Summer at the Library

Summer's here, and so is the library's summer reading program for teens! This year's theme is Creature Feature, but you can read anything you want - books, magazines, comic books graphic novels, manga - and turn in reading logs to win prizes and be eligible for weekly drawings. Registration begins next week, June 26 and continues through the summer.



We're also running two other drawings/contests for teens. Do a review of a teen book for us, either using our paper review form or online on the library's teen page, and you'll be entered in a drawing for a gift certificate to the Burlington Regal Movie Theater. And in keeping with the Creature Feature theme, we're also having a contest for the best and funniest fake tabloid story. Entries will be posted in the YA area, and the winner will get a Hot Topic gift card. Check out the sample story below - surely you can do better than this!

Aliens Arrested for Overdue Library Books!

Westampton, NJ— New Jersey librarians are fighting mad about aliens who owe millions of dollars in library fines, and they’re not taking it anymore!

Librarians at the Burlington County Library System report that they’ve had it up to here with space aliens who check out huge numbers of books and DVDs which they then take to their home planet and never return to the library. “I don’t know how they managed to get library cards, but they’ve got to realize that library rules apply whether you’re human or not,” said librarian Kathleen Gruver. “We don’t like having to arrest anyone. All we want is to get our materials back. But we’ll do whatever we have to, including go to other galaxies. It’s not like we don’t try to make it easy for them to return what they’ve borrowed. They could just pull their spaceship up to the drive-through bookdrop after hours.”

The librarian claimed that she couldn’t legally let us know what titles the aliens had checked out, but our investigation here at Weekly Weird News revealed that alien borrowers had taken out hundreds of manga titles, including nearly all the library’s copies of Inu Yasha, Hellsing, Fruits Basket, and Full Metal Alchemist, as well as all the books about drawing manga. Aliens had also checked out all the library’s copies of the Gossip Girls books. “Well, that would explain why those books never seem to be checked in,” said the librarian when informed of this by our reporter.

Further shocking revelations about alien library use came when the librarian added, “They should realize that with overdue fines this big, they’re not going to be able to use the library computers either, and that means they can’t get to their accounts on MySpace.”