Week 6, Building Base Knowledge (Genres)

Week 6, Assignment 1 - Blog about the genre link you've been following.

I accidentally did this under Week 5, but I can certainly elaborate!

I've been following RT Book reviews (Romance Times). I've started scanning reviews both online and in the print magazine. To the uninitiated, it seems to be everything you ever wanted to know about the romance genre.

• I use the "Authors & Books" tab for a one-stop look at what's coming soon from a particular author. (Robyn Carr has a new one out in July).
• This section is also great for finding a list of older titles in a long-running series. 
• There is also an at-a-glance "Upcoming Releases" page.
• You can also sort through new reviews and book news by a specific genre, like Mainstream, Young Adult, Inspirational or Paranormal.
• I have found this most helpful for finding mainstream fiction for readers who I know like light romantic stories but don't necessarily want anything from the "romance" section.

Week 6, Assignment 3 - Find three Sub-genres

For this assignment, I had the best luck finding interesting sub-genres by using the Explore tab on Goodreads. I just clicked on a main genre and all sorts of other tags popped up. All of the lists appear to be fan-generated so I hope that counts! I've linked them below:

•  Slipstream  as far as I can tell is a genre between mainstream fiction and speculative fiction (including sci-fi, fantasy, horror). It's a term that seems to have some crossover with magical realism, steampunk, and dystopian literature too. Basically, readers are drawn to these books because they are a little bit weird and a little bit literary and a little bit mainstream all at once. Authors like Jose Saramago and Haruki Murakami fall into this category.  David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is also tagged by many Goodreads readers as "slipstream". Although I've only recently heard of this term, I realize I have read several books that could fall into this category. One of my favorites is Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.
  
  Slipstream with a fantasy bent is also called "New Weird" and includes authors like Kelly Link and China Mieville.
  
• Time Travel Romance is just what it sounds like. It features a time-travel storyline with a romance theme. Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series is probably the most well-known example. The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger is another. Others authors who have written books in this sub-genre are Karen Marie Moning (Highlander series) and Jude Devereaux (Montgomery series). The time-travel element can add both suspense and a historical setting with a modern twist. The idea that love can transcend time and place appeals to readers who like this sub-genre.


• Alternate or Alternative History this is a sub-genre of speculative and historical fiction set in a world where historical events diverge from what actually took place. The writer asks "what if history had gone a different way?" and then runs with that. This sub-genre finds inspiration in historical events, so setting and world building are of critical importance. Weaving in familiar or accurate historical details can be important as well. Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven series set in an alternate Tang Dynasty is one example, the second book in that series just came out. Laura Anderson's The Boleyn King is the first in a trilogy reimagining events in Tudor England. Steampunk novels like Boneshaker by Cherie Priest could also be considered alternate history.
  
  Two Mashup Titles - The Fantasy-Western

•  Red Country by Joe Abercrombie is a fantasy/western mashup. It's a fantasy novel (fantasy world with quests and sword fighting) that has western elements (a frontier town, gold rush, duels, revenge).
• The Six-Gun Tarot by R.S. Belcher is another. This 2013 title is set in a silver mining town that is a hotbed of strange and supernatural occurrences. The mayor is hoarding mythical treasures. Other characters include a shady saloon owner and a heroic sheriff. You might even run into a coyote.

Week 5, Building Base Knowledge (Part II)

Week 5, Assignment 1

I chose to follow Salon.com and RT Book Reviews (Romance Times)

Salon: So, early on in my bookish blog I mentioned I'd love a good source for audiobook reviews. I was delighted to discover (this week, actually) that Salon.com has a regular audiobook review feature called The Listener. Yay!  

Overall, I've found that the reviews are more in-depth than other review sources. In addition to a nice mix of literary fiction reviews, it also covers lots of non-fiction and memoir titles, as well as publishing industry trends. Check Laura Miller's best reads of the summer list, "What's 2013's 'Gone Girl'?" for something besides James Patterson and Dan Brown.

RT Book Reviews: This resource has been so useful in trying to sort out the "what's next in this series" questions we get all the time from our romance readers.
Their reviews are also great for determining how hot & heavy the sex scenes are going to be. Some of our romance readers want things tame and some want them extra steamy. RT rates each novel "MILD, HOT or SCORCHER" based on how graphic things get.

Looking through the RT Reviewers' Choice Best Book Awards, I was amazed at how many genres/subgenres of romance there are. Everything from paranormal/sci-fi erotica and Scotland-set historical romance to inspirational mystery/suspense/thriller.

Week 5, Assignment 2

North Point has a good mix of popular fiction, genre, and narrative nonfiction readers. We also circulate lots of DVDs, so Movie & TV adaptations tend to generate interest in specific books so it's good to keep up with book-to-movie news. That is one of the many reasons I love my weekly emails from Early Word.

I'd forgotten about things like "Display Ideas" and didn't realize the website had an archive of PEOPLE magazine book reviews.

Week 5, Assignment 3

According to The Atlantic's "Books to Look Forward to in 2013" Stephen King's Joyland comes out today (in paperback only, no e-book just yet). It's a spooky summer story set in 1973 at a small-town amusement park featuring ghosts and an old (possibly unsolved?) murder. The cover is deliciously vintage and looks like the sort of pulpy crime novel you want with you at the beach or on a summer camp-out. I know lots of our customers will be clamoring for it.

Week 4, Goodreads

Goodreads Impressions:

I started using Goodreads in graduate school several years ago and have been using it pretty regularly ever since. I often wonder if I would find it as useful if I didn't have so many well-read librarian friends filling up my update feed with great titles!

Overall, I find it most useful for:

• Recording what I've read and what I want to read. When I attend booktalking sessions at library conferences, I always have my Goodreads app open so I can add titles to my "want to read" shelf.
• Categorizing the books I've read for easy access later. Right now, I'm working on tagging the books I've read with appeal factors in addition to general genre tags. I like how Paula Willey tags children's books by the age/grade they'd most appeal to.
• Discovery - the update feed tells me what other people are reading or want to read, and as I mentioned above, this is great when you have so many librarians in your "friends" list. I have not found the recommendations feature as useful, but exploring genres and lists has been a quick way to find new-to-me authors and titles in genres I'm less familiar with.
• Finding out what others loved and/or hated about individual titles. Looking at reader reviews helps me decide if a book might be a good fit for myself or a customer. I don't always rely on the number of stars, since reading is a very subjective experience, but it does help to read gut reactions.

 Recommendations:

 I recommended Garden of Stones by Sophie Littlefield to Melissa Hepler because she reads a lot of historical and literary fiction and liked The Tin Horse by Janice Steinberg.

Week 3, The RA Conversation

For this role-playing assignment, we were asked to respond to three sample conversations with some book recommendations.

Conversation 1: Something everyone is reading - like Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.

Have you already read Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed? It was the first pick for Oprah's Book Club 2.0, the online re-launch of the book club on her show. I've seen it on lots of best-seller lists, too.

I'd also suggest The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin. It is both funny and introspective. It is a few years old, now, but is still listed as an Independent Bookseller's bestseller for biography and memoir. It definitely seems like it would be great for discussion.

Conversation 2: I'd like some vampires please, but hold the teen angst.

Have you seen the HBO series, True Blood? It is based on Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series, which starts with Dead Until Dark. It has some similarities: a mind-reading heroine and hunky vampires, but Sookie is much spunkier and more down-to-earth than Bella and I'd say the series appeals more to an adult audience. It's a good blend of horror, mystery, and southern gothic.
Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series or the Chicagoland Vampires series by Chloe Neill are others you might want to try.

Conversation 3: Something along the lines of River of Doubt.
 
Candice Millard is great! I shied away from historical writing until I read her book, Destiny of the Republic about the assassination of President Garfield. I couldn't put it down. If you haven't read that, I would highly recommend it. You might also try Blood and Thunder: an Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides. It's the exhaustively well-researched story of Kit Carson's role in westward expansion, but the narrative prose makes all that research accessible. It's a gripping and compelling read about a larger-than-life American figure.

Week 2, Assignment 3

This is so much fun. I love to see what everyone is reading and recommending. I made some suggestions on Julie B's page for part three of this week's assignment.

For John Green's An Abundance of Katherines, I suggested A.S. King's Ask the Passengers or Please Ignore Vera Dietz. Both John Green and A.S. King write snappy, witty teen dialog and cover some pretty intense emotional situations with the right amount of humor to balance everything out.

Based on her annotation of Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons, I suggested another Southern, character-driven novel: Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith. I have not read either (I used Library Thing and Goodreads for that one), but I plan to!