from an early age. I liked science and math and computers so I kept working with them, spending a lot of time on the Internet in middle school and taking elective science classes in high school. In college I majored in math and got a minor in computer science (and minors in religious studies and English, too, just to round things out) and now I continue to do Internetty things like blogging.
A few weeks ago my supervisor in interlibrary loan was telling me about how ILL worked before the department had computers and Internet access: they relied on print-based lists of what each library had and requests had to be sent out via the postal service. While I could intellectually understand the process, I couldn’t really emotionally comprehend how work and research would have been like then. I think that my familiarity with computers and basically not knowing about a world before the Internet has led to me scoffing at things like MARC records because I know that computers now can handle things like extraneous whitespace and keyword searching–and I want to see that reflected in our technology and standards. I’m not content to just see how far we’ve come; I want library technology and standards to feel current.
But I am one of the oldest of the Millennials and for the first time I’m starting to feel it. A few weeks ago the Pew Research Center published a report on teens and cell phones; one of the findings was that texting was the primary mode of communication teens use. While I, too, am a daily texter, I also rely heavily on email–something only 11% of teens use on a daily basis. Previous research has also found that teens don’t really use Twitter (just 8%, even fewer than use email on a daily basis), but Twitter is one of my top tools. So for the first time in my life I’m starting to feel like I’m old–or at least, older than the age group that I need to be interested in. And I’m only 25! I’m finally starting to understand what it’s like to look at teens and not really get it. And I finally can’t depend on my own experience to understand my patrons.
People who are 15 now are the youngest of the Millennials (depending on how you define the generational cut-offs, I guess). While the Millennials are just now starting to enter the workforce and be grownups and shape the world, we have a whole new generation that’s been even more immersed in technology growing up (I didn’t get a smartphone until I was 24–but the well-off among this emerging generation will practically start out on smartphones) who will be entering our libraries and schools soon. And they’ll be even more different than the younger people of my generation, who are already beginning to seem distant and different. (For a little fun, take the Pew Research Center’s “How Millennial Are You?” quiz. I got a 95, so I guess I’m safe for now!)
I’m going to need to develop new coping strategies to keep in touch with teen culture and to stay on top of emerging trends. I can’t just rely on myself and my peers and my cousins anymore, seeing myself in my teen patrons–and that’s new for me. I’m sure that once I’m working regularly with teens, especially if my future library has a Teen Advisory Board, I can use my patrons themselves to know what’s going on in their lives, but I’m also going to understand those lives as being more and more different from my own. I guess I’m finally starting to feel like a grownup now.
Further reading: “Disconnects Between Library Culture and Millennial Generation Values” at EDUCASE Quarterly (from 2006).
4 Comments May 7, 2010
MY ROTTEN LIFE by David Lubar (Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie #1)
DEAD GUY SPY by David Lubar (Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie #2)
GOOP SOUP by David Lubar (Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie #3)
In MY ROTTEN LIFE, Nathan Abercrombie thinks he’s having a pretty rough day: he was humiliated at lunch by the most popular girl in school, he was picked last in gym class, and then everyone made fun of him for his poor video game skills. So when Abigail, a girl in his class, tells him her uncle is working on a substance that can keep him from feeling bad, he eagerly accepts the offer to be the first test subject. But then instead of receiving a few drops of Hurt-Be-Gone, Nathan is doused in it–and soon begins to turn into a zombie. While it’s cool to no longer sleep or feel pain or need to breathe, when body parts start falling off, Nathan realizes being a zombie might not be the best life (or living death). It’s a race against time before the transformation is complete and he can no longer return to being human, and he’ll need all the help he can get from his best friend Mookie and from Abigail.
Spoiler alert: Nathan winds up staying a zombie. In DEAD GUY SPY, he’s getting used to being a zombie and learning how to hide it from his parents (pretend to shower, pretend to eat, pretend to go to the bathroom, pretend to sleep) and discovering some cool new talents that come along with his living death. His body can’t heal, though, so he needs to be careful–especially in gym class with the sadistic, success-driven Mr. Lomux in charge. But when he realizes he’s being watched, Nathan starts to worry his secret might be out. He’s approached by a secret organization called BUM (the Bureau of Useful Misadventures) that wants to recruit him as a very special spy because of his new abilities. But his contact at BUM is very secretive about the organization and things just aren’t adding up and again it’s up to Mookie, Abigail, and Nathan to get to the bottom of what’s going on.
Another spoiler alert: BUM turns out to be the good guys and Nathan starts working for them on secret missions to protect the world from sinister plots. In GOOP SOUP (released at the end of April), Nathan’s finally starting to get some spy training and to pinpoint what his zombie nature contributes to his spy abilities. For the first time since his living death, though, Nathan’s running up against some limitations, so he’s not sure he’s ready to take on RABID, a secret organization bent on sowing the seeds of chaos. To make matters worse, his mother has made a doctor’s appointment and Nathan, Abigail, and Mookie have to figure out how Nathan can fake normal human vital signs before time runs out and his spy career–and his life–are over.
When David Lubar spoke at the Genre Galaxy preconference for ALA 2009 about humor writing, he cracked us up with a reading of a passage from MY ROTTEN LIFE where Nathan has an unfortunate run-in with Mookie’s fork in the cafeteria and discovers he’s a zombie. While this series has a creative premise and good storylines, the real strength is in the humor. Characters crack jokes, Nathan makes funny observations, and there’s a lot of situational humor among the action scenes.
And Lubar knows his audience: there’s plenty of gross-out humor in these books with missing body parts, farts and burps, sewage, and splattered pig guts, but despite some truly amazing passages (the climactic scene in DEAD GUY SPY includes the single-sentence paragraph “The bleachers had turned into a fountain of puke.”), it never really crosses the line. The combination of bodily functions, quick-paced plots, and humor will be a good fit for reluctant male middle grade readers especially.
On a much more personal judgment sort of level, one of the things I really appreciated was the contributions of the secondary characters. While Mookie is mostly around for the farts and goofy comedic interjections, he does provide ideas at crucial times, and Abigail turns out to be a secret science whiz who is the driving force behind a lot of the solutions to problems that Nathan encounters. The story is about him and his zombie adventures, but his friends are indispensable to his continued survival.
More reviews:
Book sources: MY ROTTEN LIFE from my local public library, DEAD GUY SPY from the publisher at PLA, GOOP SOUP as an ARC from the publisher at PLA.
(If you’re a David Lubar fan, be sure to check out his LiveJournal.)
1 Comment May 4, 2010
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