New Issue of The Corner Shelf and It is a Must Read

The latest issue of The Corner Shelf went live this week. This is a Booklist newsletter by my editor, Susan Maguire. The current issue is especially good, but you should subscribe here to always get them.

See below for the ToC and Susan's Editor's Note, which has an excellent general RA reminder. 

Click here for access to this issue or here for access to all back issues. And as you can see, the backlist is always important at the Corner Shelf because Susan has a "From the Backlist" suggestion in every issue.

May 2021
• Notes from the Field: The Lac La Biche County Instrument Library
• Top 10 Historical Fiction
• Excerpts from the Experts: The Complete Collections Assessment Manual
• Listen Up: Summer Listening for Two
• Professional Reading Roundup: Spring 2021
• Shelf Care: Circ Stats, Bridgerton, and Other Library Business
• From the Backlist: Killing Trail, by Margaret Mizushima

Editor's Note

Recently a friend tagged me in a Twitter convo where a woman was asking for the one book her almost-twenty-year-old daughter should read.  This made my RA spidey sense tingle, of course. I asked her, what did her daughter like to read? But then, instead of giving me some of her daughter's faves, she deflected, saying that she just wanted her daughter to stretch. This made my RA spidey sense tingle, in a different way. Nothing kills the reading spirit like randomly assigned reading, especially from strangers on the internet. I can find her stretch books, I said, but it helps to have a starting-off point. And she was all, OK, how about your top three books? Which! Gah! All I wanted was more information so I could help her daughter, and I wasn't getting anywhere. This reminded me of those good ol' reference desk days when a patron would come in looking for a "good book," but didn't want to engage in a readers' advisory conversation—they just want what I, clearly a book expert, deem something good. But our RA training teaches us that there is no such thing as a "good book," and, simultaneously, every book is good. To paraphrase our boy Ranganathan, every book is good to someone. It's matching the someone with the book that's complicated. This strikes me as something at the heart of library work—the systems we use to provide services are meant to make things easy for users, and so users think our services are easy to provide. Knowing the name of a random (good!) book is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and underneath is the years of learning about readers' interests and publishing trends, without which the good book tip would just float away into the ocean, perhaps to be ravaged by the whims of climate change. Anyway! This issue of Corner Shelf has plenty of iceberg-appropriate items to help you do your jobs. In "Notes from the Field," I talk to a library that lends musical instruments. Audio Editor Heather Booth provides some audiobook selections for couples with different reading tastes. There's a Top 10, a book from the backlist, a roundup of professional reading titles, and more. Including! A new feature from our friends at ALA Editions—an excerpt from a professional reading title that comes with a discount code. (And for those of you wondering if I spent my evening getting into a Twitter debate about readers' advisory practices with a civilian: I did not. Instead, I picked three random good books (Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, by Heidi Durrow; and Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia) and called it a night.) Happy reading! —Susan Maguire  Senior Editor, Collection Management and Library Outreach, Booklist  smaguire@ala.org  @Booklist_Susan

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