by Sarah Statz Cords

I am one of those awful people who often reads bestsellers and well-reviewed books simply to dislike them. Well, I don’t set out to dislike them, but I find that I frequently do. Take, for instance, my complicated relationship with the novels The Help (by Kathryn Stockett) and A Gate at the Stairs (by Lorrie Moore). I read them because they were both getting a lot of buzz, and I disliked them both. Intensely.*

So why don’t I just stay away from bestsellers and the big buzz titles? Well, for one thing, I rather like knowing what people are reading, what they’re talking about, and what books are selling (because it’s a safe bet that publishers will publish a lot more books LIKE the biggest sellers, because they are in business, after all). I also sometimes get a Book Snob charge out of not agreeing with the career book critics and reviewers. But mainly I keep reading them because when I’m wrong, I’m WRONG. And nothing is more thrilling than not wanting to read a book because everyone else has loved it, and then falling in love with it yourself.

This happened to me this week with Suzanne Collins’s YA novel The Hunger Games, which blew me away. (After polishing it off I had to go out immediately and get the sequel, Catching Fire.) Have you read this novel? It’s set in a (maybe not too distant?) dystopian future, in which the ruling powers of Panem, ensconced carefully in their Capitol, keep the rest of the population under control by demanding “tributes” from different regions of the country to compete to the death in the annual Hunger Games. The tributes are, of course, people’s children–every child between the age of 12 and 18 has their name entered in a drawing, and each region of Panem has to send a male and female tribute to the games. But when Katniss Everdeen’s younger sister is chosen, she does the unthinkable–and volunteers to enter the Games in her place.

I couldn’t be more pleased that this book turned out to live up to its hype, and then some. So how’s about it? We’re heading into the weekend–how about having some fun? Have you read any books lately that you expected not to like, but which won you over? Have you read any books you expected to love, but which left you wanting more? Tell us all about them!

*I can tell you that as a secret. Of course, if a reader wanted help finding readalikes for either book I’d enthusiastically try and help them find something.

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by Sarah Statz Cords

What is with all the nonfiction books recently coming under fire for their lack of (as Stephen Colbert would say) truthiness?*

The latest big “my nonfiction book isn’t TRUE at all!” story is that about Charles Pellegrino’s history (“history”?) of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima titled The Last Train From Hiroshima. First it seemed that perhaps Pellegrino had simply been misled by one of his main sources (Joseph Fuoco, now deceased, who claimed to be in one of the planes that escorted the Enola Gay on its bombing run); now stories are turning up that Pellegrino himself has fabricated some of his own qualifications. The publisher, Henry Holt, has stopped printing the book (for now), which the Christian Science Monitor reports is only making it sell faster.

Pellegrino is not alone, of course, in facing these types of charges. What makes his case particularly noteworthy is that his book was not a memoir, but was being billed as a more straightforward narrative history. The problem of truthiness in memoirs is now old news: so many titles have been debunked of late that it’s becoming hard to keep track of them. Such titles include Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Misah Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences, Herman Rosenblat’s The Angel at the Fence, Matt McCarthy’s Odd Man Out, and of course, the granddaddy of them all, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

We all know memoirs sometimes skirt the slippery line between fact and fiction; and perhaps it is time we talked about what to do with these books in our libraries. But what I find more disturbing are the supposedly more hardcore nonfiction history and investigative books in which serious errors are cropping up; another example of this type of book is Nick Reding’s nonfiction Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town.

Once again, I’m not really sure what to think. (I don’t have any such problems with what to feel about this: I feel annoyed. Very, very annoyed.) So today I have a two-part question for you: 1. How do you treat these debunked and problematic books in your libraries? 2. In a world where authors are largely responsible for their own fact-checking (Reding’s publishers admit he was on his own, and we’ve learned firsthand from author Stacy Horn that she was also responsible for her own work in this regard), how can we encourage publishers to perhaps give their authors a little more help (or encourage readers to demand that their nonfiction be more stridently reviewed)?**

*Thanks to Beth at the Both Eyes Book Blog for the inspiration for this post.

**I know, I know, this is totally unrealistic. Sometimes (not often) my idealistic side actually muscles my much more-developed cynical side out of the way.

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by Sarah Statz Cords

I’ve wondered for a while if it wouldn’t be helpful to RA staff to periodically see a list of display ideas relating to different months, days, times of the year, etc., listed here. So, in the hopes that late is better than never (forgot that February is a short month!) we’d like to offer a short list of display ideas and themes for the month of March. We’ll start with just the ideas, and perhaps later we can also include a starter list of titles, if we make this a regular feature. Please let us know in the comments or at rablog@lu.com if this sort of thing would be helpful (or if you have display ideas for the month you’d like to share)!

March is:
Employee Spirit Month
Expanding Girls’ Horizons in Science and Engineering Month
Humorists Are Artists Month
International Ideas Month
Music in Our Schools Month
National Craft Month
National Frozen Food Month
National Irish American Heritage Month
National Noodle Month
National Nutrition Month
National Peanut Month
National Reading Month
National Women’s History Month
Red Cross Month
Small Press Month
Social Workers Month

Holidays in March include:
Daylight Saving Time Begins (Spring Ahead): March 14*
The Ides of March: March 15
St. Patrick’s Day: March 17
National Quilting Day: March 20
Vernal Equinox (First Day of Spring!): March 20
Passover: March 29

March Famous Birthdays:
Alexander Graham Bell: March 3, 1847
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: March 6, 1806
Jack Kerouac: March 12, 1922
L. Ron Hubbard: March 13, 1911
Albert Einstein: March 14, 1879
Andrew Jackson: March 15, 1767
James Madison: March 16, 1751
Grover Cleveland: March 18, 1837
Lois Lowry: March 20, 1937
Louis L’Amour: March 22, 1908
William Shatner: March 22, 1931
Gloria Steinem: March 25, 1934
Robert Frost: March 26, 1874
John Tyler: March 29, 1790
Vincent Van Gogh: March 30, 1853

My Lone Idea for a Kids’ Display:
“In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb” (or vice versa)–with picture books featuring lions, sheep, and lambs

Sources include: Holiday Insights, Library ThinkQuest March, March Holidays (2010), The American Book of Days (Stephen G. Christianson), March Famous Birthdays

*Spring Ahead day, when we all lose an hour of sleep, is not so much a holiday as it is my least favorite day of the year.

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