The readers’ advisory librarian’s weekly update, from a scan of more than 100 blogs, newsletters, magazines, newspapers and television. This blog is brought to you by the Reader’s Advisor Online, the subscription database based on Libraries Unlimited’s Genreflecting Advisory series. We’d love to hear from you. Feel free to comment on any of our posts, or contact us here.
By Cindy Orr
This Week In Books
Welcome to Summer! This is the first week we’ve seen a drop off in the number of new hot titles as we finally move into the summer slump. The big book in fiction, of course, is Janet Evanovich’s Fearless Fourteen. We were only able to find a couple of hot newly published nonfiction titles. As always, scroll down to the next entry in this blog to see our New, Noteworthy and No-Brainers for the rest of the selected titles to be published in the next seven days.
Our Under the Radar list this week is Beach Reads for Jane Austen Lovers. Scroll down and look in the right hand column for this one. It seemed like a perfect time for this list, and if you can’t find something to read there, or in the list of No-Brainers, take a look to the right for our other weekly feature, our Most Wanted Mashup, for the titles that readers will be trying to find. There are several fiction titles new to the bestseller lists this week, including Lee Child’s Nothing to Lose, Plague Ship by Clive Cussler with Jack Du Brul, and W.E.B. Griffin & William E. Butterworth’s Death and Honor, and don’t miss David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle—especially if you’re a dog lover.
Sex and the City Book Doesn’t Exist
In case your patrons are asking for Love Letters From Great Men, the book that Carrie Bradshaw reads to Big in the Sex and the City movie, you can tell them that it doesn’t exist. That hasn’t stopped people from looking and buying something similar from ABEBooks.com, the used book site. Apparently, the nearest thing lovestruck readers have been able to find is a book called Love Letters from Great Men and Women: From The Eighteenth Century To The Present Day by CH Charles. That one does exist and is climbing the bestseller lists at both ABE Books and Amazon. If you’d like to buy the 1924 title, it was republished in the UK in 2007 and there are a few copies left–ISBN 1432576100.
Fact Or Fiction? Where Will You Put Sedaris?
Barnes & Noble lists David Sedaris’s new book of essays as fiction, according to the New York Post. Sedaris himself says the book is 97% true, even though he’s an exaggerator, so according to him, that’s “true enough” and it should go in nonfiction. Is it? Then again, B & N said they classify all books of essays under fiction. Huh?
Pentagon Sends Playaways to Military Bases
The Pentagon recently purchased 150,000 Playaways, the single title audiobooks, to send to military bases and Iraq. One officer cited them as an alternative to PlayStation games. Yeah!
IMPAC Dublin Award Winner from Canada
The IMPAC Dublin Award winner was announced this week. It’s De Niro’s Game by Rawi Hage, nominated by the Winnipeg Public Library in Canada. Hage was born in Lebanon, but lives in Canada. The novel deals with the awful dilemma faced by two young men in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war—stay there and pursue a life of crime to survive, or leave behind the country and everything they know.
Book Clubs: Where Are the Men?
Here’s a very interesting discussion about why more men don’t belong to book clubs. Is it because they’re not comfortable sharing their feelings? Because they prefer nonfiction? What do you think? Guys, here’s your chance to chime in.
Shelf-Awareness Drop-in Database
We’ve mentioned this source before, but I just had to give it another plug this week because of the books they turned up. The Drop-In Database lists books that publishers have “dropped in” to their schedule too late to be included in their catalogs.
This week, Shelf-Awareness highlighted two political books set to come out in August. The first is called The Obama Nation (it’s a pun, get it?) by Jerome R. Corsi of Swift Boat Veterans fame, so we can guess what’s in it. The second is called 72 Things Younger Than John McCain by Joe Quint. At least this one is categorized as humor. Unfortunately, it may not be so funny to some, as some of the things include Alaska, chocolate chip cookies and area codes.
Denis Johnson Writes a Noir Serial
For Playboy. Beginning in Friday’s issue. Johnson, whose Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer, says he was inspired by Dickens to try writing the serial to deadline, and by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler for his hardboiled noir story called “Nobody Move.”
James Patterson Goes Graphic
Graphic novels, we mean. After the novel The Dangerous Days of Daniel X is published in July, Patterson will follow up with a graphic novel version as well as a children’s version. It may be that children’s selectors will have to pay more attention to publishing dates other than Harry Potter and Stephenie Meyer. Is this a new trend?
Lists
LA Times Summer Reading
USA Today, Upcoming Political Books
Entertainment Weekly Memorable Memoirs of the Last 25 Years
Authors
Ursula K. Le Guin on Dr. Zhivago
David Sedaris
David Wroblewski and here
