[Quiet Man Cometh]

So I had a dream the other night that I was visiting relatives and found an old cabin/trailer thing that was handmade and had all the old toys and things from various relatives and such (I knew this much with that usual dream logic one has) and there as also a shelf of all the books I liked as kid, like Ramona and Beezes and such, and I started looking for Where the Red Fern Grows before I woke up.

No luck in the dream, or at home, so I went to the bookstore and bought a copy. That's my book for the month.

I checked out Goodreads and it's one of those books that people read in high school all the time, and is known for being sad and heartfelt and all the usual stuff. I figure I can handle all that now. ;). At it's heart, a story about a boy and his dogs, young reader stuff, in the vein of books like Old Yeller and perhaps Big Red.

I wish I had found my old copy that I'm pretty sure my aunt gave me. I know she gave my sister and I (and my mom did as well) some books for Christmas that she thought we should read. I remember The Trumpet of the Swan and Stuart Little, both of which I'm pretty sure I did read, but can no longer find. I bumped into a copy of Never Cry Wolf as well, and that may also have been in the mix.


On a slightly related note, we've been talking about demand driven acquisitions (DDA) in class: library acquisitions that are determined by user request. The practice can make it easier on library budgets, but has the drawback of largely leading to a library filled with what happen to be popular. My teacher was working on a reader advisory board in a library (fancy name for librarians that recommend stuff to readers) and she was helping a child pick a book. She went to go get a kids classic she thought would be great, but the library didn't have it. Since it was such as kids staple, it never occurred to her that it was something a library might not have. That was part of the problem with DDA was that older books that aren't necessarily known to current audiences might not make it into collections.