Links! News! Excitement! Happy Dances! Exclamation Marks!

Some of you might have witnessed me doing happy dances across various social media platforms yesterday evening, but I thought I’d share my good news over here as well: I’ve been made full-time at work! This is exciting for several different reasons: first of all, hooray, finally a living wage! Secondly, I feel extremely blessed to be able to make a living doing something I love — especially in the current economic climate, when full-time public library jobs are a bit like unicorns. It’s an enormous stroke of luck to have been able to secure one, and I’m so immensely grateful.

This is a particularly exciting time at work, as we’re preparing for the Summer Reading Challenge (my first!). I love that being around more will give me the chance to get more involved, and perhaps even to start a couple of projects I could only daydream about up until now. And on a personal front, making more money means I’ll finally be able to save for a big trip I’ve been planning for years — I’ll hopefully see some of you across the pond next year?

Moving on to bookish news, I’m currently reading Patrick Ness’ More Than This, and it’s seriously making me want to explode with bookish glee. It’s so good! How is it possible that it’s this good? (This thought somehow coexists with “of course it’s ridiculously good — it’s Patrick Ness.) Anyway, before I get all exclamation mark'ed out, here are a couple of interesting links:

• Movies, TV, books, the Web: 2013′s bests — so far at Salon gave me some reading ideas, but I was especially intrigued by Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell. Has anyone watched it?
  
  
• Also from Salon, some interesting data about the books readers abandon and why.
  
  
• Patrick Ness made some good points about writing for teens on Twitter yesterday, which were collected on Storify.
  
  
• The F Word reviews Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing. I watched this a couple of weeks ago but didn’t have the chance to jot down my thoughts. I’d be really interested in reading more commentary on the gender politics and the contemporary setting if anyone has any to offer, though *looks at some of you innocently*.
  
  
• Books Titles With One Letter Missing made me laugh more than it probably should have.
  
  
• Dear xkcd: how are you so consistently awesome?
  
  
• Lastly, Jack Zipes reviews Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm and Sara Maitland’s Gossip from the Forest (a book I need to read yesterday) for the LA Review of Books.

That’s it from me today. I still have a little bit of time until I actually start working full-time, so hopefully that will give me the chance to write All the Reviews. Oh, and out of curiosity, how is everyone coping with blogging sans Google Reader? I have to say that the transition to Feedly went better than I expected. The platform is different, but my reading habits and routine have remained the exact same.