Prepping for ARRT's Nancy Pearl Community Reads Event

Later today I will be attending the ARRT sponsored event about running successful community reads programs featuring an in person appearance and keynote by Nancy Pearl. I previously posted about the details here.

I will be one of the people live tweeting the event and will post a recap on the blog tomorrow. But, no matter if you will be in attendance or not, following the tweets or not, I thought it would be a good idea to post a few links to some Nancy Pearl things that will help ALL of you to help readers right now.

First, as I have mentioned here on the blog a few times, we are using a modified version of Nancy Pearl's Doorways to run the current ARRT Speculative Fiction Genre Study.  [Click here for our Genre Study page featuring notes and assignments.] But I realize that some of you are newer to RA and may not be as well versed in Nancy’s groundbreaking Doorways concept.  A lot of it seems intuitive now, but back in the 1990s it was revolutionary You can click here for a PW interview with Nancy where she explains the doorways. And here for an explanation of Doorways from a RA Wiki run by my friends in New South Wales.

I really love the work Nancy does on NPR providing book lists for the masses. I especially love that a librarian is the one suggesting books and not an author or general book person because we do it better. Seriously, the way library workers book talk is much better than when book people do it because we know how to entice people to read, So check out the archive of her appearances here. Remember the older lists are just as good as the newer ones.

Finally, you can watch Nancy’s TED talk, “Reading with a Purpose.”