Hey, Tom!

I just had a delightful time ordering every Discworld novel I could get my hands on for the Young Adult library. We needed more fantasy/SF anyway. My new boss doesn't know who he is. "Why are you ordering so much of this?" she asked. "It's a series," I said. She'll learn. Three of my kids started reading these when they were in 9th grade. (I am soooooo tired of ordering those novels featuring the girls with leukemia or liver failure who fall in love with boys while in the hospital for treatment.)

Also: thanks so much for the tip about Hood Hood Books, that outfit in London with the Islamic books for children and YAs. They have an American distributor working out of DC, and I've ordered a couple dozen to make a few waves amongst my colleagues. Including Lives of the Prophets (which include the Patriarchs of the Old Testament and Jesus, as well as Mohammed), a work about mosques, biographies of Saladin and Avicenna, a book about the legendary animals of Paradise, the adventures of Ibn Batutta, who was sort-of the Arabic equivalent of Marco Polo (though I don't think he's had a water version of Blind Man's Bluff named after him), and others.

After talking to a local imam, with whom I plan to consult about the quality of the books' content, I learned that Muslims frequently give books to their local libraries, who accept them with big smiles and then turn them over to the local book sales instead of putting the books into the collections. The donors get all offended because it looks to them as if they're being discriminated against as a minority religion, when actually, the libraries have collection development policies that require favorably reviewed books be collected. Books on Islamic subjects for children and youth are seldom reviewed in America. They are in Europe, the Middle East and south Asia, but that doesn't help me. So -- I just talked to our co-ordinator of youth services for our system -- once I get these books, we're going to get several librarians together and write some reviews of these, and get the imam to put his two cents in as well. Also, the American distributor for Hood Hood uses some people who are experts in Mideastern policy and culture to do in-house reviews, and they said they would probably be able to let us have those. (They don't distribute all of the Hood Hood products because some of them wouldn't work in an American market, I was told.) Both the imam and my system co-ordinator love the fact that I got the name of this British bookseller from an internet friend in the Bay Area. (Chorus of "It's a Small World" playing in the background...)

Regards--
Mary Anne