Sara Ryan

I quote myself: “As the child of two librarians, one of whom worked in rare books and special collections, I don’t have family stuff so much as a museum and archive.” So when I’m at my parents’ house, I dig around. This time I found some scrapbooks. Steve wrote about the contents of one of [...]

So yesterday I had the (not very earth-shattering) revelation that perhaps one of the reasons I run (more like jog) so slowly is that when I do it, I almost always do between 3 and 5 miles on the treadmill, and if I did a shorter distance, I might be able to increase my speed. [...]

I’m still thinking about place. Where I am now, the overwhelming majority of businesses are national chains. Their existence is described approvingly with definite and indefinite articles, e.g.: “We got a Target,” “The Wal-mart has the cheapest coffee filters.” To urbanite me, these businesses are uniformly bleak and depressing. There’s nothing unique, nothing local, nothing [...]

1. Overheard in an elevator. Business casual woman: “Is this a Sci Fi Con?” Dealer wearing innocuous t-shirt and jeans: “No, comics.” Business casual woman: “Oh, comics…well, I just love the outfits!” 2. Speaking of elevators: there weren’t enough of them. After waiting for one for twenty minutes, we took the stairs up to our [...]

I call it the Rockwell Deviance Quotient. It measures how much one’s holiday experiences diverge from the media ideal. I haven’t quite figured out the actual numerical part, but it might be like when you’re using a level and you assess how many bubbles off plumb something (or someone) is. So your holidays could be, [...]

Here at the Undisclosed Location (a.k.a. my parents’ house in Ohio), catching up on email, deleting comment spam (Why, why are the spammers so deeply attracted to the post about Rules being a Junior Library Guild selection? It’s harder hit than any other post, by far…) preparing for another small, low-key Thanksgiving, it’s hard to [...]

…and it was a good thing, too. I thought I was going to take public transportation from the Newark airport. I waited for the bus to Penn Station. For a while. Some other busses came. Finally the bus to Penn Station arrived and I was climbing the steps to get on it and I must [...]

Today I woke up at 3 am, convinced that I had booked my flight to New York for the wrong day. I hadn’t, but I couldn’t get back to sleep, either. So it was a good thing I had an audiobook. A LONG audiobook. I’m currently listening to George R.R. Martin‘s A Game of Thrones, [...]

Back from a fabulous weekend farther north in the Pacific Northwest. I have four (now three) days until I head East for the National Conference of Teachers of English and the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, and that panel I’m on with my awesome partners in YA novel crime. One of which is my birthday. [...]

At our house, we all watch The Wire.