RA Links Round Up--The Back From Vacation Edition

Thanks for hanging in there last week.  I was in Southern California on Spring Break.  A big thanks to my students for guest hosting the blog last week.

But I am back and although I did no work while on vacation, I still did a quick scan of my RSS feeds via my iPhone each day (mostly to clear out the backlog) and starred the things I wanted to pass on.

Also, check out RA for All: Horror later this week. I am working on a report on why people love the Haunted Mansion and Tower of Terror (yes we went to Disney) even though they are fairly scary.

So here are a few tidbits I wanted to pass on:

• The Bram Stoker Awards and the Vampire Novel of the Century were announced on March 31st.  Click here for the official results.  I was very happy to see Joe McKinney's Flesh Eaters win best novel.  His Dead City series is fabulous, and I highlighted it in my PLA presentation.
• I love Bookmobiles.  My dream has always been to run one, but I know it probably will never happen.  Last week, NPR ran this great report on the end of bookmobiles.  If you share my love of bookmobiles, don't forget about Ian Sansom's Bookmobile Mystery series.
• Anne Tyler gave a lengthy interview to NPR.  She has a new book and rarely gives interviews.  I have had great luck using Digging to America as a book discussion book.
• The Sisters Brothers won the Morning News Tournament of Books! I was so happy.  It was one of my personal favs in 2011 too.
• We also hit the Madame Tussaud wax museum in Hollywood.  And in a freaky coincidence, Reading the Past ran this review of Michelle Moran's fiction biography of this fascinating woman.  I was happy to see that we do own the book here at Berwyn.
• One of the most original authors out there today is China Mieville.  The problem is his books are very hard to classify by genre.  They are all genres and no genre at one time.  This is great for readers, but very hard when librarians try to make lists of core authors.  I am embroiled in it right now as I am part of building the new ARRT Popular Authors list.  We have to have Mieville on the list, but cannot figure out where to put him.  The best description I have seen is that he writes "Weird Fiction."  Last week Mieville talked about his writing with Jeff VanderMeer for the Weird Fiction Review.
• While I was gone, Joyce Saricks tackled nonfiction the GSLIS 763 students.  Click here to see what they read last week.

That's what I was thinking about while I was gone.  Look for the Monday Discussion in a few minutes.  And a back to normal week.