Tips for Choosing Better Book Discussion Titles with a Resource Even I Forgot About

As part of my training for library book discussion groups, I go out of my way to share some of the best under the radar resources to identify discussable books. 

But first, and this is actually the most important part of finding discussable books, before you Rin to those resources, you really need to understand what makes for a great book discussion book. Too often we are just picking what everyone else is doing or what is popular or what is going to be a movie, rather than taking the time to think about WHY a book is discussable in general.

Here are my tips for choosing discussable books:

• Ease of acquiring in a variety of formats
• I love when people read the book in print, e, and listen. Their format choice almost always adds to the discussion.
• Explores basic human truth
• love, family, death, grief, fear, sadness, joy, etc....things all humans understand, know and feel
• 3-dimensional characters
• You want to really talk about those characters like there are real people
• Ambiguous endings
• This irks many but that is exactly why it is great for discussion
• Starting at the end is always a good idea
• Unique style, frame, or setting
• Talking about how the author constructed the book and why they might have made those choices is a great discussable topic
• Marginalized voices
• Doorways to people different than those in the group are more interesting to discuss than books that mirror the group's known experience
• When considering media sensations or current events: tread with caution!
• Really think hard about a hot book. Sure the group wants to be in the know, but often they are lacking in other keys ways in this list.
• Proven winners, both titles and authors
• Use your backlist

If you can check off a handful of these boxes for a potential titles, you will have a great discussion. Not everyone will like the book. In fact, you may have fewer "like" the book this way, but you will 100% have better discussions. And the discussion is what keeps people coming back.

But where to find these titles? I have shared a variety of resources over the years with the "book discussion books" tag, but today, I was reminded of another. A resource that I know and use but honestly forget to check when trying to find book discussion books-- NPR Books, specifically their Books We Love coverage.

From an article on their site entitled, "What to Read Next With Your Books Club":

Sometimes you finish a book and just have to talk about it with someone else. If your book club is looking for its next conversation-sparking title we have a dozen for you! These fiction and nonfiction titles were all recommended by NPR staff and critics for the latest installment of Books We Love, our annual year-end books guide. Books We Love allows you to browse 12 years-worth of book club recommendations and filter them by genre to find the title that's perfect for you and your reading buddies. Here are a few to get you started:

Click here to read more of that particular article, but the part I was reminded of, the 12 year's worth of Book We Love databases where "Book Club Idea" is a tag and you can combine it with more tags to find the right book for your book club.

So, I am here today to remind you all that even I forget about a resource that I know about, blog about, promote, and champion. I knew it had the Book Club Idea tag and yet, I never remember to use it that way.

I hope this post helps to reinvigorate your book clubs by improving how you identify titles, both in the resources you use but also, by considering WHY something makes for a good book discussion choice. 

Rebecca Yarros Talking About Romantasy via NPR Book of the Day

We all know that Rebecca Yarros is one of our most popular authors at the library. During the National Book Festival she sat down with Emily Kwong from NPR for an interview. 

19 minutes of this longer conversation was posted as part of the NPR's Book of the Day Podcast. You can listen to it here. 

This specific audio is a MUST listen. To hear Yarros talk about the appeal of her books and the genre blend that she helped make its own genre juggernaut is fascinating and necessary.

But I also wanted to use this opportunity to let you know how much I encourage people to subscribe to NPR's Book of the Day podcast. From the landing page:

NPR's Book of the Day

In need of a good read? Or just want to keep up with the books everyone's talking about? NPR's Book of the Day gives you today's very best writing in a snackable, skimmable, pocket-sized podcast. Whether you're looking to engage with the big questions of our times – or temporarily escape from them – we've got an author who will speak to you, all genres, mood and writing styles included. Catch today's great books in 15 minutes or less.

 Notice I said subscribe. Not listen. I subscribe to NPR's Book of the Day podcast mostly to see what books they are highlighting. I see it in my feed and I know it is a book important enough to make sure I know about it. This podcast takes book conversations from across all of their shows and plops them in the feed. So you can catch discussions and books you might have missed otherwise.

At least where I live, the NPR audience and the public library users have a huge overlap. Back when I started at the turn of the Century, people would come in all the time to ask for a book they heard about. They couldn't remember much, but we quickly learned that there was a VERY good chance they heard about it on NPR. So we started asking directly, did they hear about in on the radio? What time were you in the car? And then we'd try to track down which show it was on and figure it out from there.

This was early 2000s. Some of the bigger shows (like Fresh Air) had webpages with their guests listed, but some of the local shows did not. We often called WBEZ to ask what books were mentioned on a show at a certain time. They would help. They got used to us calling and I like to think we helped them get that info on a webpage sooner.

Back to the subscribing. I do listen to many of the episodes, but you don't need to. Seeing the book and the description is often enough to use it as a resource. 

I hope you consider subscribing to stay in the know as to what books NPR wants its listners to know about. It will help you anticipate demand and allow you to prepare readalikes and displays as well. 

But right now, go listen to Rebecca Yarros specifically. Everyone who works at a public library in America has something to learn from this conversation.

Resource Reminder: NPR Books

ALA Annual begins today so most of the librarians are busy from now until Tuesday. But since I am not there, I am taking advantage of the quiet to take a half day today.

I will be back on Monday with my Horror Genre Preview in the July issue of Library Journal and Tuesday I will start with some ALA Annual Recaps.

But today I wanted to remind you of one of my favorite resources-- NPR Books.

They cover the newest books, they have  written reviews to pair with the audio ones, lists, and include journalism on book news, all with one click. I check it at least once a week to stay on top of what is going on in the book atmosphere (Robin Bradford's term).

However, it is more than a news site, it is also one of my go to suggestion resources because they have a permanent link to the "Books We Love" searchable database with easy backlist access. Please click here for more by me about this wonderful resource.

Here is the direct link to access it

But from the main page of NPR Books, click on the header--  "Best Books of the Year."

Currently they are also running a "Books We Love" so far series for 2024. Use their "Books We Love" tag to pull up those lists and the database of hundreds of titles.

Include NPR books as part of your book news routine AND as a great place to identify titles for readers based on their preferred appeal factors with backlist access to 2013 all on one page.

Attack of the Best Lists 2023: NPR's Books We Love

This post is part of my year end "Attack of the Best Lists" coverage. To see every post in my "Attack of the Best Lists 2023" coverage [and more backlist best of the year options] you can click here.

Click here to enter the site

Yesterday the Book We Love for 2023 lunched. From their about page:

What is this thing?

Books We Love is NPR’s interactive reading guide. Mix and match tags such as Book Club Ideas, Biography & Memoir or Eye-Opening Reads to filter results and find the book that’s perfect for you or someone you love.

How are the books selected?

We reached out to our staffers and trusted critics and asked them to nominate their favorite books published in 2023. They responded with hundreds of titles. Then, the editors and producers at NPR Books sat down with a huge spreadsheet of responses; we resolved duplications, noted omissions, considered the overall mix and balance of books recommended and then made assignments. 

Why isn’t this just a list?

Back in 2013, the NPR Books staff was suffering from an acute case of list fatigue. So we teamed up with our friends at NPR News Apps and started to think about a site that would be more Venn diagram-y than list-y – a site that could help you seek out the best biographies that were also love stories, or the best mysteries that were also set in the past. We wholeheartedly believe that human beings are capable of absorbing new information in formats that are 1) not sequentially ordered and 2) wait … dammit! and 3) never mind. 

But no, really, I just want to see a list of books

We got you. To view these books as a list of titles rather than as an array of covers, you are welcome to select the “List” option in the upper right-hand corner of the site. 

So what’s the deal with these tags?

At NPR Books, we’re all about discovery: helping you find your next great read – the mystery you can’t put down, the memoir you recommend to all your friends. In 2013, we hashed out a basic taxonomy that was both functional (e.g., Biography & Memoir or Kids’ Books) and fun (e.g., It’s All Geek To Me and Let’s Talk About Sex). Over the years, we’ve refined our filters and added new tags, like The States We’re In and No Biz Like Show Biz.

The names are cute, but what do they mean?

The States We’re In is for stories of the American experience both true and fictional. It’s All Geek To Me is for deep dives on particular topics – trees, personality tests, tiny houses, you name it. In The Dark Side, you’ll find dystopias, serial killers, true crime and people behaving badly in general. Eye-Opening Reads will give you a new perspective on the topic at hand, whether it’s the state of philanthropy or a new pair of shoes. 

How do the books get tagged?

Our critics and staffers make suggestions, but to ensure we are applying tags consistently, the producers and editors at NPR Books consider and discuss every tag on every book. 

That must take a very long time

YUP. 

Can I look under the hood?

If you want to know more about how Books We Love was designed and coded, you can read about the process here. And if you’re curious to see the code and adapt it for your own project, you can check it out here.

Back to me, Becky, talking about this resource.

I love this list for a few reasons. The first is the tags discussed above. I love that they are natural language based. While there are recognizable categories such as "Biography & Memoir," "Mysteries & Thrillers," or "Young Adult," there are also more intuitive, reader focused categories like "Eye-Opening Reads," It's All Geek To Me," and "The Dark Side," and even choices based on length, this is an excellent portal to "best" books that allows any reader [or library worker] to created highly specific and expertly tailored suggestions. 

Second, it is fun to use. The mixing a matching potential is endless because of the breadth of choices. A lot of that breadth is because of the nature of how they add titles to the list. They ask all of their NPR Books contributors to suggest titles. As a result, a huge swath of reading interests are represented in the list. Their intentional inclusion of all voices, even those who only write a few reviews a year, makes this list one of the best. You can click on as many or as few of the tags as you want to create a general or highly specific list.

Third,  every former incarnation of this list is easily accessible with a single click from the top of this year's list meaning you have over 3,600 customizable suggestions for literally any reader, no matter how picky, at your fingertips. 

Fourth, Books We Love is a great go-to resource all year long because of the breadth and variety of titles included and the ease of backlist access. Users get to steer the ship to find their own suggestion amongst a universe of pre-approved titles. Then they can be as picky as they want, choosing their own filters to narrow it down. And since these lists are VERY broad in terms of the types of books that are included each year, the results are very useful. And they stand up over the test of time. 

And finally, this resource works very well as a conversation starter itself. You can use it in conjunction with my Conversation Starter to Display advice any time of year. Ask people for their favorite "Eye-Opening Reads." You can fill the display with the titles from Books We Love over the years to get things started and then ask staff and patrons to help give you more. Again, the details on how to use a conversation starter question to build a display are here. You can go back to Books We Love at anytime of year for display ideas. 

When you visit the NPR Book Books We Love portal now and have fun using it for yourself or your patrons, but don't forget about it all year long. It is a wonderful  resource and, after years in existence, the compound interest of titles makes it even more useful. 

And now if you will excuse me, I am going to do my annual exercise of using Books We Love to find myself a book to read over the holidays. 

Speaking of holidays, this is the last RA for All post of the week for the American Thanksgiving holiday. I'll be back Monday 11/27.

 

Attack of the Bests Lists 2022: Largehearted Boy's List of Online "Best of 2022" Book Lists

This post is part of my year end "Attack of the Best Lists" coverage. To see every post in my "Best Books 2022" series [and more backlist best options] you can use the best lists tag. 

Over the last week, many of the to "best lists were announced, including NPR Books We Love (which I talked about in detail here) and the NYT 100 Notable Books. But there are many more, and they are coming fast and furious from now until January. 

As I have said each and every year, I do not try to post every single best list here on the blog. Rather, I choose to highlight those that are especially useful to us as we help public library readers in real time. [Again, NPR Books We Love is at the top of that list].

But, there are a few outlets that do go out of their way to keep track of every BEST list for you all in one place. 

Today I want to highlight my favorite-- Largehearted Boy and their Online "Best of 2022" list of lists.

Click here to enter the master list of lists

You can use this link for 2022's lists of every best list-- in alpha order. From general lists like the NYT one linked above, to super specific ones based on interests or type of publication, this master list of all the best lists is guaranteed to help you identify a title of interest for every patron.

The only problem you may have is that the books your patron wants are checked out because they are on the year's lists. But of course, readers of this blog know how to fix that problem-- the backlist!

One of the reasons I support Largehearted Boy's online lists of lists every year is not only because it is so comprehensive and easy to use, but also, because he makes the backlist access SO easy.

At the bottom of the page there is access to all 15 years of lists. Links to all of the best lists for 15 years, without having to construct a search or even click-- just scroll. I promise you, with the breadth of offerings you will be able to find a "best" read on the shelf for any patron without having to go back further than 1 year or 2. 

So, buckle up for the attack of the best lists to kick into a higher gear, but don't worry about knowing about them all, or missing one-- Largehearted Boy has got you covered. 

Best of Year So Far via NPR's Book We Love [Part 1 of 3]

There are many best of the year so far lists, but one of the BEST end of the year lists decided to do a best of the year so far and I cannot stop looking at it. 

Yes, I am talking about Books We Love from NPR Books. Click here to see my glowing praise for this resource from the end of last year.

Click here for their comprehensive, covering every genre and so many identities of authors, and fun to navigate resource.

And the best thing about NPR's Book We Love is that every iteration of it has all of the years accessible from the front page. Yes, I love that you can customize your personal recommendation with natural language options, but look at the image from the top of the page below. It really is 1 click to get at more than 3,000 customizable, vetted book recs. 

Click through and explore for yourself or click on the image below. 

Finally, don't forget how important every best list is as a resource, no matter what time of year it comes out. Click here for more from me about using best lists as a RA resource.

[Sorry not sorry for exploding your TBR.]

Click here for access to all the book recs

NPR Books Presents Titles for All 50 States and a Bonus Becky Outside the Box Recommendation

NPR Books always has excellent Summer Reading Content. On June 1st they unveiled this fun list, compiled by literary experts from every state. From the introduction to the piece:

Traveling this summer? Here are book picks for all 50 states (and then some)

As the summer travel season kicks off, many of us look forward to exploring new places on trips away from home. To help with this, NPR asked poets laureate, state librarians, bookstore owners and other literary luminaries from all 50 states — plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico — to recommend quintessential reads that illuminate where they live.

Here are more than 100 recommendations for you — whether you want to read about somewhere you're heading, a place you hope to go someday, or somewhere you live and want to get to know better.

(And you can let us know what books you think best represent your home state here.)

As usual, NPR has excellent visual presentation to go along with the fun and usefulness of the content itself. You can make this available to patrons to use on their own or use it to help them find a great read.

Finally, I have a favorite suggestion for armchair travel leisure reads as well. I LOVE reading guidebooks about places I may never go to, one I am going to as well. In  particular, I greatly enjoy guidebooks by Moon or Lonely Planet as they provide excellent content about the history and customs of the locales they are covering. I seek them out whenever wanderlust strikes me.  Here is a review of one of my all time favorites. 

Best Books 2021: NPR's Books We Love

This post is part of my year end "Attack of the Best Lists" coverage. To see every post in my "Best Books 2021" series you can use the best lists tag. 

I took last week off, so much of the beginning of this week will be to alert you to the major Best Books list that came out over the holiday week. However, before we get to today's post, I want to remind you that I do not post every best list. There are other resources that do that [like this one, which will get its own post soon]. What I focus on are the lists that are most useful to you, the library worker, as you help match readers with books, in real time, whether in person or virtual.

And that reminder is the perfect transition to one of my favorite and most useful lists, and it is one that got a minor face-lift this year-- NPR Books' Books We Love, formerly known as the Book Concierge. 

Click here to enter the site

From the about page:

Books We Love is NPR’s annual, interactive, year-end reading guide. (You might have known us as the Book Concierge, but this year we got a makeover! We’ve changed our name and adopted a warm and welcoming new look.) What hasn’t changed is the annual bounty of hand-picked books. Mix and match tags such as Book Club Ideas, Biography & Memoir or Eye-Opening Reads to filter results and find the book that’s perfect for you or someone you love.

 I love this list for a few reasons. The first is the filters. Listed in the left gutter of the page in natural language with recognizable categories such as "Biography & Memoir," "Mysteries & Thrillers," or "Young Adult," but also including more intuitive, reader focused categories like "Eye-Opening Reads," It's All Geek To Me," and "The Dark Side," and even choices based on length, this is an excellent portal to "best" books that allows any reader [or library worker] to created highly specific and expertly tailored suggestions.

Second, it is fun to use.

Third,  every former incarnation of this list is easily accessible with a single click from the top of this year's list meaning you have over 2,800 customizable suggestions for literally any reader, no matter how picky, at your fingertips. 

Fourth, Books We Love is a great go-to resource all year long because of the breadth and variety of titles included and the ease of backlist access. Users get to steer the ship to find their own suggestion amongst a universe of pre-approved titles. Then they can be as picky as they want, choosing their own filters to narrow it down. And since these lists are VERY broad in terms of the types of books that are included each year, the results are very useful. And they stand up over the test of time. 

Visit the NPR Book Books We Love portal now and have fun using it for yourself or your patrons, but don't forget about it all year long. It is a wonderful  resource and, after years in existence, the compound interest of titles makes it even more useful. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go place a hold on a titles I found by choosing "Historical Fiction," "Seriously Great Writing," and "The Dark Side." It's The Trees by Percival Everett, a novel I had not even heard of before using this resource. I am very excited.

If it helped me to be surprised with an unknown title, imagine the doors it can open for you and your patrons. 

NPR Books Editor Petra Mayer

Sometimes friendships from college disappear forever and you never think about people who spent hours upon hours with in a basement for three years, and then there are happy coincidences like the one Petra Mayer and I got to live.

From 1993-96 I knew Petra Mayer through my work at WAMH, the AmherstCollege radio station. We were both highly involved in management and radio was our number one activity outside of classes. While Petra was a year ahead of me, she was the Chief Engineer and I worked my may up from Sports Director to Program Director. At one point we held 2 of the top 3 management positions running a 24 hour a day radio station [and we both had the pagers we had to carry 24/7 to prove it....ahhh the 90s].  

Here is a photo from, I think, Winter 1995 of the WAMH Executive Board. Petra is in the bottom left corner and 19yr old me is next to her. [Thanks to one of my oldest and dearest friends, Adam, for sending this to me via email over the weekend].

I am not exaggerating about the number of hours we spent together, in that basement station. I can still picture her hovering over some of our equipment, trying to keep it working just a little longer, sitting in meetings giving our reports, and yes, rushing to the station at 2 am because something happened with the first year running the middle of the night shift and we got paged to run over there ASAP. 

Petra graduated the year before me. I knew she decided to stay with radio because I was still considering it too [although a summer internship at a commercial station made me reconsider], but after a few years, I moved into a different field and we lost touch. 

I remember when the NPR Books job opened. They were advertising for an editor of their books coverage, someone who would make their website more dynamic and responsive to readers, someone who could help blend their presence online with the radio coverage. As a NPR supporter, I was hopeful they would pick someone good, someone who would make NPR books less stuffy. And then I heard the name Petra Mayer and my heart was happy. 

While we never had the chance to work together directly, we did touch base multiple times while she held this job, especially when they did Horror for the Summer Reads and over the work of our mutual friend Gabino Iglesias. Petra was one of the first people to hire Gabino as a literary critic. [For the record, I asked her to figure out how she could get NPR to let him read some of his reviews on air, and while she agreed he should, she also said all she could do was suggest it.]

Petra died suddenly over the weekend. While people I knew in college have died, no one I spent so much time with, no one I knew so intimately, and no one I respected as much has. The fact that our paths crossed so directly in the years after college always made me smile. I had even told my daughter-- an Amherst student, WAMH DJ, and podcast director for the college newspaper-- that after the holidays she should talk to Petra about what it is like to work at NPR. 

If you have enjoyed the Book Conceirge, any of NPR Books' serious consideration of genre books, the diversification of their print reviewers, or just ever use their excellent website, you can thank Petra.

She will be missed by so many-- those that knew her, worked with her, and loved her, yes, but so many others had no idea who she was, but appreciated her work on a regular basis. 

That's the point of this post I guess. To remind you all that our favorite resources are still directed by people, people who may be mostly behind the scenes, but they are there. And some of them are extraordinary.

NPR Summer Reads: SF and Fantasy of last 10 Years Results

As I posted here, the 2021 NPR Summer Reading Poll was focused on the best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the last 10 years.  Below I have the introduction to the post and a link to the full list. This list is organized into the following categories of appeal:

• Worlds To Get Lost In
• Words To Get Lost In
• Will Take You On A Journey
• Will Mess With Your Head
• Will Mess With Your Heart
• Will Make You Feel Good.

I love the natural language access points here. Read it all, click though, bookmark it and don't forget the awesome backlist of previous summer reader polls [more on the below]. This is a useful information you can use immediately, but also, the thought put into speaking directly to readers, to encourage them to give these books a try [even if outside their normal reading area] is fantastic. 

We all should try to booktalk titles with this more conversational language. And now, to the list.....

We Asked, You Answered: Your 50 Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade

August 18, 20215:00 AM ET

PETRA MAYER

Deborah Lee for NPR

The question at the heart of science fiction and fantasy is "what if?" What if gods were real, but you could kill them? What if humans finally made it out among the stars — only to discover we're the shabby newcomers in a grand galactic alliance? What if an asteroid destroyed the East Coast in 1952 and jump-started the space race years early?

This year's summer reader poll was also shaped by a series of "what ifs" — most importantly, what if, instead of looking at the entire history of the field the way we did in our 2011 poll, we only focused on what's happened in the decade since? These past 10 years have brought seismic change to science fiction and fantasy (sometimes literally, in the case of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth series), and we wanted to celebrate the world-shaking rush of new voices, new perspectives, new styles and new stories. And though we limited ourselves to 50 books this time around, the result is a list that's truly stellar — as poll judge Tochi Onyebuchi put it, "alive."

As always, there was a pretty extensive decision-making process that went into the list, involving our fabulous panel of expert judges — but we know you eager readers want to get right to the books. So if you're inclined, follow these links to find out how we built the list (and what, sadly, didn't make it this year). Otherwise, scroll on for the list!

We've broken it up into categories to help you find the reading experience you're looking for, and you can click on these links to go directly to each category:

Worlds To Get Lost In, Words To Get Lost In, Will Take You On A Journey, Will Mess With Your Head, Will Mess With Your Heart, Will Make You Feel Good.

Becky back here.....

You can click here for the entire post or on the specific categories above to access the full list and all of the annotations. There is also easy backlist access to past NPR Summer Reads content at this link.

Get busy helping patrons uncover some awesome, recent speculative reads right now! And book mark NPR Books always for tons of thoughtful and useful resources to help readers. 

NPR Summer Reads is Back with SF and Fantasy of the Last 10 Years

Ahh the annual NPR Books feature for Summer Reading is BACK! Click here for my info on past year's and here for access to past NPR Books summer features.

Click here for the official kick off post or below to start reading. And please participate. Enter your books into the mix. Over the course of the summer, this feature will have information and lists from both author experts AND readers. Please pass the links on to your own patrons.

It is fun to participate, but the list of the best and most popular Science Fiction and Fantasy of the last 10 years will keep you full of info for updated displays, lists, and suggestions for years to come!

The Summer Reader Poll Returns: Tell Us Your Favorite New Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books

Ten years is a long time! In 10 light-years, you could get from Earth to a whole new solar system, Epsilon Eridani. And in the past 10 years, science fiction and fantasy have undergone a revolution — new voices, new perspectives, and new stories, bright as stars in the night sky.

BOOK NEWS & FEATURES

Summer Reader Poll 2021: Meet Our Expert Judges

So we thought it would be a great time to revisit our original 2011 reader poll of favorite science fiction and fantasy. And not just because of all the fantastic new stuff that's come out in the past decade, but because that 2011 list has some, uhhh, notable holes in it (Octavia Butler, I am SO sorry).

We're doing things a little bit differently this year since we already know you guys love The Lord of the Rings. Instead of a grand survey of all of time and space, we're zeroing in on titles from the past 10 years — that is, anything that's come out since the 2011 poll. And since we're only looking at the past decade, our panel of expert judges will take your nominations and use them to curate a final list of 50 titles (rather than our usual 100).

Click here to keep reading, meet the expert authors, and participate for yourself and pass on to your patrons.