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RA Run Down

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

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 the Week’s Most Wanted Mashup of Bestsellers:

Fiction

  • Frederick Forsyth – The Cobra
  • James Patterson and Liza Marklund – The Postcard Killers
  • Martin Cruz Smith – Three Stations
  • Lauren Weisberger – Last Night At Chateau Marmont

    • Nonfiction

  • Rhonda Byrne – The Power

    • Also, keep your eye on:

  • Robin Cook – The Cure
  • Felix and Dick Francis – Crossfire
  • W. E. B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV – The Vigilantes
  • Tommy Spaulding – It’s Not Just Who You Know

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

  • Jennifer Crusie – Maybe This Time
  • Clive Cussler with Grant Blackwood – Lost Empire: A Fargo Adventure
  • Loren D. Estleman – Frames
  • Jonathan Franzen – Freedom – one of the most anticipated books of the year
  • Allen Ginsberg and Eric Drooker – Howl: a Graphic Novel
  • Brenda Novak – Body Heat
  • Sara Paretsky – Body Work
  • Arturo Perez-Reverte – Pirates of The Levant
  • Steven Saylor – Empire

    • And many more. 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.
    _______________________________________________________
    Our Under the Radar list this week in honor of National Alcohol and Drug Recovery Month is Addiction Memoirs. Look in the righthand column just under the Most Wanted Mashup for this list.
    _______________________________________________________
    And now on to the news of the week:

  • PW says Mockingjay is the “best yet,” but LA Times not only breaks embargo by publishing their review early…it contains spoilers
  • Giving President Obama an ARC of Franzen’s Freedom early causes uproar and confusion
  • The 17 most innovative academic presses
  • More on Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner complaining that women don’t get their fair share of book reviews
  • Laura Lippman’s new book I’d Know You Anywhere sells 4,739 ebooks in the first week and 4,000 hardcovers
  • Could this be a replacement for ILL?
  • Random House and Wylie Agency call a truce over ebook rights
  • Are ebooks worth the money? (Finally a mainstream article at leasts mentions libraries.)
  • Are ereader devices changing reading habits?
  • 10 reading revolutions before ebooks
  • Why Science Fiction?
  • Deep-fried Norman Mailer? Revisiting James Dickey’s Deliverance 40 years later
  • Publishers Weekly the latest to enter field of companies playing to self-publishers; and author J. A. Konrath thinks it’s a ripoff
  • So what’s this big behind-the-scenes brouhaha at Barnes & Noble all about?
  • Ebook readers encourage conversation
  • When is the last time you read fiction by a woman? (Real question put by the author…don’t know where the Atlantic headline came from.)
  • Canadian bookstore bans butt book
  • Keep your eye on The Long Ships by Frans G. Begtsson - rave review from Michael Chabon (“stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth”) and Michael Dirda (ranks it right up there with “Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin naval adventures, Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, the Flashman novels (and The Pyrates) of George MacDonald Fraser, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander and its sequels, the Lymond Chronicles of Dorothy Dunnett, and, of course, the celebrated swashbucklers of Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini) Wow.
  • If you hear about the little 6-year-old who got a 23 book deal…well, read this
  • Banned Books grants available
  • Seth Godin becomes his own publisher
  • Art Garfunkle’s quite impressive Reading Log
  • The future of books according to science fiction
  • Sharper Image announces the Literati for October: a wireless color reader powered by Kobo for $159
  • Mystery Scene Magazine goes all color

    • _______________________________________________________
    Books on Screen

  • Jim Carrey to star in Mr. Popper’s Penguins
  • Joe Hill’s comic book series Lock and Key to be a TV series developed by Stephen Spielberg
  • 127 Hours…film version of Aron Ralston’s Between a Rock and a Hard Place

    • _______________________________________________________
    Awards

  • 2009 World Fantasy Award Finalists
  • Royal Society Prize for Science Books Shortlist

    • _______________________________________________________
    Authors

  • Jose Luis Borges – who was he?
  • A. S. Byatt – women who write intellectual books seen as unnatural
  • Nancy Freedman – obituary
  • Jackson Gillis – obituary

    • _______________________________________________________
    Lists

  • New York Magazine’s Most Anticipated Books for Fall
  • 6 Books to Read After Mockingjay
  • Spy Novels by Real Spies (there are more than you think)
  • Books to Read After Checking Out the Egg Recall List
  • Science Fiction Books That Will Stand the Test of Time
  • The 10 Greatest Works of Christian Fiction
  • Indie Biography and Memoir Bestseller List

    • _______________________________________________________
    Lighthearted Link of the Week

  • Library justice: man clobbers thief with library books

    • Posted in RA Run Down | 1 Comment »

    RA Run Down

    Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

    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:

  • Booksellers open till midnight Monday for Mockingjay

    • New Titles on This Week’s Most Wanted Mashup

    Fiction

  • Sandra Brown – Tough Customer
  • W. E. B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV – The Vigilantes
  • Linda Howard - Veil of Night

    • Nonfiction

  • Tony Dungy with Nathan Whitaker – The Mentor Leader

    • Mass Market Originals

  • Lorna Barrett – Chapter & Hearse (A Booktown Mystery)
  • Suzanne Brockmann – Infamous
  • Jeaniene Frost – Eternal Kiss of Darkness (Night Huntress)

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

  • Terry Brooks – Bearers of the Black Staff
  • Suzanne Collins – Mockingjay
  • Kathy Reichs – Spider Bones
  • Elie Wiesel – The Sonderberg Case
  • James Baldwin – The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings
  • Scott Simon – Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption


    • And many more. 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.
    _______________________________________________________
    Our Under the Radar list this week is New History Titles You May Have Missed. Look in the righthand column just under the Most Wanted Mashup for this list.

    _______________________________________________________
    And now on to the news of the week:

  • Why should we celebrate Jonathan Franzen? Because books matter
  • The chart of fantasy cover art subjects
  • This year’s 10 highest paid authors
  • A Man’s Guide to Eat, Pray, Love
  • Reading Group Guides big 10th anniversary contest for book groups
  • Authors to go on USO tour
  • Jodi Picoult thinks the New York Times favors “white male literary darlings”, and Jennifer Weiner says “Carl Hiassen doesn’t have to choose between getting a Times review and being a bestseller. Why should I? Oh, right. #girlparts,” meanwhile… Fairiness and Accuracy in Reporting says the NY Times has “an exceedingly narrow view of who’s books deserve review and who is fit to discuss them.”
  • How do you read? In sips, or gulps?
  • Okay…is the choice really between going catatonic or reading something difficult?
  • When book recommendations go wrong
  • Man Booker longlist author thinks current European fiction is dry and academic
  • What prisoners are reading in Guantanamo—including Dan Brown and Harry Potter in Arabic
  • Choose Your Own Adventure gets a makeover
  • USA Today disses Rhonda Byrne’s The Power while the Wall Street Journal wonders if the book can sell as many copies as The Secret in this economy
  • Love and Magic: Trends in Romance—free webinar Wednesday September 8
  • ebook summit: Libraries At the Tipping Point September 29 $29.95
  • RUSA online course: RA 101 by Joyce Saricks – $130
  • Check your copies of Eat, Pray, Love…sales are soaring again because of the movie
  • New Indian library appropriately named after S. R. Ranganathan
  • Farewell Libraries?
  • The guy behind Goodreads.com
  • Was Quasimodo a real person?
  • Average of public libraries providing ebooks – 65.9%
  • Into the Wild fan dies trying to reach the bus where McCandless died
  • The personal approach is what will keep independent bookstores alive
  • Statistical profile of book buyers
  • Censorship flack in Texas has YA authors boycotting festival
  • A real Percy Jackson-like summer camp
  • Dorothy Seymour Mills finally gets author credit for baseball books published by Oxford University Press
  • Will there be a <$100 ebook reader for Christmas? Looks like Kobo may have one
  • The futures of the book
  • Kansas City Public Library’s awesome parking garage
  • Emma Thompson to write new Peter Rabbit book set in Scotland
  • Deadline November 15 for the Pimp My Bookcart competition
  • Speaking up for the print book
  • Barnes & Noble is in trouble because it didn’t evolve quickly enough

    • _______________________________________________________
    Books on Screen

  • Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie: Lisbeth Salander cast
  • James Franco stars as Allen Ginsberg in Howl (trailer)
  • Viggo Mortensen and Amy Adams to star in On the Road
  • Ellen Burstyn, True Blood’s Ellen Ann Woll cast in Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
  • Idris Elba to play Alex Cross
  • Movie The Switch is a safe version of Eugenides short story

    • _______________________________________________________
    Awards

  • Nevada Barr receives National Parks Conservation Society Award
  • Geraldine Brooks wins Dayton Literary Peace Prize
  • Thurber Award Finalists
  • James Tait Memorial Prizes
  • German Book Prize Longlist

    • _______________________________________________________
    Authors

  • Margaret Atwood - interview (she freely admits to writing “speculative fiction,” which she calls a subset of science fiction)
  • Ray Bradbury – how to live to be 90 (video)
  • Robert A. Heinlein – Tor is hosting an online symposium in his honor
  • Frank Kermode – obituary
  • Ludvik Kundera – obituary
  • Laura Lippman – interview
  • Rick Moody – “Writers are more desperate than any time since I’ve been watching what’s been happening closely.” (video)
  • Edwin Morgan – obituary
  • Ian Rankin – criticizes his own early works
  • J. D. Salinger’s toilet is for sale for $1 million
  • Kurt Vonnegut – museum to open in Indianapolis
  • Betty White – signs a 2-book deal at age 88
  • Jeanette Winterson – hits out at threats to libraries

    • _______________________________________________________
    Lists

  • Back to Reality: Nonfiction for Summer’s End
  • 8 Great Literary Love Affairs
  • The Winners: NPR’s Listeners Choose the Top 100 Thrillers
  • Best Books on Pakistan

    • _______________________________________________________
    Lighthearted Link of the Week

  • 11 great librarian movies
  • Outrage builds over plans to build library next to Sarah Palin
  • Find a date based on your reading tastes
  • Better Book Titles

    • Posted in RA Run Down | No Comments »

    RA Run Down

    Sunday, August 15th, 2010

    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

    The bestseller lists have changed significantly from last week. Here are this week’s new titles in the top 10 of the lists:

    FICTION

  • Philippa Gregory – The Red Queen
  • Carl Hiaasen – Star Island
  • Gary Shteyngart – Super Sad True Love Story

    • NONFICTION

  • Andrew Morton – Angelina
  • Mary Roach – Packing for Mars

    • To see the entire Most Wanted Mashup of this week’s bestselling titles, look to the righthand column.

    AND KEEP YOUR EYE ON THESE
    A few more titles that may be in the top tier soon:

  • Kelley Armstrong – Waking the Witch 1794
  • W. Bruce Cameron – A Dog’s Purpose
  • Jude Deveraux – Scarlet Nights
  • Allegra Goodman – The Cookbook Collector
  • J.A. Jance – Queen of the Night
  • Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger – Furious Love
  • Faye Kellerman – Hangman

    • _______________________________________________________
    The New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainer entries for the upcoming week include:

    The biggest book of this week, with a printing of 2 million:

  • Rhonda Byrne – The Power

    • plus:

  • Eric Jerome Dickey – Tempted by Trouble
  • Frederick Forsyth – The Cobra
  • Felix Francis and Dick Francis – Crossfire
  • Laura Lippman – I’d Know You Anywhere
  • James Patterson and Liza Marklund – The Postcard Killers
  • Martin Cruz Smith – Three Stations (Arkady Renko)

  • Lauren Weisberger – Last Night at Chateau Marmont
  • Stephen White – The Last Lie (Alan Gregory)

    • And many more. 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.
    _______________________________________________________
    Our Under the Radar list this week is Music Makes the Difference. Look in the righthand column just under the Most Wanted Mashup for this list.

    _______________________________________________________
    And now on to the news of the week:

  • Are you planning a Banned Books Week program for September 25 – October 2? Would you like to promote your program on this page? If so, sign up here.
  • USA Today: Booksellers love The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise
  • Are you going to the Guadalajara Book Fair? Want some support to help you pay for it?
  • Facebook is the novel we’re all writing
  • National Archives treasure hunters featured in Harlequin romance (Linda Turners’ His Wanted Woman – Silhouette Romantic Suspense in case anyone asks).
  • Newsweek asks…Good-bye libraries?
  • The printed book’s path to oblivion
  • Why is it “women’s literature?” Can’t it just be “literature?” … and Do flowers on the cover automatically disqualify you for awards or even serious reviews?
  • Amish inspirationals grow in popularity
  • Bowker—the latest to try to make money from aspiring authors
  • Famous authors writing under a pseudonym…why?
  • Does the language we speak shape our thought? Fascinating.
  • When pets look wrong on book covers
  • Tolkien and Dickens descendants collaborate
  • Want a vintage book cover for your ereader?
  • President Obama signs “libel tourism” law into effect
  • Alameda bookseller gets original Steinbeck manuscript
  • Book by the Financial Crisis Commission will actually earn an advance and royalties for the government
  • Novelists who predict the future
  • Why historical fiction is so popular
  • Project Gutenberg shoots for 1 billion eBooks
  • More on Dorchester (see last week’s post): royalty checks late;
  • Random House, Kobo, Fairmont Hotels partner to offer eBooks to guests…but what if they’re not finished reading when they check out?
  • Top 2 slots on the Amazon Kindle top free “sellers” occupied by video games
  • Borders lays often even more people, this time in Ann Arbor
  • War breaks out over control of Barnes & Noble
  • The Chick Lit debate again
  • Is Google’s book count mostly bunk?

    • _______________________________________________________
    Books on Screen

  • Frances McDormand producing Olive Kitteredge for HBO, plus a movie of Laura Lippman’s Every Secret Thing
  • The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff to be on Lifetime TV
  • Angelina Jolie to play Kay Scarpetta

    • _______________________________________________________
    Awards

  • Shamus Award nominations
  • Business Book of the Year Longlist
  • Thurber Prize Finalists

    • _______________________________________________________
    Authors

  • The 15 most overrated contemporary authors – Oh snap!
  • And…the 15 most underrated contemporary authors – Guess this was inevitable.
  • Seriously? The most accurately-rated contemporary authors
  • Michael Capuzzo - talks about the Vidocq Society
  • Pat Conroy - give eBooks a chance: his grandparents thought airplanes wouldn’t work too
  • Patricia Cornwell - sells two more Scarpetta novels
  • Don DeLillo - rare interview
  • Jonathan Franzen – first living author on the cover of Time magazine since Stephen King in 2000; Headline: Great American Novelist, also a video interview
  • Christopher Hitchens - on his cancer, mortality, and God (video, with Martin Amis)
  • Sally Laird – obituary
  • Laura Lippman - on the nature of memory
  • Alexander McCall Smith - his productivity is incredible
  • Marcia Muller - talks to NPR about murder
  • Nicholas Negroponte – the physical book is dead in 5 years
  • Nicholas Sparks - says comparing his own novels to a romance is like comparing Cinderella to Romeo and Juliet; thinks Cormac McCarthy is horrible;
  • Mary Roberts Rinehart - what you didn’t know about her

    • _______________________________________________________
    Lists

  • The Truly Best-Dressed Characters in Literature
  • Great Books About the Beach
  • Suggested Summer Reading for President Obama and What He’s Really Been Reading
  • 11 Books Predicting the Collapse of the Middle Class
  • The 50 Best Cookbooks of All Time

    • _______________________________________________________
    Lighthearted Links of the Week

  • Summer Reading (video)
  • Okay, this is a combination of insane, inane, and inconsistent, but it is book related
  • Imaginary Conversations About Music at the Library with My Son
  • You know you’re a 21st Century librarian when…
  • College library drops Dewey Decimal numbers in favor of Netflix categories

    • Posted in RA Run Down | No Comments »

    RA Run Down

    Sunday, August 8th, 2010

    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 the Most Wanted Mashup of Bestsellers This Week

    We have only one new title on the hardcover bestseller lists Top 10 this week:

  • Carl Hiaasen – Star Island

    • Coming very close and seemingly a good candidate for next week’s list is:

  • Gary Shteyngart – Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

    • We’ve been thinking about this for awhile, and have decided to add a new feature to our Most Wanted Mashups. Beginning this week, we’ve added a list for bestselling Mass Market Paperback Originals.

    Libraries do a good job of buying hardcover bestsellers, but we often overlook new titles that have been published in the mass market format and don’t appear first in hardcover or trade paperback. So here is this week’s list of original mass market paperbacks bestsellers your patrons may be looking for:

    MASS MARKET PAPERBACK ORIGINALS:

  • Christine Feehan – Water Bound
  • Lisa Jackson – Running Scared
  • Debbie Macomber – Orchard Valley Brides
  • Ben Sherwood – Charlie St. Cloud

    • To see the entire Most Wanted Mashup of this week’s bestselling titles, look to the righthand column.
    _______________________________________________________
    The New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainer titles to be published in the upcoming week include:

    FICTION

  • Sandra Brown – Tough Customer
  • Robin Cook – Cure
  • W.E.B. Griffin & William E. Butterworth IV – The Vigilantes
  • Brian Haig – The Capitol Game
  • Linda Howard – Veil of Night

    • NONFICTION

  • Michael Capuzzo – The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes Gather to Solve the World’s Most Perplexing Cold Cases
  • Roseanne Cash – Composed: a Memoir
  • Larry McMurtry – Hollywood: a Third Memoir
  • Mother Teresa – Where There Is Love, There Is God

    • And many more. 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.
    _______________________________________________________
    Our Under the Radar list this week is New Science Fiction You May Have Missed. Look in the righthand column just under the Most Wanted Mashup for this list.

    _______________________________________________________
    And now on to the news of the week:

  • Book of the month for August: if you don’t recognize the name Katniss Everdeen, you need to read this (print run = 1.2 million)
  • Google counts all the books in the world; result: 129,864,880 if you exclude microforms (8 million), audio recordings (4.5 million), videos (2 million), maps (another 2 million), t-shirts with ISBNs (about one thousand), turkey probes (1, added to a library catalog as an April Fools joke)
  • Vince Flynn and Brian Haig to team up
  • What motivates book buyers…very revealing survey
  • NY Times Book editor defends classifying Laura Ingraham’s fictional Obama Diaries as nonfiction: “there is a practice by the bestseller list to classify most any parody or political satire as non-fiction” “We do see books of this nature and you do not dignify them by calling them fiction.” as an aside, see Stephen Colbert on Ingraham’s book (video)
  • Participate in LJ’s eBook survey (Forward this link to the person in your library best able to respond if that is someone other than you.)
  • Barnes and Noble for sale. . . The Street says no sale would be very bad news
  • Borders announces layoffs in Tennessee
  • Survey by Book Industry Study Group shows 7% of eBooks are obtained from libraries
  • What about animated eBook covers? (Try Smilla’s Sense of Snow)
  • Rita Dove’s intriguing insights on the future of literature
  • Al Roker picks Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes for his Today Show Book Club for Kids
  • Dorchester Publishing completely drops its mass market paperback model in favor of eBooks beginning next month; eBooks that do well may be produced in trade paper
  • The Dominican Study: Public Library Summer Reading Programs Close the Reading Gap
  • Stieg Larsson boxed set to include essays on Larsson and emails between him and his pubisher
  • Justin Bieber’s memoirs (covering all 16 years of his life) will be published in October
  • Reading in a whole new way: “Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day.” In the future, “reading will be more athletic.”
  • The votes are in for NPR’s Killer Thrillers; the top ten are:

    1. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
    2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
    3. Kiss the Girls, by James Patterson
    4. The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum
    5. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
    6. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
    7. The Shining, by Stephen King
    8. And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
    9. The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
    10. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  • Newsweek on self-publishing
  • Betting on the Booker
  • The juicy bits from Andrew Morton’s Angelina Jolie bio
  • Escaping the Summer Heat in a Bookmobile
  • Newsweek asks “Farewell, Libraries? Resource Shelf has a good answer
  • Teen Read Week, October 17-23
  • No need to be embarrassed about reading kids’ books…they’re great according to the NY Times
  • 25,000 books on the floor as shelving collapses at Indiana State University Library
  • Harlequin Teen has 1 million books in print after its first year
  • Artist constructs rooms out of books
  • Vatican Library set to reopen next month after 3-year refurbishing (video)

    • _______________________________________________________
    Books on Screen

  • Sean Penn in talks to play famed editor Maxwell Perkins in the movie Genius based on Scott Berg’s Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
  • Haruki Murakami adaptation of Norwegian Wood (trailer)
  • Robin Wright in talks to play Erika Berger in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
  • Fox buys film rights to 29: a Novel by Adena Halpern
  • Steven Spielberg to direct War Horse based on Michael Morpurgo’s children’s book
  • The Little Prince goes multimedia

    • _______________________________________________________
    Awards

  • Romance Writers of America RITA Awards

    • _______________________________________________________
    Authors

  • Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly talk about Stephen King (video)
  • Jennifer Belle – “I paid them to read my book on the subway.”
  • John Callahan – obituary
  • Bill Cosby – “I am not dead.”
  • Michael Dirda – on his career at Washington Book World
  • Tony Judt – obituary
  • Sarah Palin – deletes 10% of her Facebook comments
  • Richard Price – adopts a pen name for detective novel series
  • Anne Sexton – video interview from 1966
  • Jonathan Tropper – was selling watches five years ago
  • Kurt Vonnegut – advice to young people (hilarious video)

    • _______________________________________________________
    Lists

  • MetaList of Beach Reads (you still have a month left)
  • September Indie Next Preview
  • Wedding Books for Dudes
  • What You Need to Read Now
  • Slate offers an Alternative Summer Reading List for College Freshmen
  • Kansas Notable Books
  • Nancy Pearl suggests Under the Radar Summer Reads and how her endorsement pushed them up in sales
  • Top 5 Historical True-Crime Books of the Last Decade
  • Literature’s Top 10 Best-Dressed Characters
  • 20 Classic Works of Gay Literature
  • Books That Change Kids’ Worlds (from Susan Orlean’s Twitter followers)
  • 10 of the Best Dragons in Literature

    • _______________________________________________________
    Lighthearted Links of the Week

  • I’d like to order a burger…
  • The worst negative book review cliches . . . and GalleyCat readers add their own candidates

    • Posted in RA Run Down | No Comments »

    RA Run Down

    Sunday, August 1st, 2010

    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 the Most Wanted Mashup of Bestsellers This Week

    Daniel Silva’s The Rembrandt Affair debuted at number 1 on all the lists this week. Otherwise, there’s not much change from last week.

    To see the entire Most Wanted Mashup of this week’s bestselling titles, look to the righthand column.
    _______________________________________________________
    The New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainer entries for the upcoming week is a kind of long one, and includes:

    FICTION

  • Nevada Barr – Burn (Anna Pigeon)
  • Eoin Colfer – Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex
  • Bill Crider – Murder in the Air (Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mysteries)
  • Jude Deveraux – Scarlet Nights: An Edilean Novel
  • Philippa Gregory – The Red Queen (The Cousins’ War)
  • Cecelia Holland – The Secret Eleanor
  • Faye Kellerman – Hangman (Decker and Lazarus)
  • Ridley Pearson – In Harm’s Way (Walt Fleming Novel)
  • Per Petterson – I Curse the River of Time
  • Sara Poole – Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance (Poisoner Mysteries)
  • Lisa Unger – Fragile

    • NONFICTION

  • Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson – The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time
  • Andrew Morton – Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography
  • Douglas Perry – The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago
  • Mary Roach – Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

    • And many more. 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.
    _______________________________________________________
    Our Under the Radar list this week is New Environmental NF You May Have Missed. Kind of appropriate, we thought, with the BP Gulf oil spill tragedy. Look in the righthand column just under the Most Wanted Mashup for this list.
    _______________________________________________________
    And now on to the news of the week:

  • Volume of Kindle books sales surpasses hardcovers; Bezos predicts overtaking paperbacks within 9-12 months, then a combination of both after that; new cheaper, lighter versions of Kindle announced
  • Random House executive projects ebook sales as more than 10% of its U. S. sales revenue next year
  • Will the Costco v. Omega Watch court case prevent libraries from lending books? Seriously, the case is about whether Costco can import Omega watches (which are sold more cheaply in other countries by Omega), and sell them at a discount. If Omega prevails, it will overturn the first sale doctrine of the copyright law which allows the owner of a volume (the library) to control what is done with it
  • Stieg Larsson — first author to join the “Kindle Million Club”
  • Vote for one of the top five book recommender sites
  • “Enhanced” e-books
  • Barnes & Noble to install 1,000 sq ft Nook boutiques in its stores; and Just in case this brings patron queries, the Nook does work with OverDrive eBooks
  • Pennie Picks Mennonite in a Little Black Dress for Costco’s Club
  • Sarah Weinman on Sjöwall and Wahlöö—the original Swedish mystery writing team
  • Crying in public over a book — has it happened to you?
  • Celebrity “unauthorized bios” don’t sell well anymore; too much gossip is already available online; now, if the celebs write their own stories, that’s another thing entirely: watch for more of those
  • You are there report of this year’s Crime Fest
  • Sex disappears from the British novel as authors run scared of ridicule
  • Library of Congress hires Curious George to promote reading
  • 9 of the most amazing bookstores in the world
  • Is experimental fiction making a comeback?
  • Council of State Librarians issues report on e-books
  • Literary Endings: Pretty Bows, Blunt Axes, and Modular Furniture
  • OverDrive surveys audiobook patrons from 10 of their busiest sites; 60% heard about the service on their own library’s website! Check the demographics here
  • The art of filling a bookshelf
  • Are Vikings the new vampires? But wait… The Onion votes for minotaurs
  • Most anticipated books for the rest of this year
  • Library of America’s new blog
  • The digital revolution in children’s publishing
  • Eat, Pray, Love turns commercial
  • San Diego readers up in arms over the loss of their book editor—probably won’t make a difference
  • Does reading really affect your life?
  • Library Day at the Romance Writers of America Conference
  • Mauritania’s ancient manuscripts
  • Librarian of Congress James Billington makes surprise move of instituting some commonsense exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
  • Children with books in their home get 3.2 years more schooling than those from bookless homes
  • New romance subgenres…according to Business Week
  • Ten reasons why the summer belongs to Stieg Larsson
  • Is today’s fiction irrelevant?
  • Author Norman Spinrad’s frustrating experience with the “Publishing Death Spiral,” Part 1
  • New genre: the hyphenate, by Joyce Saricks
  • Ottawa library card works in book vending machines

    • _______________________________________________________
    Books on Screen

  • Daniel Craig to star in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
  • How are your copies of Howl looking? The movie starring James Franco comes out next month
  • Rachel DeWoskin’s Foreign Babes in Beijing to be a film
  • Harlequin relaunches ebook store with new look
  • James Herriot to return to the screen
  • Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day to be a feature film

    • _______________________________________________________
    Awards

  • Man Booker Prize longlist
  • Dylan Thomas Prize for Young Writers longlist
  • Johan Theorin wins Dagger Award

    • _______________________________________________________
    Authors

  • Woody Allen – on recording audio versions of his essays
  • Verily Anderson – obituary
  • Margaret Atwood – sees more reasons than ever to fear a horrible future
  • Cécile Aubry – obituary
  • Enid Blyton – her Famous Five books get a modern makeover
  • Jon Cleary – obituary
  • Jim Cole – obituary
  • Eoin Colfer – there will be only one more Artemis Fowl book
  • Neil Gaiman – recommends three classic children’s books
  • Iris Gower – obituary
  • Jim Henson – a graphic novel based on an unproduced screenplay is in the works
  • Carola Hicks – obituary
  • Laura Lippman – on the importance of place
  • China Miéville - NY Times profile—a bit condescending as usual for “genre writers”
  • Alyson Noël – signs 7-figure deal for new series
  • Anne Rice – “Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.” Comments on her Facebook post number in the thousands, and the story has been picked up by mainstream media. Might be worth pulling out a display of her books.
  • Daniel Schorr – obituary
  • Maurice Sendak – gives $1 million in memory of his life partner
  • Helen Simonson – loves Georgette Heyer
  • Mark Twain – on enjoying Southern cooking
  • Ayelet Waldman – to speak at Sisters in Crime workshop the day before Bouchercon begins
  • Walt Whitman – Cleveland Plain Dealer book editor reads Leaves of Grass
  • Rex Stout – is this the site of Nero Wolfe’s brownstone?

    • _______________________________________________________
    Lists

  • July Catholic Bestsellers
  • Vintage Bibliomysteries
  • The 15 Biggest Bestsellers After the Bible
  • Off the Beaten Path Summer Reading Lists from Becky Spratford
  • August Indie Next List
  • Indie Travel Bestseller List
  • 11 Beloved Children’s Books with Seriously Dubious Lessons
  • Elin Hilderbrand’s Favorite Summer Books Set in New England
  • Formidable female protagonists in SF – help him add to the list of 80; he’s shooting for 100

    • _______________________________________________________
    Lighthearted Links of the Week

  • Jane Austen’s Fight Club (video)
  • Sleeping Baby Bookworm
  • Obsolete Skills: Searching a Card Catalog
  • The Book Cover Identification Game
  • Comic-Con nerds vs. Fred Phelps

    • Posted in RA Run Down | No Comments »

    RA Run Down

    Sunday, July 25th, 2010

    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.
    _______________________________________________________
    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.
    _______________________________________________________
    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.

    _______________________________________________________
    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

    • _______________________________________________________
    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

    • _______________________________________________________
    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

    • _______________________________________________________
    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

    • _______________________________________________________
    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

    • Posted in RA Run Down | No Comments »

    RA Run Down

    Sunday, July 18th, 2010

    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

    Fiction

  • Christina Dodd – Chains of Ice: The Chosen Ones (mass market)
  • Nora Roberts – The Search

    • Nonfiction

  • Drew Brees – Coming Back Stronger
  • Kendra Wilkinson – Sliding Into Home

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

  • Cherry Adair – Black Magic (mass market)
  • Janet and Alex Evanovich – Troublemaker
  • Daniel Silva – The Rembrandt Affair

    • And just a few more. 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.
    _____________________________________________
    Our Under the Radar list this week is New Fantasy Books You May Have Missed. Look in the righthand column just under the Most Wanted Mashup for this list.

    _____________________________________________
    And now on to the news of the week:

  • Setting of fourth Stieg Larsson book revealed
  • St. Martin’s reportedly losing Janet Evanovich over demand for $50 million for the next four books
  • Comic book publishers need to support libraries
  • How The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo got its cover…after 50 tries
  • Zondervan delays Palin biography for tweens indefinitely
  • Luxury Lit: $75,000 a title anyone? Oh yeah, and the ink contains real blood from the author. Oops. Sorry. Sold out.
  • Farrar, Straus and Giroux launches new newsletter with Susan Sontag archives, Jeffrey Eugenides interviewed by Jonathan Galassi, and much more
  • $1 Million in grant money available for Big Read projects
  • The Nanny Novel lives on
  • Beware: PublishAmerica changes its name
  • The Midlist: located between the “Brobdingnagian head (an increasing number of purchasers buying the same few lead titles)” and the “enormously attenuated tail (a tiny number of customers buying from a huge range of titles)”
  • Leading British historian admits faking reviews on Amazon, settles out of court
  • Another lawsuit claiming Harry Potter plagiarized another’s novel
  • See who you write like—for Margaret Atwood it was Stephen King; for me? Either H. P. Lovecraft (an article) or Vladimir Nabokov (a blog post). Okaaay. . .
  • The Picture Book Report has illustrations for artists’ favorite books including The Giver, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and others
  • BBC sells majority stake in BBC Audiobooks to AudioGo
  • New daily site: writers’ houses
  • Adult hardcover sales up 43.2% in May compared to last year
  • Vote for the best thrillers ever
  • Warren Buffett sends 1975 book up the charts
  • Deadline July 30 for Louisa May Alcott grant application
  • Billy Collins – “The critical difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into to. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break.”
  • Lawsuits tie up royalties for The Shack
  • One-Upsmanship at the Patent Office: Microsoft filed secret patent that might affect Apple’s iPad and the Amazon Kindle, Amazon has one aimed at Barnes & Noble’s Nook
  • Library school student gets funding for video book reviews

    • _____________________________________________
    Books on Screen

  • Creator of TV version of True Blood to do HBO series based on Charlie Huston’s The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death.
  • Starz Network’s 8-part miniseries of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth begins July 23
  • Kitty Kelley sells the rights to her Oprah biography to TV
  • Jack Black to turn My Life As an Experiment into sitcom
  • West Wing creator to turn Andrew Young’s The Politician into a John Edwards biopick
  • Ben Affleck to direct and star in The Town by Chuck Hogan
  • Elmore Leonard’s Freaky Deaky to finally be a movie
  • Trying to read on the iPad at the beach

    • _____________________________________________
    Awards

  • Mythopoeic Awards
  • Shirley Jackson Awards
  • Japanese Akutagawa Award and Naoki Prize

    • _____________________________________________
    Authors

  • Samuel R. Delany – a preview of his next book
  • William Faulkner - his lectures at the University of Virginia are now online
  • Tess Gerritsen – blogs about libraries for Lesa’s Book Critiques
  • James P. Hogan – obituary
  • Shirley Jackson – why she was great
  • P. D. James – on the enduring appeal of detective fiction
  • Franz Kafka – lawyers open safety deposit boxes…hoping to find manuscripts
  • Juan Hernandez Luna – obituary
  • Iris Murdoch - her works released in e-book format
  • Harvey Pekar – obituary

    • _____________________________________________
    Lists

  • 5 Best Summer Science Books
  • 6 Great Novels on Work
  • Mismatched Duos for Summer Reading

    • _____________________________________________
    Lighthearted Links of the Week

  • The Old Spice Guy Talks About Libraries How it got started and The New Spice Guy library video
  • Flash Mob at the Seattle Public Library (video)
  • The Beverly Cleary Quiz

    • Posted in RA Run Down | No Comments »

    RA Run Down

    Sunday, July 11th, 2010

    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 the Most Wanted Mashup of Bestsellers This Week

    FICTION

  • Tess Gerritsen – Ice Cold
  • James Patterson and Maxine Paetro – Private
  • Brad Thor – Foreign Influence

    • NONFICTION

  • Sean Payton and Ellis Henican – Home Team

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

  • James Lee Burke – The Glass Rainbow
  • Tana French – Faithful Place
  • Lisa Gardner – Live to Tell
  • Jennifer Weiner – Fly Away Home
  • Laura Ingraham – The Obama Diaries
  • Leigh Anne Tuohy, Sean Tuohy and Sally Jenkins – In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving – (true story behind The Blind Side)

    • And many more. 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.
    _____________________________________________
    Our Under the Radar list this week is the very appropriate Cool Reads for Hot Days. Look in the righthand column just under the Most Wanted Mashup for this list.
    _____________________________________________
    And now on to the news of the week:

  • First there was Slow Food, Slow Travel, Slow Money, and now Slow Reading…though Nietzsche thought of it first
  • Excerpt from Mark Twain’s upcoming unexpurgated autobiography to appear in Granta
  • “For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the nonfiction writers”
  • The tremendous power of books
  • Is South Africa the next Scandinavia of the mystery world?
  • Israeli writers ponder literature’s role in peacemaking
  • Last year e-books were 3% of the market, this year, about 10%, Random House President says in 5 years—50%
  • Comic-Con, July 22-25, San Diego – program schedule released
  • Study shows it takes longer to read books on a screen than in print
  • RA in the 2.0 Environment
  • E-Reading on the rise in libraries
  • A fresh breed of literary magazines
  • Covers in the e-book age
  • Better than a piece of bacon…forgotten bookmarks
  • Should your child be learning the art of slow reading?
  • Being a reader is like playing tricks with time
  • On plot summaries

    • _____________________________________________
    Books on Screen

  • Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid heads to screen
  • Gary Oldman to star in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
  • Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel to be a film
  • Moneyball, the movie

    • _____________________________________________
    Awards

  • The Caine Prize for African Writing
  • 2010 Thriller Awards

    • _____________________________________________
    Authors

  • Martin Amis – forces cancellation of unflattering biography
  • Robert Butler – obituary
  • Bill Crider – answers 7 questions
  • Harlan Ellison – to sell birthday present from Neil Gaiman
  • Denis Johnson – his papers go to the University of Texas at Austin
  • Margaret Millar - remember her great books?
  • Karin Slaughter – recommends Denise Mina
  • Ann Waldron – obituary

    • _____________________________________________
    Lists

  • Summer’s Monster Reads: Kraken anyone?
  • Top 10 Post-Apocalyptic Books
  • To Kill a Mockingbird and other one hit wonders
  • Stephen King’s 6 Must Reads for Summer
  • Top 10 Pubs in Literature
  • August Indie Next List
  • Amazon’s Top Ten Books of 2010 So Far
  • Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Mainstream Readers Should Read, and Mainstream Books That Science Fiction and Fantasy Readers Should Read
  • Bloomberg’s Top 50 Recent Business Books
  • 12 Uniquely American Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels and Stories
  • Books You Have to Read

    • _____________________________________________
    Lighthearted Link of the Week

  • Zombies Are Going Hungry As Libraries Close
  • Library Card Art and 15 of the Coolest Bookends

    • Posted in RA Run Down | No Comments »

    RA Run Down

    Sunday, July 4th, 2010

    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

    Fiction

  • Janet Evanovich – Sizzling Sixteen
  • Karen Kingsbury – Take Four
  • Danielle Steel – Family Ties

    • Nonfiction

  • S. C. Gwynne – Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

    • To see the entire Most Wanted Mashup of this week’s bestselling titles, look to the righthand column.
    _____________________________________________
    The New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainer titles hitting the shelves in the upcoming week include:

  • Allegra Goodman – The Cookbook Collector
  • Susan Isaacs – As Husbands Go
  • Bill Pronzini – Betrayers
  • Nora Roberts – The Search
  • Paco Underhill – What Women Want: The Global Marketplace Turns Female Friendly

    • And many more. 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.
    _____________________________________________
    Our Under the Radar list this week is Short Story Collections You May Have Missed. Look in the righthand column just under the Most Wanted Mashup for this list.

    _____________________________________________
    And now on to the news of the week:

  • Reading is dependent on a whole hierarchy or cascade of processes. Amazing story by Oliver Sacks: Howard Engel, author of the Benny Cooperman novels wakes up and finds that he can’t read…but he can write.
  • Audiobook sales for 2009 were 49% digital
  • Internet Archive, Boston PL, Biblioteca Ludwig von Mises at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala, Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Wood’s Hole, MA and OverDrive Work to Create One Stop Open Library e-Book Site
  • W. S. Merwin named U. S. Poet Laureate
  • The Labyrinth revisited: Costco picks The Hunger Games for its July Pennie’s Pick
  • How an author accidentally got 700,000 Facebook fans…and how it didn’t help his book at all
  • Fiction’s global crime wave
  • 82-year-old gets 3 book deal
  • The BP Gulf disaster reminds writer of Don DeLillo’s White Noise

  • What it’s like to command a bookmobile
  • Scholastic ups print run for Mockingjay to 1.2 million
  • The apparently shared urban fantasy belt
  • Scholastic translates 80 children’s titles into Arabic
  • Try listening to your summer reading books
  • Report on the Poisoned Pen conference by Lesa Holstine
  • Is the number of Americans who read literary novels close to the number of Americans who like soccer? Does Philip Roth know?
  • Is Elena Kagan on Team Jacob or Team Edward?
  • Paperback version of Elizabeth Edwards autobiography has a new chapter
  • Audiobook sales increased in 2009
  • Sony unveils Reader library program to promote digital reading in public libraries
  • 15 great independent presses that should not be overlooked
  • Some think e-books will pave the way to more blockbuster bestsellers
  • Christian YA novels offer an empowering guide to adolescence
  • New York Times will work on developing ebook bestseller list
  • One study “found the biggest determining factor in children achieving academic success was not wealth or class, nor parents staying together, but the presence of books in the home. Since buying books is an unimaginable luxury to those struggling to buy groceries, the only viable route towards improving those children’s chances in life is the local lending library.”
  • The vampire guy talks about real life vampires
  • Wonder Woman gets a new backstory and more clothes…what woman would go 60 years with one outfit?
  • OverDrive to add hundreds of Disney titles to their library collection
  • Scientists claim to find hidden code in Plato’s works
  • Anonymous donor buys most expensive manuscript ever…Casanova’s uncensored original diaries…and presents them to the French national library

    • _____________________________________________
    Books on Screen

  • Peter Jackson seems to be back in as director of The Hobbit
  • Jude Law joins Hugo Cabret movie
  • Anne Hathaway stars in One Day by David Nicholls
  • Jessica Chastain to play Celia Foote in The Help

    • _____________________________________________
    Awards

  • The Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now Prize is newly established for debut authors
  • Trillium Book Awards
  • Locus Awards – best novel: Cherie Priest – Boneshaker
  • Christian Fiction Awards
  • Canadian Author Association Literary Awards
  • Orange Prize Shortlist

    • _____________________________________________
    Authors

  • Margaret Atwood – interview
  • Sen. Robert Byrd – obituary
  • Jose Luis Borges - Rivka Galchen on why we read him
  • Ray Bradbury – book store appearance at the age of 90
  • Harper Lee – grants rare interview (sorta)
  • JM Coetzee – smiles
  • Stephen Gilbert - obituary
  • Charlaine Harris - on the current vampire epidemic
  • Christopher Hitchens – to undergo chemotherapy
  • Herman Melville – has a prehistoric whale named after him
  • Andreas Okopenko – obituary
  • James Patterson – will begin partnering with writers in Germany, Italy, Australia, and England
  • William Tenn – obituary
  • Colin Ward – obituary

    • _____________________________________________
    Lists

  • 2010 Notable Books List
  • Most Downloaded Books from OverDrive – June 2010
  • The 10 Best Credit Crunch Books
  • June 2010 Christian Bestsellers
  • Top 10 African Crime Novels
  • The Lost Essential Reading List
  • ABC News Video: Janice Kaplan’s Hottest Summer Reads
  • 10 Summer YA Books You’ll Want to Read Despite Your Age
  • July Indie Notables

    • _____________________________________________
    Lighthearted Link of the Week

  • Molly Ringle wins this year’s Bulwer-Lytton contest for the worst opening sentence (the runners-up are pretty funny too)
  • Al Qaeda calls off terrorist attack in order to save the life of Stephenie Meyer

    • Posted in RA Run Down | No Comments »

    RA Run Down

    Sunday, June 27th, 2010

    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

    Fiction

  • Glenn Beck – The Overton Window
  • Catherine Coulter – Whiplash

    • Nonfiction

  • Tori Spelling – Uncharted terriTORI

    • But don’t forget Glenn Beck’s power to pull titles up to the top of the lists ala Oprah. The most recent examples: F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and George Washington’s Sacred Fire by Peter A. Lillback, which have hit USA Today’s Top 150 Books, though they’re not reflected in the other bestseller lists.

    To see the entire Most Wanted Mashup of this week’s bestselling titles, look to the righthand column.
    _____________________________________________
    The New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainer titles hitting the shelves in the upcoming week include:

    FICTION

  • Tess Gerritsen – Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel
  • Lisa Kleypas – Love in the Afternoon (Hathaways, Book 5) (mass market paper)
  • Linda Lael Miller – McKettricks of Texas: Austin (mass market paper)
  • James Patterson and Maxine Paetro – Private
  • Richard North Patterson – In the Name of Honor
  • Brad Thor – Foreign Influence

    • NONFICTION

  • Nadine Gordimer – Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008
  • Diana Ross – Upside Down: Wrong Turns, Right Turns, and the Road Ahead
  • Venus Williams – Come to Win: Business Leaders, Artists, Doctors and Other Visionaries on How Sports Can Help You Top Your Profession

    • And many more. 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 New and Classic YA Books for Adult Readers. Look in the righthand column just under the Most Wanted Mashup for this list.

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    Before we begin this week’s news…is your library facing cuts, layoffs, or even closure? Report it here. This topic is not really RA-related, except that if you have to close your doors, how can you provide RA service? Take a look at Library Journal’s new project and send them your information as they build a map of the terrible news. And here’s an article on The Huffington Post by Carol Fitzgerald, the founder of TheBookReportNetwork.com on the awful situation facing libraries. It’s called “Libraries and Librarians Are Endangered Species: What You Can Do to Help.”

    And now on to the news of the week:

  • Thriller Fest next week in NY
  • No surprise… Dick Francis’s son Felix will take over his father’s book franchise. Felix and his mother had worked on the Francis books from the beginning. He says, “Dick Francis has been not an individual but a brand, and the brand will live on after him.”
  • Neil Gaiman: today’s vampire’s a bit toothless…and they’re everywhere, like cockroaches
  • The world’s largest publishers in rank order: 1. Pearson 2. Reed Elsevier 3. Thomson Reuters 4. Wolters Kluwer 5. Bertelsmann, etc.
  • Crime novel wins Australian Miles Franklin Award…could crime ever win a Booker?
  • Gay themed novels for young readers enter the mainstream
  • From Shelf-Awareness: Phil Jackson, LA Lakers coach assigned reading for his players
  • The book everyone’s buzzing about…Mr. Peanut…look here, here, here, and here.
  • Richard Curtis has a two part article on the history of the rise and fall of the mass market paperback and Part 2 here
  • Novel about Anne Frank stirs up controversy and here’s the publisher’s side of things
  • 20 writers to watch, an alternate list
  • Author House to republish Harold Robbins novels
  • People read, but now it’s social…identifying popular passages in books
  • Russian police seize 100,000 copies of book criticizing Putin
  • 50 Books/50 Covers competition
  • Why price cuts for e-readers mean that the future of ebooks is assured
  • Chicago Tribune on how to keep kids reading over the summer
  • Michael Jackson literary links on the one year anniversary of his death
  • Autobiography of a book cover

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    Books on Screen

  • Kobo reader is compatible with OverDrive service
  • Be prepared for the Eat, Pray, Love juggernaut
  • Trailer for this year’s Narnia movie, Voyage of the Dawn Treader
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2, headed to screen
  • Miley Cyrus to star in Wake by Lisa McMann
  • Daniel Radcliffe to star in All Quiet on the Western Front
  • Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, part 1 begins production, but has already shrugged off its first director
  • Matt Damon may star in adaptation of Benjamin Mee’s We Bought a Zoo
  • Twilight night coming Wednesday as Eclipse premiers at theatres
  • Warner Brothers gets rights to Ready Player One by Ernie Cline
  • Rob Reiner to do Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen after his teenage son recommends it
  • Random House Children’s Screen Entertainment signs four titles: Fish-Head Steve by Jamie Smart; the Gargoyles series by Jan Burchett and Sara Vogler; the Charlie Small series by Nick Ward; and the Princess Poppy books by Janey Louise Jones.

  • TNT will begin a series in July called Rizzoli and Isles, based on Tess Gerritsen’s books
  • Readers’ Advisory and Reference: kissing cousins by Neal Wyatt

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    Awards

  • Wendell Berry – pulling his papers from the University of Kentucky to protest their acceptance of Big Coal money
  • Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book wins Carnegie Medal
  • Christie Awards
  • Locus Award Winners

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    Authors

  • Russell Ash – obituary
  • Rick Atkinson – wins 2010 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing
  • Clive Cussler – lost his court case, but refiles; still fighting over movie Sahara
  • Emily Dickinson – did she have a secret love?
  • Stieg Larsson – remembered by his partner
  • Patricia MacLachlan - Q & A
  • Laura Lippman on Grace Metalious (written in 1999)
  • Richelle Mead – on the Vampire Academy books
  • Stephenie Meyer - on her next book Midnight Sun, “What’s true is that I’m really burned out on vampires.”
  • Susan Orlean – from Editor A to Publisher Z…her crazy odyssey to get a book published
  • Ferdinand Oyono – obituary
  • Tine Thevenin – obituary
  • John Updike – a peek at his papers

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    Lists

  • Top 10 Women Travellers in Fiction
  • The Hottest Graphic Novels of the Summer
  • Okra Picks: Great Southern Books Fresh Off the Vine
  • The 12 Best Books of Summer
  • The 5 Must-Read Books on Soccer

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    Lighthearted Link of the Week

  • Embarrasing passages from celebrity autobiographies become Off Broadway hit play—Madonna read by Florence Henderson?

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