By Diana Tixier Herald
Reader’s Advisory is a hot topic with librarians serving teens, as evidencee by the dozen who turned up at the YALSA Reader’s Advisory Interest Group meeting on Sunday in Anaheim. It was organized by Cara Kinsey and hopefully will eventually become a full-fledged YALSA committee. It was wonderful to be in a room with so many like minded people as everyone discussed what they would like to see a YALSA RA committee do. And of course, since it was a meeting of reader’s advisors, we all talked about great books.
YALSA already produces some great lists that are of major help to reader’s advisors working with teens and also administers important awards, so this committee would focus on educating librarians and library staff on how to use those lists as well as the wealth of other RA resources to put teens together with books.
One of the great things about talking about reader’s advisory with other reader’s advisors is that the dialog helps one solidify one’s own thoughts on various topics and issues. It gives us a way of looking at ideas and issues from different perspectives.
Ideas that were talked about included continuing the discussion online using a Drupal, the importance and how-to of coming up with read-alikes, the importance of extending advisory services to include television, film, comics, audio, and other media.
We also talked about different aspects of books that may irritate some readers and be a draw for others which really made me start mulling over the differences between advising readers on aspects of a book that they like or dislike and censorship. Some of the things that came up in talking about examples of those aspects included the books with two or more alternating stories jumping from character to character, to novels in verse, touchy subjects, and hot language. It is just as important to know what the reader doesn’t like as well as what they do like. When looking at those aspects it is important to remove value judgments. A person likes or doesn’t like a certain aspect; it is not a reflection on the value of the book.
Bibliotherapy also came up, and with issue driven novels so important in teen literature, reader’s advisors do need to consider if the reader who likes particular issues is really looking for bibliotherapy or just wants a good trashy (used here in the best entertainment-related way) read like Go Ask Alice. That question leads into the ethics of bibliotherapy and what is the reader’s advisor’s role in it, if any.
Unfortunately I’m awful with names and with so many fabulous thoughts and ideas flying around I can’t attribute what was said to anyone in particular, but it was so invigorating to hear these people who are so passionate about providing reader’s advisory to teens talk about it. Someone said “reader’s advisory is about the individual,� so she always uses reader’s rather than readers’ advisory which is a terrific point. Someone talked about how RA is the intersection between service to teens, knowledge of books, and enthusiasm about reading. It is a person-to-person relationship. By having an interaction with readers and listening to them about books we are validating their right to have opinions about what they are reading.
I know there are tons of book lists but I just couldn’t resist adding a list of the books people attending the meeting mentioned. We all told which book was a personal favorite read in the last month or so. Thank goodness I had read a fair number of them because my list of to-be-reads is just getting longer and longer and the folks at the meeting all had good books to talk about.
Inda by Sherwood Smith
Rapunzel’s Revenge by Shannon and Dean Hale
The Dead & The Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Before I Die (on audio) by Jenny Downham
The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
Skin Hunger by Kathleen Duey
A Curse as Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce
My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger
