Resource Alert: How to Read A Review (Instead of The Book) and the Final Issue of The Corner Shelf for 2023

The last issue of Booklist's Corner Shelf newsletter for 2023 is upend can be read here. 

While all the content in this newsletter is useful, I want to draw your attention, in particular, to Susan's article, Booklist Better:How to Read a Review (Instead of Reading the Book). This is a skill I spent time on with the students when I taught the RA class at the graduate school. And I always used Booklist reviews as my examples.Why? Because Booklist reviews are always written to the best possible reader of the book. They do not waste your time with reviews for a book no one you are serving would like. That focus on writing to the best reader also means that the reviewers (myself included) focus on the appeal of the book and what the author does best. 

I now mention using reviews to help readers without reading a book in all  my programs, but I don't have the time to get into it in depth anymore. Thanks to Susan for breaking it down in detail.

Below is Susan's editor's note for the entire issue with links as well or you can just click here for the whole thing at once.

You can also click here for previous issues as well. Most of the information in this newsletter is evergreen. 

Editor's Note

Hello Shelfers,

It's spooky season, sweater weather, pumpkin spice season, and time to start thinking about the best books of the year. I know! Already!

This is the last issue of Corner Shelf for 2023 (don't be sad! We'll be back in February), and as is tradition, I'm going to share some of my fave reads of the year. There were so many good ones! But if I had to narrow it down, I would put The Hotel of Secrets, by Diana Biller, near the top. It perfectly captures a competent heroine, a delightfully repressed hero, and glittering nineteenth-century Vienna with humor and emotion. But there are others that I can't stop thinking about: Uzma Jalaluddin's effervescent Much Ado about Nada, a Persuasion retelling set in Toronto; Lush Lives, by J. Vanessa Lyon, a hot, perceptive novel about art and authenticity; and the intense, compulsively paced locked-room thriller, There Should Have Been Eight, by Nalini Singh.

If you haven't read any of these, fear not: in a new edition of Booklist Better, I walk you through how to read a review, looking for clues to the appeal of a book so you can talk about it without reading the book. It's not cheating! It's readers' advisory!

Also in this issue of Corner Shelf, we've got a preview of some great forthcoming documentaries from Audio Editor Heather Booth, the top 10 romance novels of 2023, and Excerpt from the Experts about building a manga collection (you know you have patrons who love manga . . . ), and a link to the latest Shelf Care: The Podcast, all about creative ways folks are raising awareness of the rising tide of book challenges and bans.

What cool readers' advisory and collection development stuff are you doing at your library? Share with me and you could be featured in an upcoming Corner Shelf newsletter!

Happy reading, friends.

—Susan Maguire 
Senior Editor, Collection Development and Library Outreach, Booklist 
smaguire@ala.org 
@Booklist_Susan