1. What useful information have you learned from the resource that you have been monitoring since week one?
I subscribe to the email newsletters from Shelf Awareness, Booklist, First Edition, Early Word and the Library Journal prepress alerts, which tells you which books will be reviewed in the next issue. Now granted, I only skim all these - who could actually read them all? And when I skim, that's when certain things poke out.
POR EJEMPLO:
19th Annual Children's Book Art Silent Online Auction - 9am May 18 - May 24. Original art from leading illustrators of children’s books. Finished pieces, sketches, signed prints and other bookish things. Proceeds go to the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and underwrite projects that support freedom of speech, including the Kids’ Right to Read Project, Banned Books Week, and other ongoing efforts to maintain First Amendment rights. For more info, please visit www.abffe.org
2. What’s popular in your branch? What resources are new discoveries for you? What do you think that you will continue to use?
DVDs go out a lot at my branch. I check out the website Video ETA every now and then to see what's coming down the pike.
Amish fiction is big here. I know most of the authors, but to find out what's forthcoming, I looked for and found the blog AmishReader.
3. Pick a title from the highly anticipated titles of 2013, found under the righthand “Coming Soon- Season Previews” sidebar on Early Word. Write a blog post using appeal factors or read alikes to describe the title. Why is this title expected to be popular and to whom would it appeal?
Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell (Swamplandia) is a book of short stories that Flavorpill says put the "disturbing surreality of the everyday world in sharp relief." Fans of a particular brand of modern magic realism will go for this - people who like Liz Jensen, Denis Johnson, Dave Eggers, possibly Jonathan Safran Foer, George Saunders. I expect this to be absurdist, wry, well-written, and with strong characters that are both male and female, children and adults, human and non-human.
This week's assignment is all about Goodreads. Oh sure, I am on Goodreads. I am reeeaalllly on Goodreads. I have 2782 books on Goodreads, including two I added just last night (Lucy Knisley's graphic novel food memoir Relish and For the Good of Mankind, an interesting upper-grade nonfiction book about human medical experimentation). Be my friend on Goodreads!
I rely on Goodreads to keep track of what I have read and what I want to read, and I rely on Goodreads to help me make decisions about books that I may or may not want to read. I have 311 friends on Goodreads, including many fellow librarians, as well as authors, bloggers, and critics. If I'm on the fence about a book, I will click into Goodreads to see what my "community" has to say about it.
For example, Bryce recommended that I read The Freddie Stories by Lynda Barry. Love Lynda Barry, and I love Freddie. Thanks Bryce!
I found Karin on my Goodreads friends list and took a look at her favorites. Karin appears to like well-written books with strong female protagonists and no paranormal BS, and she appreciates YA, since she gave five stars to The Fault in Our Stars, Divergent and Hunger Games.
So for Karin, I recommended Revenge of the Girl With the Great Personality by Elizabeth Eulberg. She likes the Dairy Queen series, and Revenge... is humorous, contemporary, and realistic, featuring a few really wonderful, memorable characters, like the Dairy Queen books. Some of the book takes place within the wackadoo Toddlers and Tiaras baby beauty pageant world, and with that title, you can't hardly miss!
I use Goodreads to record my impressions of a book if I'm not going to write a review of it. I'll at least give stars. I use Goodreads to keep track of books I've had to read for a project, like Books for the Beast or YALSA's Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults committee. Doing that is really helpful. If the project has a deadline, it helps to be able to look at all the books you have to read before the deadline so that you can budget your time.
Recently, Goodreads was bought by Amazon. (Travis Jonker, author of the kidlit blog 100 Scope Notes, wrote about this for School Library Journal.) It bugs me that yet another part of my life has become stitched into Amazon's juggernaut of data, but what can I do? 2783 books (I added another one) - it's too many to walk away from.
Let's find books for hypothetical readers!
Reader #1, come on down! You like Oprah books and Eat, Pray, Love - we're finding you something with a little humor and a little depth. How about a protagonist whose background is similar to yours, experiencing unusual situations? This lets you put yourself in the narrator's shoes and wonder how you would react. Try...
No Touch Monkey by Ayun Halliday. Recent college graduate Ayun travels all over the world, maintains her sense of humor, gains some perspective.
Who's up next? Reader #2 likes vampires but thinks Edward Cullen is a cold fish! It sure would help if we knew how old Reader #2 is, but we're going to assume she's old enough to drive, and recommend...
Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter books. Anita's stories are fast-paced, action-packed, and a little bit spicy. No introspection here!
Reader #3 likes True Life Adventure. Exotic locations and man-eating everything are right up his alley. We'd walk this reader straight to the 910's to pick something off the shelf, but if nothing in that aisle appealed, we'd put a request in for...
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story by Christina Thompson. The title will sell it, but the reader may be put off by the mention of romance in the book's synopsis. Can't resist trying, though.
Reader #3 also wins a bonus prize! A custom-scrawled list of recommended authors, among them Caroline Alexander, Simon Winchester, Erik Larson, John M. Barry and - longshot - Nathaniel Philbrick.
Thanks for playing! See you next time at the library!
This week's Be More Bookish assignment was all about appeal factors.
Project Cain and Cain's Blood by Geoffrey Girard
These paired novels tell the same story - about a government-sponsored project in which serial killer DNA is used to create clones, which you know can't end well - from the point of view of two different characters.
Ostensibly written for two different audiences - the protagonist of Project Cain is a 15-year-old clone of Jeffrey Dahmer, and therefore that book will be marketed as YA, while Cain's Blood follows a former Army Ranger dispatched to kill or capture Jeff and the other clones after they escape from their top-secret school - both books are similarly grim in tone and feature graphic violence and images of psychological and physical torture of children. Teens who can handle Stephen King, Dean Koontz, John Connolly and the like will be able to stomach Project Cain, but tread carefully.
The pace is mainly fairly speedy, but slows in spots when the other book's main character is the focus of the action.
Readers who enjoy semi-sciencey horror like Robin Cook, Lincoln Child, and Michael Crichton might enjoy the Cain novels - but the science doesn't hold up to any kind of scrutiny, so readers who lose patience with speculative fiction that plays it fast and loose will roll their eyes.
When We Wake by Karen Healey
More squirrely science can be found in Karen Healey's new teen thriller. Future tech and social intrigue mystify teenage Tegan when she wakes up in a hospital a hundred years after attending a political rally. She doesn't remember having been shot, and she certainly doesn't remember having been cryogenically frozen in an experimental procedure.
Tegan's naturally optimistic nature and flippant tone keep this book rather lighter than other future medical ethics stories - I am looking at you, The Adoration of Jenna Fox et sequelae. In fact, the inclusion of decent action - not to mention a media-savvy makeover - recalls The Hunger Games more than anything.
Karen Healey's two previous books, Guardian of the Dead and The Shattering, are better-crafted, more mysterious, and more thought-provoking. When We Wake, however, mixes romance, action, and light sci-fi in a combination that is very popular right now.
And based on appeal factors expressed in some of Zeke's reviews, I suggested a couple of books for him.
Until recently, I was the librarian at North Point who checked in the new books every day. April does it now, and I miss that little job. Nothing beats a quick glance at EVERY new cover that comes into the library for maintaining awareness of trends and specifics. Am I going to read every 50 Shades knockoff that comes down the pike? NO. I am not going to read ANY of them. But knowing what their covers look like gives me a leg up when a customer comes in looking for the next Bared to You book and it isn't out yet.
So absent that daily dose of New and Noteworthy (or New and Ehhh), I have been leaning heavily on Edelweiss and Netgalley lately.
Both of these online services allow professional readers - and most library personnel qualify as professional readers - to request free advance review copies that can be downloaded to a computer or to any ereader. The publishers approve the requests (or don't - what the heck, Penguin? what did I ever do to you? let me read your dang books, what's the worst that could happen?).
Here's my current NetGalley dashboard:
I'm heavily into graphic novels right now, partly because, along with Todd and Melissa, I'm one of the facilitators for the Graphic Novels sessions of Genre Boot Camp, but also because I love graphic novels. And they look fabulous on my iPad.
Edelweiss is even more powerful than NetGalley because you get to see publishers' entire catalogs, not just the books for which review copies are available.
And if you can keep yourself from humming that song from The Sound of Music while you're browsing this site, well, you have more self-control than Doug or I do.