by Sarah Statz Cords

Or, as in my case, are we ready for some advertisements between the football playing? I must admit that I almost always watch the Super Bowl, although my team (Go Pack!) hasn’t made an appearance there for a while. My interest in this Sunday’s Super Bowl XLIV will be primarily to see how the ads are, and to eat as much junk food as possible during the broadcast.

This got me thinking. Of course, we won’t be seeing any, but wouldn’t it be awesome to see some ads for books during the Super Bowl? (There’s no event I don’t want to see books involved in, really.) So that’s the question as this week winds down: If you could advertise any book or author during the Super Bowl broadcast, what or who would it be, and why?

My personal vote would be to advertise the books of biographer Mark Kriegel, who is the author of the nonfiction titles Namath: A Biography, and Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich. I very rarely read sports biographies, but Kriegel’s books are masterpieces of both sports reporting and good solid storytelling. I very much hope to see more titles from him in the future, and I’ve always thought he doesn’t get enough attention as a writer. And, of course, I think his work might strongly appeal to football fans (whether they love or hate Joe Namath)!

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As is only fitting, our final “Best Books of 2009″ list–again featuring a grab bag of titles and genres–comes from our intrepid editor, Cindy Orr. 2009 was a great year in books, a fact to which we paid homage by posting 2009 lists a week into 2010. Here’s hoping for even bigger and better book things in 2010!

Genre/Subgenre: Speculative Fiction/Science Fiction/Bleak Future
Margaret Atwood–The Year of the Flood

Genre/Subgenre: Mainstream Fiction/Character-Driven
Kathryn Stockett–The Help

Genre/Subgenre: Thrillers/Maniacs, Murderers, Psychopaths, and Serial Killers
Michael Connelly–The Scarecrow

Genre/Subgenre: Crime/Suspense
Laura Lippman–Life Sentences

Genre/Subgenre: Crime/Mystery & Detective Stories/Amateur Detectives
Stieg Larsson–The Girl Who Played with Fire

Cindy Orr is the editor of the Reader’s Advisor Online blog. She is the former Collection Manager at Cleveland Public Library and has also been Fiction Selector and Director of Technical Services at Cuyahoga County Public Library. She consults with libraries and book industry companies, speaks frequently at library conferences, and teaches Readers’ Advisory Services for Kent State University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

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Today’s “Best of 2009″ list includes biographies and memoirs, and was contributed by Rick Roche. What do you think? Do you agree with Rick’s choices? What were your favorite memoirs and biographies of 2009?

Genre/Subgenre: Life Stories/Biographies/Change-Makers and Activists
Tracy Kidder–Strength in What Remains.
Deogratias, a medical student and Tutsi from Burundi who fled his country in 1994, returned to his country in the company of journalist Tracy Kidder long after the genocide had ended. Kidder profiles a young man who may hold the key to reconciliation in this inspirational biography.

Genre/Subgenre: Life Stories/Historical Biography
Raymond Arsenault–The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America.
Marian Anderson was as important a civil rights figure as boxer Joe Louis, baseball star Jackie Robinson, and seamstress Rosa Parks. Raymond Arsenault recounts Anderson’s efforts to sing where blacks had been banned by Jim Crow laws in this historical biography.

Genre/Subgenre: Life Stories/Biographies/Sports Biographies
Larry Tye–Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend.
While baseball fans and many teammates worshiped Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige, managers often wanted him off the team. He broke almost every team rule without regret, as owners often paid manager-imposed fines for him. Sports writer Larry Tye recounts the career of one of baseball’s most talented and colorful figures in this investigative biography.

Genre/Subgenre: Life Stories/Memoirs/Overcoming Adversity
Myron Uhlberg–Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love.
Myron Uhlberg was born the hearing son of two deaf parents at a time when deaf people were at best ignored and at worst considered undesirables. Readers will run through most of their emotions reading this inspiring memoir.

Genre/Subgenre: Life Stories/Memoirs/Coming of Age/Self Discovery; Life Stories/Relationships/All in the Family
Adam Langer–My Father’s Bonus March.
Novelist Adam Langer always wondered why his father spoke about writing a book about the Bonus March, an effort to get money to World War I veterans, yet never wrote the book. In this very personal memoir that should resonate with readers, he recounts his search for the elusive secret to his father’s dream.

Rick Roche is a librarian at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library in Western Springs, Illinois. He is the author of Real Lives Revealed: A Guide to Reading Interests in Biography (published in 2009) and can be found online at http://ricklibrarian.blogspot.com/.

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Today’s “Best of 2009″ book list comes to us from Jessica Moyer. Jessica offered us a grab bag of titles, including mysteries, science fiction, and nonfiction. Enjoy!

Genre/Subgenre: Mystery & Detective Stories/Private Investigators
Tarquin Hall–The Case of the Missing Servant
An outstanding debut and a series I can’t wait to read more of. Slightly cozy (and often humorous), the mystery is set in modern India and features an aging PI and his crew and family.

Genre/Subgenre: Mystery & Detective Stories/Paranormal Detectives (with a nod to noir)
Cornelius Kane–Unscratchables
A very funny and clever spin on noir mysteries featuring an all animal cast.

Genre/Subgenre: Mystery & Detective Stories/Police Detectives/Police Procedurals
Stuart MacBride–Blind Eyes
All the Logan Macrae books are great, but this one was memorable because Logan realistically and finally falls apart from stress, especially that incurred during his last case (in Flesh House).

Genre/Subgenre: Science Fiction/Action-Adventure
Kage Baker–Empress of Mars
The best Mars colony story I’ve ever read and my favorite SF of this year. Great characters and realistic events.

Genre/Subgenre: Fantasy/Sword and Sorcery
David Anthony Durham–Acacia
An excellent start to an epic fantasy series, darker and more violent that most, but not overwhelmingly so.

Genre/Subgenre: Fantasy/Dark Fantasy
Ken Scholes–Lamentations
Another amazingly good opener to a new fantasy series, this one has some SF/post apocalyptic overtones. Canticle, the sequel, is everything a 2nd book in a series should be.

Genre/Subgenre: Nonfiction/Environmental Writing/Animal Stories
Anthony Bourke et al–A Lion Called Christian
Short and sweet, a touching animal story that both my husband and I enjoyed.

Genre/Subgenre: Nonfiction/Environmental Writing/Animal Stories
Irene Pepperburg–Alex and Me
Alex the famous talking grey parrot recently passed away and this is his story and that of Irene, his friend and researcher. Not only a good book about animal intelligence, but also a somewhat sad story of a woman’s struggle in academic life.

Jessica also adds that she did some series reading:
“This year I read two series start to finish that were great: Jim Butcher’s ‘Dresden Files’ about PI and wizard Harry Dresden (love the Chicago setting); and Charlaine Harris’s ‘Sookie Stackhouse’ series. I’m so glad I finally listened to my friends suggestions and tried these.”

She also listed her favorite audio book reads for the year:
“The ‘Phryne Fisher’ books read by Stephanie Daniel continue to be a favorite with this year’s best, Raisins and Almonds. Simon Vance does amazing things reading the ‘Temeraire’ series as does Grover Gardiner in his reading of the ‘Vorkosigan’ saga.”

Jessica Moyer was a chair of the 2008 RUSA Awards committee and is a doctoral candidate in the Literacy Education program at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She is the author of the book Research-Based Readers’ Advisory.

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Today’s list is by Diana Tixier Herald, and features her picks for the best of 2009 in YA publishing. Enjoy! And do let us know if there’s any YA titles you considered the best of 2009.

Genre/Subgenre: Teen Speculative Fiction/Teen Fantasy/Teen World of Faerie
Laini Taylor and Jim Di Bartolo–Lips Touch: Three Times
This amazing triptych of dark fantasy novellas has the feel of truth inherent in a classic fairy tale. The illustrations are a perfect compliment, foreshadowing the story when looked at before reading and compelling the reader to revisit them after reading the story. Readers who enjoy the magnificent writing and intelligent approach to fantasy may also enjoy Sharon Shinn’s General Winston’s Daughter and Nancy Werlin’s Impossible.

Genre/Subgenre: Teen Speculative Fiction/Teen Fantasy/Teen Sword and Sorcery
Kathleen Duey–Sacred Stars (#2 in the series “A Resurrection of Magic”)
Skin Hunger, the first book in the trilogy, was one of the best books of 2007. Sacred Scars continues in its excellent tradition as a sophisticated, elegant, and complex story taking up where Skin Hunger left off but incredibly enough is constructed so that it can stand alone.

Genre/Subgenre: Teen Speculative Fiction/Teen Fantasy
Rob Reger and Jessica Gruner–Emily the Strange: The Lost Days
When a girl wakes up with no memories she picks the name Earwig and discovers she is in the town of Blackrock even though not a single black rock is in evidence. Great fun to read and the book itself as an object is a joy to experience; there’s lots of illustrations, semi-glossy pages and a cover that just begs to be stroked with its high gloss embossed art on a matte black background.

Genre/Subgenre: Teen Speculative Fiction/Teen Science Fiction/Alternate Worlds
Scott Westerfeld–Leviathan
In Westerfeld’s spectacular steam-punk novel, set in an alternate 1914, the major division in the world is between the Clankers and the Darwinists; those who build complex, powerful machines and those who tweak DNA to engineer fantastical beasts. Readers who love this will also enjoy Kenneth Oppel’s Prinz honor book Airborn for its high-flying alternate early-20th century setting and L.A. Meyer’s Bloody Jack series.

Genre/Subgenre: Teen Speculative Fiction/Teen Science Fiction/Action-Adventure
Alexander Gordon Smith–Lockdown: Escape from Furnace
In a world that has given up on its youth, a high security prison is built a mile underground where youthful offenders can be sentenced for life. In Furnace (the prison), monsters rule and the inmates are forced to chip away at the rock walls to make new rooms.

Genre/Subgenre: Teen Speculative Fiction/Teen Paranormal and Horror/Teen Monster Stories
Chris Wooding–Malice
This amazing adventurous action novel combines text with passages from a graphic novel, and includes a secret graphic novel that features characters who look like teens and children who have gone missing.

Genre/Subgenre: Teen Romance/Teen Paranormal Romance
Maggie Stiefvater–Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1)
This amazing werewolf romance is in a class with Blood and Chocolate which many will recognize as the best werewolf book ever. It features the fascinating premise that temperature brings on the shift.

Genre/Subgenre: Teen Romance/Teen Issues Romance
Simone Elkeles–Perfect Chemistry
A gang member and a cheerleader are forced to be lab partners in their high school chemistry class. Starting out as antagonists, against their wills they are drawn to each other and discover they each have hidden depths and painful secrets.

Genre: Teen Contemporary Mysteries
Stella Lennon–Invisible I (The Amanda Project #1)
With a real Veronica Mars sensibility the beginning title in “The Amanda Project” introduces Callie, whose astronomer mother has disappeared and whose depressed father has taken up drink and lost his job; Hal, former art nerd turned hottie; and Nia, labeled a loser back in middle school.

Genre/Subgenre: Teen Contemporary Life/Multicultural
Laura Resau–The Indigo Notebook
Zeeta’s fifteen years have been spent traveling the globe with her mother, Layla, an itinerant English teacher and free spirit. On a flight to Ecuador, they become involved with several other travelers who are seeking answers of their own in that country. This amazing book blends coming of age, romance, mystery, and a little mysticism to build an enticing story.

Genre/Subgenre: Teen Contemporary Life/Multicultural
Mitali Perkins–Secret Keeper
In Calcutta, dreaming of going to the U.S. and earning a doctorate in psychology, Asha sits on the roof of the house writing in her journal. That is where she meets Jay, the boy next door, an eccentric painter. This tale of forbidden but chaste love, loss, and family solidarity really pulls at the emotions. Readers may also enjoy Perkins’s Monsoon Summer, Whelan’s Homeless Bird, Sheth’s Keeping Corner, and Vijayaraghavan’s Motherland.

Genre: Teen Issues
Carol Lynch Williams–The Chosen One
Thirteen-year-old Kyra lives with her rather large family in a rural Utah compound. She loves to read but years earlier the prophet of the polygamous cult her family belongs to decreed that all non-scriptural books be burned. Defying the Prophet, she has secretly been meeting the bookmobile every week to feed her reading habit.

Diana Tixier Herald is the author of Genreflecting, Teen Genreflecting, and Strictly Science Fiction (co-authored with Bonnie Kunzel). She is the series editor for the Genreflecting advisory series. She can be found online at genrefluent.com and
twitter.com/genrelibrarian.

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Okay, we’ll admit, we’re into a new year and new decade now. But we’re not quite ready to let go of 2009’s crop of books, and we still have a few “Best of” lists to post, so we’ll be publishing those throughout the rest of this week. Today’s list, of Best Street Lit books, was contributed by Megan Honig.

Genre: Coming of Age
Erica Hilton–10 Crack Commandments
Karen Williams–The People vs. Cashmere

Genre: Drama
Azárel–Carbon Copy

Genre: Romance
Keisha Ervin–Gunz and Roses

Genre: Thriller
Teri Woods–Alibi

Megan Honig is the New York Public Library’s Young Adult Materials Specialist and a blogger for YALSA. She has been writing and speaking to librarians about street lit and teenagers since 2007 and is the author of a forthcoming street lit readers’ advisory guide.

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by Sarah Statz Cords

Each year I eagerly await the Annual Best Books/Worst Books Smackdown on Fiction-L. You know the event I’m talking about; some kindly and ambitious souls offer to compile everyone’s “best books” suggestions, and pretty soon someone else suggests listing what we thought were the “worst books,” and soon there’s a big heated discussion about whether or not it is useful or advisable to list “worst books.” Some years this discussion gets extremely acrimonious, but this year I was pleased to see that everyone was feeling generous, and many library staff members got on with the business of naming the books they enjoyed the least.* I have always been firmly of the camp that thinks you can learn just as much about a reader by listening to what they DON’T like, so I thought I’d get into the spirit and present my 2009 list of Worst Nonfiction Books.

Genre: Memoir/Humorous Memoirs
1. Augusten Burroughs–You Better Not Cry: Christmas Stories.
Burroughs, well known for plumbing the depths of an unhappy childhood and challenging adulthood in such memoirs as Running with Scissors and Dry, here offers a slim volume of holiday-themed essays. I personally found them unfunny, super-depressing, and largely similar to material that Burroughs has already mined. I also find “holiday books” kind of an annual plague of books published for a quick buck, and which are marketed as gifts to be purchased for people you don’t know very well. (Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, with its snappy title and forgettable text, was another example of such a “gift book.”)

Genre: Making Sense…/Of Our Culture and Society
2. David Denby–Snark: A Polemic in Seven Fits.
Mr. Denby is a film critic with The New Yorker, and the author of the memoirs American Sucker and Great Books. Here he turns his attention to “snark,” which he thinks is the nasty hallmark of modern journalism (and Internet journalism in particular). I’d like to be able to explain this book further, but it was SO BORING and written in such critic-ese that I couldn’t make it through its mere 128 pages. As far as I could tell, he spent a lot of time defining what snark is NOT–it’s not Jon Stewart, for instance, which I still don’t really understand–and he never really got around to explaining what he thinks snark is or why it might be bad for our culture.

Genre: Memoirs/Coming of Age/Self Discovery
3. Isabel Gillies–Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story.
Gillies, an actress on NBC’s Law and Order: SVU program, describes the dissolution of her marriage, and her struggle to care for her two young sons after her husband left her (a situation which, according to a friend of hers, “happens every day”). I wanted to like this one; it’s short, and the subject was interesting enough, but I found Gillies’s writing so clunky it was beyond distracting. Celebrity memoirs should only be written by celebrities who can write, or by ghostwriters who can write.

Genre: Investigative Writing/Political Reporting
4. Thomas Friedman–Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–And How It Can Renew America.
Mr. Friedman, repeating your catch phrase of “hot, flat, and crowded” in your nonfiction book about the “need for a green revolution” does not make you clever. It makes you annoying. Now, granted, part of my annoyance with this title is because Friedman tried to charge my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a fee of $70,000 to come to campus for a speaking engagement, which is ridiculous. For a considerably angrier (and more profanity-rich; be warned) review of this title, check out what Matt Taibbi had to say about it.

Genre: Life Stories/Relationships/With a Little Help From My Friends
5. Jeffrey Zaslow–The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship.
Journalist Zaslow interviewed ten women who had known each other since their high school days together in Ames, Iowa. At one point he actually uses this line to describe the women’s personalities in high school: “As a clique, they had a reputation for being flirts–more social than academic, and more apt to tease boys than to please them. In reality, though, most of the Ames girls were very good students. And a couple of them actually pleased more than they teased.” Pleased more than they teased? Um, Mr. Zaslow? The 1950s called, and they want their line back.

Now, as with all Worst lists (and, let’s be honest, Best lists as well) this one is HIGHLY subjective. It is not offered to offend, and I’ll be the first to admit that many of these books that were worsts for me might well have been enjoyed by many other readers. But, I’ll bet you any readers’ advisor, without hearing about any books I’ve enjoyed, could look at the above list and tell you what they’ve learned about my reading tastes: Writing style is important to me. I don’t particularly need or want books by big-name authors. I might be up for some books by Matt Taibbi (which, in fact, I always am!).

*And, my heartfelt thanks to all the contributors at Fiction-L. I thoroughly enjoyed this year’s Best AND Worst round-ups.

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Today’s list of “Best Books” was contributed by Rosalind Reisner, and contains her picks for the best memoirs of the year. Enjoy!

Genre: Memoir/Coming of Age/Self-Discovery
Rachel Simon–Building a Home With My Husband: A Journey Through the Renovation of Love.
As Simon and her husband renovate their Baltimore row house, every phase recalls a part of her life and how the important relationships in her life–and ours–need to be nurtured and repaired.

Douglas Rogers–The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe.
Rogers returns to visit Zimbabwe, where his parents still attempt to run their resort, Drifters, despite gangs of thugs roaming the country, rampant inflation and food shortages, and threats to their safety. Through it all, his parents plan and hope, hatching schemes to carry on and survive.

Genre: Coming of Age
Jayanti Tamm–Cartwheels in a Sari: A Memoir of Growing Up Cult.
Tamm grew up part of Sri Chinmoy’s cult, normal family life forbidden in order to serve the guru’s needs; in her teen years she sought an independent life and consequently suffered the loss of everything she knew and loved.

Genre: Working Life Memoirs
Julie Holland–Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER.
Psychiatrist Holland writes about the verbally and physically violent patients she treated and how their pain invaded her own life.

Rosalind Reisner is the author of Read On…Life Stories: Reading Lists for Every Taste and Jewish American Literature: A Guide to Reading Interests. More of her memoir picks can be found at her website, A Reader’s Place.

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Welcome back to our best books round-up for the year 2009! (Which is moving toward its conclusion with astonishing speed.) Today’s “Best” list is Thrillers, as chosen by Jane Jorgenson. Enjoy the list, and your last week of the year!

Genre: Thrillers

Josh Bazell–Beat the Reaper

David Ellis–The Hidden Man

Brian Haig–The Hunted

Robert Rotenberg–Old City Hall

Genre: Mystery

Linda Castillo–Sworn to Silence

Jane Jorgenson is a librarian with the Madison Public Library (WI) and is the editor of their reading blog, MADreads. She has taught courses on the “Reading Interests of Adults” and “Public Libraries” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Library and Information Studies, and is the author of a forthcoming readers’ guide on thrillers. Jane will also be presenting, along with Barry Trott and Jessamyn West, a preconference at PLA 2010 titled Readers’ Advisory 2.0: The Next Dimension.

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by Sarah Statz Cords

Our “Best of 2009″ lists will resume next week, as we pause briefly while everyone passes the holiday week in their own style. All of us here at RAO offer all of you our best wishes for safe travels and peaceful holidays, and of course, a fantastic 2010, filled with exciting books and soothing books and award-winning books and books with beautiful covers, and, well…you get the idea.

In the meantime, there’s still some interesting articles out there about reading, just waiting to be read themselves. Have you seen these?

• Even book terms can have buzz; terms “orphan book” and “vook” among New York Times’ 2009 buzzwords;
• Even The Daily Beast gets in on the Book List action;
• There’s a new movie out about Queen Victoria, but has that venerable monarch been shortchanged in the historical fiction department?;
• Now THAT’S a holiday! Jane Austen’s birthday: December 16, 1775*;
• All right, books! Fourth on the list of “favorite entertainments”!;
• Nancy Pearl’s “Reissues Wish List”–are you paying attention, publishers?;
• Gotta love the Guardian: they ask readers to “name and shame” the decade’s worst books, and get 892 comments;
• Has everyone heard the Carte Noire Readers? Our little gift to you: British actors reading classics. You’re welcome;
• Book Covers Galore! The winners are listed here, but the nominees page is a lot more fun.

*Yes, yes, I have a Jane Austen addiction problem. I am aware.

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