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RA Run Down

The readers’s 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 raoblog@lu.com.

By Cindy Orr

This Week In Books

New Titles on This Week’s Most Wanted Mashup of Bestsellers

It’s a big week for new bestsellers, with 6 new titles making it onto the lists:

Fiction

  • James Lee Burke – The Glass Rainbow
  • Tana French – Faithful Place
  • Lisa Gardner – Live to Tell
  • Jennifer Weiner – Fly Away Home

    • Nonfiction

  • Laura Ingraham – The Obama Diaries
  • Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, with Sally Jenkins – In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving

    • To see the entire Most Wanted Mashup of this week’s top 10 bestselling titles in fiction and nonfiction, look to the righthand column.
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    The New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainer entries for the upcoming week include:

  • Carl Hiaasen – Star Island
  • J. A. Jance – Queen of the Night: A Novel of Suspense
  • Ashley JaQuavis – Cartel 3: the Last Chapter
  • Todd J. McCaffrey – Dragongirl
  • Mary B. Morrison – Darius Jones
  • James Patterson and Adam Sadler – Daniel X: Demons and Druids
  • Tim Pratt, ed. – Sympathy for the Devil (short stories by Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Kage Baker, Charles Stross, Kelly Link and many more)
  • Gary Shteyngart – Super Sad True Love Story

    • And a whole lot more. It’s a big week for summer reading, as many new original mass market paperbacks will be released this week along with the hardcover titles. Scroll down to the next entry to see the whole list of noteworthy titles to be published in the next seven days, or click here.
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    Our Under the Radar list this week is National Golf Month. Look in the righthand column just under the Most Wanted Mashup for this list of fiction and nonfiction about golf.

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    And now on to the news of the week:

  • Agent makes exclusive e-book publishing deal with Amazon for backlist titles of his clients; Random House contends it is illegal and may take legal action and also says it will sign no new agreements with clients of the agency until this issue is resolved; and here are some other shocked reactions
  • The Christian Science Monitor discusses people who are good at recommending books. The good news—they include Nancy Pearl; the bad news—they forgot to mention libraries.
  • Why the next big pop-culture wave after cupcakes might be libraries
  • E-Book sales topped hardcovers at Amazon for the last 3 months and publishers report similar experiences
  • Early Word: So what’s wrong with plot?
  • The usual on getting reluctant boys to read
  • Evolution of a reader
  • Celebrity biographies: successes and failures
  • Behind the I Write Site
  • BookSwim statistics on readers
  • Point of view: the struggle for omniscience in novels—there from the very beginning, never fully achieved
  • 5 literary trends that have made the leap to subgenre status
  • “Dem Black Books” – very good, thoughtful, blog post on street lit
  • Elizabeth Gilbert’s ex-husband will not publish his side of the story with Hyperion, who he says tried to push him to make the book more racy
  • The Cold War years: the greatest era of political fiction ever
  • Time to pull out your old copy of Jaws?
  • Future libraries: electronic outposts?
  • Bowker getting into pay-to-publish market?
  • Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus?
  • Will fee-based book clubs work?
  • The brouhaha at the Paris Review: the great poetry purge
  • Why the Vook will never work – on the other hand, Penguin releases enhanced version of Pillars of the Earth
  • Los Angeles Review of Books to launch this fall
  • New blog for true crime lovers
  • Borders will launch e-reader sections in its stores by September
  • Freedom to Read Foundation competition for Banned Books Week grant
  • Lawyers demand records from prison library on defendant’s reading habits and the local library’s struggle when citizens demand removal of a book on the case
  • LJ/SLJ E-Book Summit Program
  • The fine art of recommending books—from the perspective of a book reviewer
  • Books for non-readers

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    Books on Screen

  • N.D. Wilson’s 100 Cupboards fantasy trilogy–100 Cupboards, Dandelion Fire and The Chestnut King will be a movie
  • Biopic on Jerry Garcia’s life based on Robert Greenfield’s Dark Star

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    Authors

  • Martin Beales – obituary
  • Franz Kafka – unseen writings inch toward revelation
  • G. K. Chesterton – Adam Langer remembers his Chesterton summer
  • Asne Seierstad – must pay damages to Bookseller of Kabul’s wife
  • Stephen H. Schneider – obituary

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    Lists

  • 50 Novels to Read When You Need a Good Laugh (neatly categorized)
  • Top Film Criticism Sites
  • Gusher of oil spill books
  • 8 Literary Works That Deserve a Graphic Novel Treatment
  • Laugh Out Loud Summer Reading

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    Lighthearted Links of the Week

  • The Great Gatsby Video Game
  • The Dallas Morning News book room after they neglected to shelve for a week
  • An exploration of literary tattoos
  • The Little Librarian Play Library Kit

    • This entry was posted on Sunday, July 25th, 2010 at 10:01 pm and is filed under RA Run Down. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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