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 at rablog@lu.com.

By Cindy Orr

This Week In Books
Our Most Wanted Mashup list has three new fiction titles and three new nonfiction books. Michael Connelly’s The Brass Verdict, A Wallflower Christmas by Lisa Kleypas, and Gregory Maguire’s A Lion Among Men are the fiction books new to the list. On the nonfiction side we have Multiple Blessings by Jon Gosselin, Kate Gosselin, & Beth Carson, Maureen McCormick’s Here’s the Story and Tried by War by James McPherson.

For Under the Radar, we chose Games and Gambling. Hey… this is a good week to escape from reality! Lots of books again this week in our New, Noteworthy and No-Brainer list of new books hitting the shelves this week. Several of them have Christmas themes. Here are some of the authors you’ll recognize: Nelson DeMille, Vince Flynn, Jonathan Kellerman, John Updike, Donna Andrews, David Morrell, Anne Perry, Stuart O’Nan, Marcia Muller, Danielle Steel, Marcia Talley and M. J. Rose for just a partial list. In nonfiction, Too Close to the Sun: Growing Up in the Shadow of My Grandparents, Eleanor and Franklin by Curtis Roosevelt, Donald Spoto’s Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies, Philip Norman’s John Lennon: The Life, and The Darwin Awards Next Evolution by Wendy Northcutt. For a complete list of the high profile titles to be published this week, see the next post below this one.

Meyer Puts Forks, Washington On the Map
Stephenie Meyer says she needed a setting that was “ridiculously rainy” for her Twilight series of novels. She found Forks, Washington by using Google. The small town citizens not only took this all in stride, they embraced the publicity and have seen a 48% increase in lodging tax income.

Borders and Amazon See Spike in Financial Book Sales
The huge global economic crisis has readers looking for answers in books—nonfiction to try to understand, and fiction for escape reading. According to Borders and Amazon, sales are up for financial titles like The Ten Roads to Riches: The Ways the Wealthy Got There (And How You Can Too!) by Kenneth L. Fisher, Stop the 401(k) Rip-off!: Eliminate Costly Hidden Fees to Improve Your Life by David B. Loeper, and The Snowball, the first authorized biography of billionaire Warren Buffett. Sales of thriller, mysteries and other escape fiction are up as well.

Clive James on Sludge Fiction
“The whole secret with what he called sludge fiction was to enjoy it while you built up the habit of reading, and then move on to something hard. The very idea that there might be something interesting further up the road had not occurred to me before that day.” Click here to read the whole story.

Shane, Come Back!
George Will, in Newsweek, makes a case for the comeback of the Western. He asserts that the new movie Appaloosa is “welcome evidence that the Western genre is not facedown in the dusty streets of Laredo, wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay.” And he doesn’t do a bad job on the history of the western as a literary genre. Fun.

The Biblioburros Are Going Strong
Every weekend for a decade, Luis Soriano loads up his two burros Alfa and Beto with books and takes them to the impoverished small villages in the hills of Colombia. Mr. Soriano, who has two other jobs during the week, believes passionately in the power of reading.

Urban Fiction a Hit in Libraries of All Kinds
The New York Times has a story on urban fiction, or street lit, as some call it, and it success in the Queens Library and others. “We’ve got people who are reading for the first time. We’ve got people coming into our building asking for Teri Woods — who have never come here before,� said Lora-Lynn Rice, the director of collections at the Martin Library in York County, which held a symposium on urban fiction during National Library Week in April. “Why would we not embrace this?�

King Love Letters Tied Up in Court
The three surviving children of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King are fighting in court over control of love letters between the two and nearly 1000 boxes of other personal papers which are part of Coretta Scott King’s estate. Dexter King had arranged for the papers to be used in a book with a $1.4 million deal with the Penguin Group, which set a deadline of last Friday before they would cancel the publication. Martin Luther King, III and his sister Bernice King say their brother agreed to the deal without their approval.

What, No Women Outliers?
Here’s an interesting take on Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers. “Since the publication of The Tipping Point we’ve seen a proliferation of books that present a single, shrink-wrapped idea as a means of understanding the world at large: books like The World is Flat, The Black Swan, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Long Tail… [A]ll of them promise access to a club whose sole activity is the exchange of ideas; all of them promise, however covertly, to make us feel smarter. And all of them are written by men.” But, GalleyCat observes: “Things aren’t really that binary—the reason Gladwell enjoys such a powerful reputation as a big thinker, for example, is that he’s an expert storyteller, and while Mary Roach gets credit for her quirky stories, her books are just as issue-driven as his—but it’s when you start trying to think about why such a stark polarization feels wrong (or right!) that you start getting a nuanced consideration of an issue like this.”

NPR Gets Exclusive PrePub Readings from Toni Morrison
Watch the NPR Book Tour area for readings by Toni Morrison from her new book A Mercy, due out on November 11. The huge event, to be held on October 27, 28, 29 and 30, features a serialized reading by Morrison herself, plus a discussion with Morrison and Lynn Neary.

Lists
October Indie Next Picks
The Ultimate Guide to Pairing Alcohol and Literature
PW October Religion Bestsellers

Authors
Iain Banks - interview
Tony Hillerman - obituary
Alexander McCall Smith
Neal Stephenson - interview

Fun site of the week: Judge This Book By Its Cover. Addictive!

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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 at rablog@lu.com.

By Cindy Orr

This Week In Books
This was a kind of slow week in fiction, with only four notable new novels hitting the shelves this week. They’re good ones, though—Robert B. Parker, Carolyn G. Hart, Iris Johansen, and Anita Shreve. There’s tons of new nonfiction, including John Grogan’s The Longest Trip Home, Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow on Spain. . . A Culinary Road Trip, and James Patterson’s Against Medical Advice: One Family’s Struggle with an Agonizing Medical Mystery. And here’s a fun one: Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. See the next post below for the complete list of New, Noteworthy and No-Brainers.

Our Most Wanted Mashup has three new novels and three new nonfiction titles this week. In fiction, Grace by Richard Paul Evans is new to the lists this week, as are John le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man, and The Pirate King by R.A. Salvatore. New to the nonfiction lists are Kill Bin Laden by Dalton Fury, Ted, White, and Blue by Ted Nugent, and Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates. Check Under the Radar for some Halloween Booooooks. Enjoy.

New Issue of RA News
Click here for the latest issue of RA News, the free online newsletter of the readers’ advisory field. Edited by Barbara Ittner, Acquisitions Editor for Libraries Unlimited, and the force behind the Genreflecting series of readers’ advisory tools, RA News has been published since 2005. This issue includes “Manga 101: Tips for the Curious, the Confused, and the Clueless” by Robin Brenner, “Fifty-two Definitions, and Nothing to Read: Advice for the Science Fiction Reader” by Maura Heaphy, “The Readers’ Advisor and Reading as Heroic Quest” by Brian Sturm, and “Historical Fantasy: A Hot New Trend in Speculative Fiction” by Jessica E. Moyer. Take a look!

Sign up for LJ’s Book Smack
Library Journal has launched a new e-newsletter called Booksmack. The newsletter, which will be published twice a month, is free, but you will need to register first. The current issue includes “The Word on Street Lit” by Rollie Welch, “Top Ten Holds from the Sno-Isle Library System, WA,” “35 Going on 13: Teen Books for Adults,” and other features. The newsletter will include “LJ PrePub Exploded” and “RA Crossroads” by Neal Wyatt.

Late Bloomers and Precocious Stars
Malcolm Gladwell asks why we equate genius with precocity, in an intriguing look at the difference in careers for those who spring into fame at a young age, and those who come to the work later. Gladwell compares Jonathan Safran Foer, who says that he’d hardly read any other books when he took a creative writing course with Joyce Carol Oates on a whim, and whose first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, catapaulted him to fame at the age of nineteen, with Ben Fountain, a young lawyer who quit his job, visited Haiti over thirty times, and toiled for eighteen years, with the support of his wife, until he published Brief Encounters in 2006. Fascinating.

Bouchercon World Mystery Convention
Baltimore was host to this year’s 39th annual Bouchercon mystery convention. It was quite a weekend for Laura Lippman, who was the American guest of honor—fittingly, since her Tess Monaghan series is set in her native Baltimore. The icing on the cake, though came when she won a triple crown with her book What the Dead Know—Best Novel for the Barry Awards, the Macavity Awards, and the Anthony Awards. Quite a feat. Next year’s conference will be held in Indianapolis.

Sherry Jones Defiant About Jewel of Medina
Even though her British publisher’s house was fire bombed, Sherry Jones seems to be in a defiant mood as she was interviewed in a recent trip to London. “My sweet little historical novel, my epic love story, my bridge-building book about Islam. How was it suddenly an issue of national security?” she asked. Random House, which paid a $100,000 advance for the novel, backed out of the deal when an American academic called it soft-core pornography. The novel was then published by Beaufort Books. “I’m a feminist and don’t write porn,” said Jones. “I have a teenage daughter and I want her friends to be able to read this and be inspired by Aisha’s story.”

Jones has already finished a second novel called The Battle of the Camel, which is about the schism which resulted in the rival Sunni and Shia factions of Islam. In this novel, the widowed Aisha leads troops into battle against her husban’d nephew. It is likely to be just as controversial.

Forever War the Movie
Ridley Scott, director of Gladiator, Body of Lies, Alien, and Blade Runner, will take on Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novelThe Forever War, according to Variety.

Lists
The National Book Award Nominees
Booksellers Rush to Publish Financial Titles
Barry Awards
MacAvity Awards
Anthony Awards
Top 100 Books of All Time – in Australia

Authors
Tim Burton - on the filming of his new movie Alice in Wonderland
V.S. Naipaul (by Christopher Hitchens) – “V. S. Naipaul has produced works of extraordinary skill— and lived a life of equally extraordinary callousness.”
Marilynne Robinson - interviewed by Bat Segundo
Gore Vidal - fractures his back

“The government regulates drugs, alcohol and (finally) bad lending practices. How long can we continue to allow the totally laissez-faire dissemination of literature? Not even a warning from the surgeon general or the attorney general, or some sort of general, on the back of every book?” Click here for the rest.

Have a lovely autumn week. See you again next Monday.

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