A Book Suggestion For You on National Library Worker Day

Happy National Library Worker Day!

For this celebratory post I am featuring two of my Booklist colleagues to recognize their great work and because they have something to share with you today.

First is my friend Robin Bradford, who today on Twitter not only wished us all a Happy Library Workers day but made this succinct and eloquent statement about how our work is noble but that doesn’t mean we should be paid less for it. 

I salute all of you who work in a library. I did it for 15 years in a community where money was tight for the library and the citizens. I know first hand what a difference every single one of you makes in people’s lives and just how hard you work for your patrons.

And now, I am honored to now work for all of you, the Library Workers, trying to help you help patrons better.

Which leads me to the second colleague I am featuring, Sarah Maguire, who is Rebecca Vnuk’s featured Notes From the Field interview in the current issue of her Booklist Online’s Corner Shelf Newsletter:

Although I don’t play favorites, Susan Maguire is right up there as one of my best reviewers—not only because she’s a fantastic writer but she covers the women’s-fiction titles I personally like! She’s also my dream self: both a librarian and a romance author, writing under the pen name Sarah Title (yep, you have to search the author field for Title!). Her new series for Kensington, Librarians in Love, is gathering rave reviews and lots of attention—the first book in the series, The Undateable, was published in February 2017, and the next, Falling for Trouble, is due out in June. You can find out more about her books at www.sarahtitle.com.

You can click here for the entire newsletter and here for just Sarah’s interview.

In that interview, Sarah not only mentions her romance novel (which I just put a hold on!), but she also suggests a lot of good reads in a variety of genres from romance, to science fiction to literary and more. See, we library workers ARE awesome. Sarah could just be promoting herself and her library, but instead she is also promoting better RA Service.

I haven’t met Sarah before, but with just this quote from her interview, I know we would get along smashingly:

My evil plan is to make our patrons realize that they actually do like genre fiction, they just don’t know it yet—mwa-ha-ha-ha, etc.

So today, celebrate yourself. Pick out a book to read for FUN. Something you want to read. Not something you have to. Take one of Sarah’s suggestions or one of mine. I have hundreds here or here.