Archive for January, 2008

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This just in: Oprah’s sixty-first pick

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

It’s just been announced that Oprah has picked the sixty-first title in her book club, and it’s Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Life’s Purpose. The book is a nonfiction self-help title, in which Tolle advocates “transcending our ego-based state of consciousness” as a “prerequisite not only for personal happiness but also for the ending of violent conflict endemic on our planet.” Oprah’s going all out; announcing the title on today’s (January 30) broadcast and advertising a weekly online class at Oprah.com to more fully understand the book and its author’s suggestions.

Oprah’s previous pick was Ken Follett’s novel The Pillars of the Earth; on today’s broadcast she’ll also be speaking with Follett. Tolle is the bestselling author of the book The Power of Now, and this isn’t an entirely new direction for Oprah, as she paid a lot of attention to Rhonda Byrne’s self-help/empowerment book The Secret early in 2007.

What does everyone think of this pick? The book is currently ranked at #85,822 in sales at Amazon; I’ll be very interested to see what that number is tomorrow.*

*I wrote the original post around 10 a.m. this morning; barely four hours later the sales ranking at Amazon stands proudly at #96.

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Let’s Talk LitBlogs

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

By Sarah Statz Cords

I recently read a book called Everything is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger. As technology and I have a complex and contentious relationship, I’ll admit that a lot of it was over my head, but the author did a good job of making the point that information is becoming ever more miscellaneous, hard to categorize (there’s a whole chapter on Dewey numbers!), and how more and more of it is being organized by the end user (with the use of searches and filters) than by the producer.

He may have a point, as my eyes and my brain were wandering before I made it to the ends of most of his chapters. But it did set me thinking about the massive amounts of information out there, and how we find what we use, reference, read, and learn from. Take the case of blogs. There’s no doubt about it; I use them. I now find at least half of what I read from litblogs. And no, I’m not one of those organized blog readers who makes use of an aggregator or an RSS reader; that just takes all the fun out of it, and I’m too lazy to set any of them up. Nope, I just have a set round of sites that I visit like I used to visit web sites in the 1.0 world: by typing in their URL.

I know. I’m hopeless. But for now, it works.

It has made me curious, though, about what litblogs you typically use; periodically I’d like to highlight a site I visit and, as THIS is a blog and I’m hoping to learn from it, I’d ask that if you have any litblogs you regularly visit, send them along to us and we can highlight them as well, or interview you regarding how you use them.

This is already too long, so I’ll start with a biggie that I use EVERY DAY for fiction and nonfiction and that largely speaks for itself: Bookslut.* Moderated by Jessa Crispin, who just got a nice write-up in Publisher’s Weekly, this is a blog based in Chicago which features a monthly list of features, interviews, and fiction and nonfiction reviews; it also features a daily blog with all that’s new and noteworthy in literary cycles. It reads exactly like its title makes it sound: it’s sassy but intelligent, funny but very, very serious about books. I can’t say I’ve loved everything I’ve ever read that I got after reading about it at the site, but they’ve never been dull. Check it out; recently more contributors have been writing on their blog with interviews of indie publishers (always useful) and a ton of poetry helpful notes.

*In the interest of full disclosure, I sometimes review nonfiction books for the site. I don’t get paid for it, and don’t tell Ms. Crispin: I consider it such an honor I’d pay her.

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RA Run Down

Monday, January 28th, 2008

The readers’ advisory librarian’s weekly update, from a scan of more than 100 blogs, newsletters, magazines, newspapers and television.

By Cindy Orr
Wow, lots of hot new books this week, including John Grisham’s legal thriller The Appeal, which has a print run of 2,800,000. Look to the right for the Most Wanted Mashup, which is a mixture of top bestsellers and notable books hitting bookstore shelves in the next week. Scroll down to see this week’s Under the Radar list of underpromoted science fiction titles from 2007 that received great reviews.

So What’s Up With Dan Brown’s Next Book Anyway?
The Wall Street Journal tried to find out. Dan Brown is holed up in New Hampshire and isn’t talking. Neither is his agent. But his publisher dropped a little hint: “Dan Brown has a very specific release date for the publication of his new book, and when the book is published, his readers will see why,” says Stephen Rubin, president of Bertelsmann’s Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group. I can see it now…thousands of impatient fans surging the net trying to get a list of the next few signficant dates!

Destination Bookstores
USA Today’s article on “bookstores worth putting on a tourist’s itinerary,” might be just the thing for armchair travel for librarians stuck in the middle of winter. Take a look here.

Overview of Bestsellers of 2007
In case the Publishers Weekly hasn’t been routed to you yet, don’t miss this article on last year’s bestsellers. The bottom line? More books made the bestseller lists, but most of them didn’t stay on the charts very long. Oh, and in case you’re counting, it’s 561 titles that made the lists for the first time in 2007. Here’s another interesting quote, “Random House, Penguin USA, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette and Holtzbrinck—controlled 87.5% of all the slots on the weekly hardcover lists and 83.3% of all paperback slots.” Fascinating article.

Neal Wyatt Wins the I-Just-Invented-It Award for Asskickingly Non-Condescending Description of Romance
from the Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books blog. The prize is a beverage of her choice.

The bitches were blown away by the fact that her definition of romance did not include anything that referenced heaving bodices or man-titty. The article in question is in RUSA Quarterly here. Neal should be honored…honored to receive this award, as these ladies are no lightweights. In fact, it was they who uncovered the Cassie Edwards plagiarism scandal. Enjoy. And congratulations, Neal. Well done. Well done.

Sarah Johnson’s Historical Picks for 2008
Sarah Johnson, author of Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre, one of the Libraries Unlimited Genreflecting series titles on which The Reader’s Advisor Online is based, has a preview of the 2008 historicals she’s most looking forward to in her Reading the Past blog.

Awards:

Essence Literary Awards Nominees
Essence Magazine has announced the finalists for its 2008 awards in the categories of Fiction, Inspiration, Memoir, Nonfiction, Photography, Poetry, Current Affairs, Children’s Books, and Storyteller of the Year. The Lifetime Achievement Award will go to Toni Morrison. The winners will be announced on February 7.

800-CEO-READ Chooses Best Business Books of 2007
Awards were selected in 13 categories.

An unusually high number of recent films based on books might make this a good time to try a display of Books Into Movies. Here are a few:

Atonement by Ian McEwan
Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose
Beowulf (try the new translation by Seamus Heaney)
Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile
Evening by Susan Minot
I am Legend by Richard Matheson
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
A Mighty Heart by Marianne Pearl
Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner
Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Five Serious Novels for Those Who Would Rather Be Reading Romance

Brazil, by John Updike
On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
Light Years, by James Salter
Call Me By Your Name, by Andre Aciman
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie

That’s all folks. Well, maybe not really all, but it’s 1 am and far past my bedtime. See you next week!

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Most Wanted Mashup: Hottest Books of the Week

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

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Under the Radar: Recent Great Science Fiction You May Have Missed

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

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2008 ALA Youth Awards

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

By Diana Tixier Herald

One of the highlights of going to ALA Midwinter is the chance to attend the “Academy Awards� of youth literature, the Youth Media Awards sponsored by YALSA and ALSC on the Monday morning of the conference. In addition to the announcement of the well known Newbery and Caldecott Awards it is also the venue for announcement of the Printz Award (often described as the “Teen Newbery�), the Alex Award for adult books for young adults, the Margaret A. Edwards Award to an author for providing “young adults with a window through which they can view their world and which will help them to grow and to understand themselves and their role in society,� and the new Odyssey Award for excellence in audiobook production.

The youth awards featured a few very welcome surprises. Orson Scott Card, the bestselling author of science fiction and fantasy was named the Margaret A. Edwards Award winner for Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow. The big surprise was the Caldecott winner, The Invention of Hugo Cabaret, a middle-grade to younger young adult selection that is a unique blend of text and illustrations.

ALA President Loriene Roy warmed the hearts of readers’ advisors when she mentioned the importance of Reader’s Advisory in her speech at the Youth Media Awards.

The Alex awards (click here for this year’s winners) that honor adult books for young adults are of interest to readers’ advisors as are the Printz Award winner and honor books. This year’s Printz Award winner is The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean. The honor books are Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet by Elizabeth Knox, One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke, Repossessed by A.M. Jenkins, and Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill.

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Them’s Fightin’ Words

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

By Sarah Statz Cords

I have a bad habit of leaving the TV on even when I’m not watching it; sometimes I just like to hear some noise while I’m doing other work. With the recent writer’s strike, however, I have found myself reduced to watching programs like American Gladiators. I know. I’m not proud of it, and if today’s post sounds a little too confrontational, I’m going to blame it on increased adrenaline brought on by reality television shows.

Which is all a rather backhanded way to broach the topic of Neil Hollands’s article in the most recent edition of RUSQ: Back to the Future: A Response to Dilevko and Magowan. If you’re not familiar with those authors, they are the writers of the book Readers’ Advisory Service in North American Public Libraries, 1870-2005, published by McFarland in 2007.

This all sounds harmless enough, doesn’t it? Someone has written a book on the history of RA, and a notable in the field has reviewed it and responded to it. But if you’ve not read either of these publications, I think we can nut-shell it for you. The book by Dilevko and Magowan has been met with some critical disfavor; the authors make claims to support their point (quoted directly from their back cover copy) that “today’s public libraries tend to neglect the rich heritage of readers’ advisory services in favor of promoting genre titles and bestsellers.” In their book, they offer such case studies in which the authors asked students in RA courses they had previously taught, to use and critique such resources as NoveList and Nancy Pearl’s titles Book Lust and More Book Lust.

Hollands doesn’t mince words in his response, even in his opening paragraph: “Their book is ostensibly a history of RA service in public libraries, but from the first sentences it is apparent that ‘history’ will be molded to serve the authors’ arguments about what RA service should be. Dilevko and Magowan seek to revise the way in which we look at RA’s history, and, in doing so, lead a reactionary movement toward a future in which advisory is practiced as it was in the past, not as it is in the present. The authors have strong opinions, but ultimately their conclusions are wrongheaded.”

Now, this may be the part of me that’s been watching Gladiators talking, but this situation is starting to feel like a serious smackdown.

Which is why the whole thing, in my opinion, is such, such fun. How often do readers’ advisors get to hear the ring of drawn critical swords and hear the smash of opposing sides meeting on the battlefield in their professional literature? Not enough. (Frankly, I’ve got the Dilevko/Magowan book at home this week, and I was so bored by the cover I wasn’t going to look at it at all, until I read the Hollands piece.) This sort of thing, if nothing else, seems like a perfect opportunity to get our blood up about what it is that we truly do. Are we truly only purveyors of publishers’ overcommercialized products, or are we, as Hollands says in his conclusion, starting “from our shared values of service, inclusiveness, respect for the interests and needs of all library users”?

Sadly, I am not really personally qualified to answer that question. But my opinion is, why can’t it be a bit of both? Let’s take both of these works, consider them, and then have a good spirited bout of getting into it. Frankly, would it hurt any of us to consider just a bit more, as Dilevko and Magowan assert, how we can dedicate ourselves to the “promotion of serious and purposeful readings”? Likewise, would it hurt Dilevko and Magowan and those who agree with them to admit that yes, sometimes people really want to read bestsellers, well-written or not, and they have a right to that too?

Gladiators ready? Contenders ready? Go!

Posted in Noteworthy | 3 Comments »

Webinar Demonstration for Reader’s Advisor Online January 29, 2008

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Sarah Statz Cords, from Madison Public Library, Wisconsin, author of The Real Story, and associate editor for the Reader’s Advisor Online, will be offering web-based training Tuesday, January 29, 2008 at 1PM EDT / 10 AM PDT. Attendees will view the training via the web and will call a conference number to enable full participation in the training. Spaces are limited — please register ASAP! You may reserve a seat by emailing laura.calderone@lu.com. Confirmation of registration and access instructions will be sent by email. Future dates include Thursday February 21, 2008.

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RA Run Down

Monday, January 21st, 2008

The readers’ advisory librarian’s weekly update, from a scan of more than 100 blogs, newsletters, magazines, newspapers and television.

By Cindy Orr

We have several new hot books this week, including a Barbara Delinsky and one by Bernard Cornwell, plus Stephen King’s Duma Key, which has a book trailer available. Look to the right for the full list of top bestsellers and hot new titles in our Most Wanted Mashup. Scroll down to see this week’s Under the Radar list of great, but underpromoted fantasy titles from the past year or so.

Don’t Miss This Survey
Click here to participate in the RUSA CODES Readers’ Advisory Committee’s survey on book groups. It takes no time at all, and the Committee really needs your input.

OverBooked Creator Ann Chambers Theis Wins Award
If you’ve done readers’ advisory service for any time at all, you know about the wonderful free resource OverBooked. We were so pleased to hear that Ann Theis has won the Louis Shores/Greenwood Publishing Group Award. Congratulations to Ann (ann@overbooked.org), and here’s hoping she takes the cash and goes on a well earned vacation! Well done, RUSA. Well deserved, Ann.

Time of the Trade?
USA Today has spotted a new trend in 2007–a number of books that sold modestly in hardcover became blockbusters in trade paperback. And the trend is predicted to continue. And speaking of trade paperbacks, industry expert Mike Shatzkin made this prediction for 2008:

Some publishers will begin producing a hardcover edition of every paperback and a large-print edition of every title. This will be possible by harnessing print-on-demand and using an XML workflow, which makes it easy and inexpensive to put content into other print and electronic formats. The increasing number of large-print titles offered will lead to large-print subsections for many categories in some bookstores. Click here to see the other 14 predictions.

Cassie Edwards Plagiarism Charge
In case you missed it, the bloggers at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books stumbled across a case that looked like plagiarism by Cassie Edwards the romance author. At first her publisher denied it, but as more instances popped up, they’ve backed off. Story here.

Awards and Top Sellers
This was another big week for awards. Here are a few highlights:

Caldecott Pushes the Envelope — is this really a picture book?

2008 Dilys Winn Award Nominees – presented by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association to the book the association’s members most enjoyed selling:

Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen
Thunder Bay by William Kent Krueger
The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz
Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raynourn
The Blade Itself by Marcus Sakey

The Edgar Award Nominees - were announced by the Mystery Writers of America. And the nominees are:

Best Novel
Christine Falls by Benjamin Black (Henry Holt and Company)
Priest by Ken Bruen (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
Soul Patch by Reed Farrel Coleman (Bleak House Books)
Down River by John Hart (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Best First Novel By An American Author
Missing Witness by Gordon Campbell (HarperCollins – William Morrow)
In the Woods by Tana French (Penguin Group – Viking)
Snitch Jacket by Christopher Goffard (The Rookery Press)
Head Games by Craig McDonald (Bleak House Books)
Pyres by Derek Nikitas (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Best Paperback Original
Queenpin by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
Blood of Paradise by David Corbett (Random House – Mortalis)
Cruel Poetry by Vicki Hendricks (Serpent’s Tail)
Robbie’s Wife by Russell Hill (Hard Case Crime)
Who is Conrad Hirst? by Kevin Wignall (Simon & Schuster)

Best Critical/Biographical
The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction by Patrick Anderson (Random House)
A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational by Maurizio Ascari (Palgrave Macmillan)
Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction by Christiana Gregoriou (Palgrave Macmillan)
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley (The Penguin Press)
Chester Gould: A Daughter’s Biography of the Creator of Dick Tracy by Jean Gould O’Connell (McFarland & Company)

December Mystery Bestsellers
IMBA Bestsellers
for December 2007:

1. ‘T’ Is for Trespass by Sue Grafton
2. Person of Interest by Theresa Schwegel
3. Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen
4. Lord John and the Hand of Devils by Diana Gabaldon
5. The Venetian Betrayal by Steve Berry
6. The Darkest Evening by Dean Koontz
tied with
Kissing Christmas Goodbye by M.C. Beaton
8. SPQR XI: Under Vesuvius by John Maddox Roberts
tied with
Knitting Bones by Monica Ferris
10. Red Mandarin Dress by Qiu Xiaolong

Mayhem in the Midlands at Omaha Public Library
While we’re on the subject of mysteries, it’s time to register for
The Ninth Annual Mayhem in the Midlands
May 22 to 25th, 2008
Embassy Suites, Omaha, 555 S. 10th Street
Reservations 1-800-362-2779 — Be sure and ask for Mayhem Rates
Guest of Honor: Alex Kava
Toastmaster: Jeff Abbott

Introducing Brisingr
Brisingr is the title of the third book in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance cycle, following Eragon and Eldest. (It’s an old Norse word for fire.) The first printing will be 2.5 million copies, with the release date (and time) set for 12:01am on Saturday, September 20. Expect midnight launch events.

I’ll close with an uplifting article. The Guardian has a great piece on the use of book groups and poetry reading as therapeutic treatment for everything from rheumatoid arthritis to autism. Read it here. It will make you feel good!

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Most Wanted Mashup: Hottest Books of the Week

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

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