Know me, know my books

My current "squeeze" is Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris, the latest release in the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampires/TrueBlood series.

I bought it on a recent shopping trip with Alana while the boys were at footy. She had some vouchers to spend from her birthday (in April! She's a careful shopper.) and one of the vouchers was for a bookstore, a very dangerous place for me :) I decided that I simply couldn't leave the shops without a copy of this book, so I searched high and low for the best price, which happened to be at Big W. Hooray for discount department stores!

I've been rationing it out very carefully, but I'm nearly finished :( I hate the feeling of getting to the end of a book that you're really enjoying; you want to keep going to find out what happens, but you don't want it to end.

At the same time I'm also reading Organising Knowledge in a Global Society: principles and practice in libraries and information centres by Hider & Harvey for ETL505 - Bibliographic Standards for Education.

I like to call this page-turner "death by acronyms". Here's a list of the acronyms that appear in the first chapter - "Definitions and introductory concepts":

OPAC - online public access catalogue

ERIC - educational resources information centre

PAIS - public affairs information service

RILM - abstracts of music literature

AEI - australian education index

ISBN - international standard book number

AACR2 - anglo-american cataloguing rules, 2nd edition

DC - Dublin core

DDC - Dewey decimal classification

LCC - library of congress classification

KWIC - keyword in context

KWOC - keyword out of context

MARC - machine-readable cataloguing

UBC - universal bibliograhic control

UBCIM - ?

IFLA - international federation of library associations and institutions

ICABS - IFLA-CDNL alliance for bibliographic standards

ISBD - international standard bibliographic description

Whew! Is it any wonder I had to read chapter one twice? After my first read through, I was heard to mutter "I don't understand anything..."

On my bedside table for after Dead in the Family, are these two:

Every Secret Thing by Lila Shaara is a psychological thriller set in a college. The protagonist, Gina, is a single mum and college professor. I must admit I had started this when I bought Dead in the Family and abandoned it partly read. Bad reader! But I'll get back to it soon.

the Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson is simply the latest in a long line of books that I've read on this subject. I'm a happy person with a very blessed life, and generally I know what I want and where I'm going. But I'm still searching for deeper self-knowledge; that elusive self-discovery that will make everything fall into place and make sense. I very much want to live my life with passion. I want to radiate love and joy and energy and positivity. I want every day to be meaningful. I don't want anything about my life to be mediocre. I don't want to "just get it over with".

Given that I have a wonderful husband, two beautiful children, a puppy, a house that we're paying off, friends, meaningful work...and so on and so on, you may think that I'm just a little bit greedy, or that I expect just a little bit too much from life. Maybe, but I don't think so.

Also "To Be Read" for uni are Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature by Clare Bradford and Books in the Life of a Child: Bridges to Literature and Learning by Maurice Saxby.

These are for ETL402 - Literature in Education, and yes - it's kinda funny that I'll be reading about reading.

So there's me in a nutshell. Know me, know my books.