Posted on 01/02/2007 1:32:48 PM PST by Obi-Wandreas
You can't find "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings" at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson's "Final Harvest"? Don't look to the Kingstowne branch.
It's not that the books are checked out. They're just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.
Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works have been eliminated from the Fairfax County collection after a new computer software program showed that no one had checked them out in at least 24 months.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
It was a dark and stormy night. The kinda night that froze your soul like some kid's tongue to a steel pole at Christmas time........
No Catcher in the Rye?
The Works of Aristotle Aristotle (Centreville)
Sexual Politics Kate Millett (Centreville)
The Great Philosophers Karl Jaspers (Centreville)
Carry Me Home Diane McWhorter (Centreville)
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner (George Mason Regional)
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy (George Mason Regional)
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway (George Mason Regional)
Desolation Angels
Jack Kerouac (George Mason Regional)
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak (George Mason Regional)
Remembrance of Things Past
Marcel Proust (George Mason Regional)
Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well
Maya Angelou (Chantilly Regional)
The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams (Chantilly Regional)
Writings Gertrude Stein (Chantilly Regional)
Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte (Chantilly Regional)
Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe (Chantilly Regional)
Great Issues in American History
Richard Hofstadter (Chantilly Regional)
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude Stein (Chantilly Regional)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Pohick Regional)
Babylon Revisited: And other stories
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Reston Regional)
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee (Reston Regional)
The Aeneid Virgil (Sherwood Regional)
The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot (Fairfax City Regional)
I thought libraries were supposed to be repositories of literature, not pop culture.
ps. It's the Washington Post, not Washington Times.
We live in a culture on the brink of re-inventing itself. Unfortunately, it's starting from scratch, without traditions, religion, philosophy or a history.
Scoundrel! ;-)
I was OK with this, until I saw that Faulkner's Sound and the Fury was on the list.
In all seriousness, though, the head guy quoted in the story has a point ... why stock was doesn't get used? It's sad that folks are not reading some of this stuff, but Thomas Hardy is gonna have a tough time competing with season 3 of Laguna Beach. Surprisingly, more melodrama in Laguna Beach (and it's tough to out melodrama Hardy).
Once in high school I got interested in the strange career of Aaron Burr. I went into the Pratt Central Library and searched the card catalog for "Aaron Burr" entries. Ultimately, I checked out a book that had last been checked out a CENTURY ago. It was the transcript of Burr's trial for treason, before Chief Justice John Marshall. (Burr was acquitted on sound legal grounds.)
I remembered what I'd read. And that memory made me a source for Matt Drudge years ago, when the subject was a subpoena to Clinton, like the one that CJ Marshall issued to President Jefferson in the Burr trial. But I'd have missed that whole opportunity if the Pratt Board had been as short-sighted as the library boards reported here.
Congressman Billybob
Latest article: "The Are-You-Kidding Award for Cong. Conyers"
D'oh!
It was all over in an instant. Her, me and the dwarf were all totally exhausted..........
It would appear that local English teachers and professors no long assign the classics. Okay, so what do the young literature scholars read instead?
Interesting.
So are they just going to throw these books in the trash? If so, they can send them to my house instead. I'd happily give them a good home.
This reminds me of one of my favorites, James Thurber.
Welcome to the new doublegood Fairfax County!
Well, that's just a shame.
Whoops - slap upside the head! The ACLU would support the removal of the collected writings of Abraham Lincoln. But imagine the howls of protest if the library dared remove the collected writings of Karl Marx?
Books at home?
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