It seems that some anonymous booksellers peeked in the boxes and have let it be known that Oprah has indeed picked Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom as her final bookclub pick.

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by Sarah Statz Cords

On September 2, 2010, another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, causing concerns in a region still reeling from the April 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon rig explosion. Five books which might help give you and your patrons context for oil industry news and context are:

Tom Bower–Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century
Journalist Bower provides a definitive look at the last twenty years of the oil industry, focusing particularly on its control by a broad number of political players, its price volatility, and the companies and individuals who have devoted untold resources to finding, refining, and distributing it.

Joy Horowitz–Parts Per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School
Horowitz describes the oil drilling activity taking place right next to BHHS (which is also her alma mater), suggesting there might be a link between the school’s students’ exposure to oil and other toxins like benzene and high cancer rates in the area.

Peter Maass–Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil
Maass describes global oil dependence, and explores what that dependence is doing to environments, governments, and people all around the world. Pointing out that nobody is entirely certain how long global petroleum reserves will last, Maass also explores the problems inherent in dependence on such a nonrenewable resource.

Lisa Margonelli–Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline
Journalist Margonelli decided she wanted to learn exactly how gas ended up at her local gas station pumps, and set out to learn about the oil industry.

Daniel Yergin–The Prize
Although somewhat outdated (it was published in 2003), Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history starts farther back than do many others, at a time before oil was even demanded for automobiles and was used almost exclusively in patent medicines.

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by Sarah Statz Cords

All right, I’ll admit, a simple Google search revealed that I am not as clever in this choice of topic as I thought I was. Links to other (undoubtedly more clever) stories on the subject are listed at the end of this post.

I noticed the other day as I was looking over new releases for the year that a good number of new horror books feature zombies. Of course, in terms of sheer output, vampire books are still walloping all competition.*

But what do you think about it? Are you getting readers as rabid about zombie books as they are/were about vampire books? (And was the trend, if it is one, started by the popular spoof Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?) Do vampire books, in all their genre-blending splendor, seem to be slowing down in popularity at all, or are they still flying off your shelves? As evidenced by the list of articles below, lots of critic and journalist types have an opinion on this phenomenon. But we’d like to know what the librarians actually working the public service desks could tell us about it!

*I still laugh when I think of a bookseller friend of mine saying, shaking his head, “We just keep waiting for the Twilight thing to pass, and it just won’t go away…”

August 2010:
Fiction-L discussion about books for a fan of zombie novels
From way back in April 2009: Time magazine, Zombies are the New Vampires
Murderati, April 2009: When There Is No More Room In Hell
Starpulse magazine, Oct. 2009: Are Zombies the New Vampires? (More of a take on movies than lit, but still.)
Sassy Librarian blog, Dec. 2009: Are Zombies the New Vampires?
Euclic Public Library Book Banter Blog, Jan. 2010: Zombies: The New Vampires
Just Press Play blog, June 2010: Lit of the Living Dead
The Guardian, Aug. 2010: The Walking Dead (a television perspective)
And, last but not least, a big thank you to the Lincoln (Nebraska) City Libraries post of a reader-submitted list of zombie books:
Zombies…the New Vampires.

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by Sarah Statz Cords

Has anyone else been following all the recent hullabaloo about “the Biblioracle” at The Morning News website?

The gist of the idea was this: readers of The Morning News (a great online journal, by the way, of culture and book news; they’re also the people who bring you the annual Tournament of Books) were invited to send lists of the last five books they had read to TMN contributing writer John Warner (a.k.a. “the Biblioracle”), and he would write back to them with several suggestions for further reading they might enjoy.

As discussed in Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn’s New Yorker blog post*, demand far outstripped supply, and Warner received so many requests that the service had to be shut down early (although the website promises that the oracle will return later this summer). As of today, the number of comments attached to the article announcing the service is 1045–that’s right–more than a THOUSAND comments.

Friends and librarian neighbors, what are we doing wrong?** We have been here all along just begging to suggest further reading; we are the original biblioracles. Why don’t people ask us these sort of book suggestion questions at our libraries? Clearly there IS an audience for RA services–and I know everyone who’s working a service desk these days is probably overtaxed and doesn’t want a thousand questions about book recommendations–but how can we structure our libraries, services, and websites to try and give the Biblioracle a run for his money? Do we need to start our own library literary and online journals to reach out to where all the readers are?

*Thanks to Patty Franz, of the Pamunkey Regional Library (VA), for posting this link on Fiction-L in early June 2010.

**Bless her heart, at least one commenter did suggest that if people missed the oracle’s window, they could always go talk to a librarian.

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by Sarah Statz Cords

When I get the chance, one of my favorite things to do is peruse magazines that are written for writers (many of whom also happen to be, handily, avid readers), including Poets & Writers and Writer’s Digest. This past month, while I was perusing the March/April 2010 issue of Writer’s Digest, I stumbled upon this sidebar poll:

“If you had to pick just one, what’s the best ingredient of a solid novel: The plot/premise, the style, the characters, or the setting?” The results were as follows: 50% characters, 27.3% plot/premise, 22.7% style, and 0% setting.

Now, I’m not saying I entirely trust those results. (Nobody really loved the setting of a novel? I find that somewhat hard to believe.) And I would argue that many of those “ingredients” can be applied to nonfiction as well as novels. But what I did find interesting was that such a question was being posed in a general interest magazine, indicating that all authors and readers seem to be thinking a little harder these days about what it really is about specific books that appeal to specific readers.

I was also pleased about the four characteristics discussed; they seem to hew closely to both Nancy Pearl’s ideas of doorways and appeal factors of character, story (I would argue this covers plot/premise), language (style), and setting, as well as to Joyce Saricks’s appeal factors of characterization, story line, pacing, and frame.

The same magazine also contained a wonderful feature on debut authors (including Debra Berndt, Ellen Bryson, and Mara Purnhagen), an interview with popular author Elizabeth Berg, and a “small press spotlight.” Of course, I know the last thing we all need is yet another thing to read. But do consider eyeballing a Writer’s Digest sometime. We may find our interests aligning with those in the writing and publishing worlds even more as e-publishing and other innovations start making their reverberations felt, so taking a look at their reference sources might help us all understand one another better.

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By Cindy Orr

Big news from BEA today. According to Publishers Weekly, Jean Auel’s final volume in her Earth’s Children series will be published by Crown on March 29, 2011. The title is The Land of Painted Caves. No ISBN yet, and it’s not even listed at Amazon, but this will be huge, so word will spread fast. My advice? Put it in your catalog anyway, including the pub date. That’s the cleanest way to make your public service staff look like heroes. More info at the PW website. You might want to check the condition of the other five volumes in the series as well.

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Robert Parker, creator of the Spenser mystery series (which became the basis for the popular television program Spenser for Hire), has died. He was 77 years old.

More news is available at Sarah Weinman’s Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind site, including links to others’ tributes to Parker and his writing.

Parker was a prolific and popular author. In addition to the Spenser series (starting with The Godwulf Manuscript, in 1974), he also created the Jesse Stone series (Night Passage, 1998), the Sunny Randall series (Family Honor, 1999), and the Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch Western series (Appaloosa, 2005).

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by Sarah Statz Cords

At this time of year, you can’t move for fear of tripping over a new “Best Books” list. Making comprehensive lists has been done elsewhere, so what we’ll be doing in multiple posts through the end of the year is selecting a few of the lists most applicable to our work in libraries and with readers and listing them here. That’s right. We may not be the first to compile these lists, or the most comprehensive, but we’re the most demanding–what follows is a list of best book lists for the discerning readers’ advisor.

Best Books: Fiction
Amazon.com Editors’ Picks of 2009: Fiction and Literature (10 titles)
Booklist Best First Novels (10 titles)
Christian Science Monitor Best Fiction of 2009 (12 titles)
Genreville Blog/Publishers’ Weekly Top SF, Fantasy, and Horror (10 titles)

Best Books: Nonfiction
Boston Globe Best Nonfiction (7 titles)
Christian Science Monitor Best Nonfiction (24 titles)

Best Books: Fiction and Nonfiction
EarlyWord Best of the Best Spreadsheet (titles appearing on three or more “best” lists)
Economist Best Books (43 titles; particularly strong on business and economics)
Library Journal Best Books (31 titles)
New York Times Notable List (100 titles)

Best Books: For Kids
School Library Journal Best Books (54 titles)

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