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What is Bookslingers?
Who are the Bookslingers?
What is Bookslingers?
Bookslingers is the three o'clock in the morning, sitting around the kitchen table wasting time when we should have been sleeping, brilliant idea of Miss Maiar and Miss Corene.
On this auspicious and propitious day (well, early morning to be exact), our glorious founders, library & information studies and library tech students, were drinking tea and eating stale biscuits supping on foie gras over a bottle of expensive port when a world-changing conversation occurred.
The Foundation of Bookslingers!
(Slightly abridged)
(Suitable for audiences everywhere, except maybe Miss Maiar)
Miss Maiar: Prithee, great and wonderful Miss Corene from whom flows the fountain of all knowledge, do you like books?
Miss Corene: Verily, Miss Maiar, that I do. My overpoweringly large brain doth devour the pages of many books at great speeds that astound the average being. I am like a rampaging vampire of text. I have also noticed that despite your slightly smaller intellect, you also enjoy books.
Miss Maiar: Indeed, I have many books and they doth overwhelm my bookshelf.
Miss Corene: Indeed. We should probably go to IKEA and pick up another bookcase. Something in the Billy line. Where's the catalogue?
Miss Maiar: Methinks you used it to slay the wicked wasps that drift into our apartment.
Miss Corene: Dicken's Longjohns.
Miss Maiar: Did you just say what I thought I heard you just say?
Miss Corene: This is the adapted version. I may have said differently on the night of.
Miss Maiar: Very well. Do you not, O Athena of the Lower Mainland, have many wise opinions?
Miss Corene: Indeed, opinions I do have. They flow like the mighty Peace through the best parts of Canada.
Miss Maiar: Alberta is silly. But I add that I also have many opinions that I would like to share with the greater world who may benefit from the hours that we have spent reading books. As a sort of humanitarian thing.
*Silence*
Miss Maiar & Miss Corene: We should start a YA and JUV book recommendation website with a customizable search engine with reviews and links to similar works and a really rocking banner designed by Lynn Lau!
...And it happened exactly like that. I'm thinking we'll adapt it for stage, maybe start off-Broadway and then see what happens...
But until the royalties start pouring in, Bookslingers remains as our site where we sling books (metaphorically unless we find you with a book in hand and you've signed our waiver) of the young adult, teen, juvenile and tween variety because adult books are boring.
We are, officially respectively, a Masters' of Library and Information Studies student (Miss Corene) and a Library Technician student (Miss Maiar, who also goes by Arien) with a passion for YA and Juvenile literature and a want to share, spread and celebrate books.
We also have a secret patriotic plan to promote both Canadian authors and Canadian books as they are few and far in-between and also, awesome.
We are planning the launch of our site on March 1st, 2010 and until then, will be busy writing reviews, writing code (Well, Miss Maiar will be busy writing code) and publishing our exploits on our blog and our Twitter account. Feel free to friend us or watch the blog as this ground-breaking, earth-shattering, axis-tilting, volcano-erupting, time-consuming endeavour lifts off.
See you in March!
Who are the Bookslingers?
Miss Maiar (née Arien) is an SFU graduate (BA, English Lit/History) and a library-tech-in-training. She lives in (and comes from) Vancouver, and after living other places is pretty sure she's going to have to live here for the rest of her life, because nowhere else quite compares. She is of geeky disposition, upbringing, and descent (if you couldn't tell from her first name - which was taken from the Silmarillion), and is very grateful to her parents for all of these things.
Her dearest ambition is to one day be a published author and actually manage to live off the proceeds of such, though at present this is a dim and distant goal, owing mainly to the reluctance of publishing houses to accept manuscripts that aren't actually finished yet. First she will graduate from Library Tech School, get a proper job, and perhaps take over some small but crucial information organization that allows her time to muck about on the Internet all day to good purpose and for pay. And buy a house with a yard for a dog (once she crawls out from beneath her personal mountain of student loan debt), because once you've lived with a dog, it's hard to do without.
Miss Corene was born in the wilds of Northern Alberta and was once chased by an angry moose. She is also a professional key misplacer, internationally recognized champion of Reading While Walking Without Smacking Into Light Posts, and tea-drinking fanatical reader.
Dangerously overeducated, Miss Corene has a BA in History from the University of Alberta and knows way too much about the influence of the Ballets Russes on Golden Age Parisian pillow coverings. She will be graduating from the University of British Columbia's Master's of Library and Information Studies in August and would like everyone henceforth to refer to her as "The Master."
And yes, she is a bit of a Doctor Who fan.
Pekoe (AKA: Her Highness Princess Pekoe Faildog Brown) is (probably) an Aussie Shepherd/Border Collie mix who was a rescue from the Vancouver City Animal Control Shelter in February of 2009. Her past is a misty uncertain tale of tragedy, adventure, and triumph. At least until she very likely rolled over to show her belly and was taken in by a Chilliwack shelter as a young pup. Pekoe convinced Corene to take her home by coming off all sweet, calm and demure in the shelter and waiting until brought home to reveal her true self (pillow-eating, book-chewing, valiant).
Pekoe is a very vocal and articulate dog (as she would say, A MASTER OF COMMUNICATION), to the point of running her own Twitter and blog, where she tells of her many exploits against rogue towels, duplicitious socks, her mortal enemies Bobo the Pomeranian and Jack the Ripper (a Jack Russell Terrier with a distinct lack of social skills), and the invisible ninjas that only she can see.
(I WANTED TO WRITE MY OWN BIO-THING BUT AUNTIE ARI SAYS MY PAWS ARE TOO BIG. -- HRH Pekoe of the Couch)