1 of My Stories

I fell in love with this movie last week. Once is a celebration of music, but it's also a celebration of friendship and love and the many forms it takes. A person can come into your life for just a short time and have a lasting impact. You might only meet them once, but sometimes that's all it takes.
Our story happens on the streets of Dublin. He (Glen Hansard) is a vaccuum repairman, who works in his father's shop. In his spare time, he writes music and performs it on the streets for spare change. She (Marketa Irglova) is an immigrant from Czechoslovakia who sells roses on the street. One evening, she hears him performing a song. No one else is listening. She loves his music, but lo and behold, she also has a vacuum to repair.
The plot is sparse, simple, and the perfect platform for some terrific songs. The two meet, walk the streets together, and she ends up showing him the piano she plays on. Next thing you know, they are singing one of his original songs together. As …

I have been a young adult librarian since 2006. I have witnessed book after book coming into the library. Let me tell you--there doesn't seem to be anything original coming in anymore. Now, teens and the adults who read teen books can breathe easy. In Rot and Ruin, Jonathan Maberry has created a novel that takes one of the latest crazes--zombies--and creates a new world that dystopian readers will delve into. It seems odd to use zombies to teach lessons about humanity. It's the future, and zombies have taken over the world. Some virus has set in, and now it's only a matter of time before every human eventually becomes a zombie. If you get infected by a zombie, you're toast, and even if you die a natural death, you re-animate as a zombie. The only way to avoid being a zombie is for someone to drive a large stake into the back of their head.
Our protagonist is Benny Imura, a teenager who is your typical surly teen. Orphaned when his parents both became zoms, he now live…