Becky’s RA Training Tips For a Great 2015: Part 4 of 4-- Spend Time With Colleagues

To wrap up this beginning of the year pep talk meant to get you excited about increasing and enhancing your RA skills, I have the most social idea of the week-- Spend Time With Your Colleagues. Yes, I am telling you to hang out with your library friends while getting paid for it!

The posts on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, although all good continuing education tips are mostly solitary activities.  You can learn a lot on your own, but you ALWAYS learn more by taking your solid base of knowledge and pooling it with the knowledge of others.

Find time to get together with like minded folks and talk about books, RA, and working with patrons together.

Readers of this blog know that I am on the Steering Committee for the Adult Reading Round Table, the oldest organized group of RA librarians in the country. I know I am lucky to live in the Chicago area so that I can be a part of it, but just because you don't live near me doesn't mean you can't meet up with colleagues too.

Most library systems or consortia have networking groups that get together on a variety of topics. Click here to see the breadth of offerings by my library system. Why not start one for those of you who work with leisure readers?  You can even begin your meetings by trying out one of the training tips from this week of posts and talk about your experiences, challenges, and successes together.

If you cannot get together physically with other librarians, start a regional listserv. Or join the well established community on Fiction-L and participate in the rich discussions that have been going on there for years. Fiction-L has a fantastic archive too.

But if these ideas are unworkable for your situation, meetings like the BPL's Book Lover's Club are a great option.  From our website:

 On the last Tuesday of odd numbered months the Book Lovers Club meets atOlive or Twist ( 6906 Windsor Ave, Berwyn) at 7pm.  We don’t discuss one book, but lots of titles! Participants come each month to talk about what they have read and loved, then mingle and chat with other book lovers. This eclectic martini bar offers a refreshing backdrop to thoughtful literary conversations.

It’s social networking for book lovers, but the old fashioned way…in person.

I love the community of book talking we have created with the Book Lover's Club.  We are all sharing our favorite reads and talking about books, authors, readalikes, and even publishing trends. These meetings are fun, useful, and professionally fulfilling for me.

No matter how you decide to engage with and share ideas with fellow RA librarians and/or book lovers from any walk of life, it is a key part of becoming better at serving leisure readers. In a vacuum you can only learn so much. Pooled together, our knowledge, ideas, and experiences can enrich our patrons' lives, connect more people with the perfect book, and pass on a lifelong love of reading.

Book Lovers Club Tonight and More ALA Midwinter Info

I will be thawing out with fellow book lovers tonight at the new Wishbone that just opened next door to Olive or Twist in Berwyn.  Click here for more Book Lovers Club details.

We are normally filled up, but with the cold I know we have had a few cancellations.  If you want to venture out tonight for food, drinks, and lots of talking books, stop by.

Since I am not going into work until a bit later, I have been spending time looking through more ALA 2014 Midwinter reports.  The best place to begin is with Twitter by following #alamw14.  Many people are on their way home and posting slides, videos, and reports.  Click through now, and check back over the rest of the week.  It seems like a productive meeting with lots of good information coming out.

Book Lover's Club Tonight

Just a reminder that it is the last Tuesday of an odd numbered month, so join me for Book Lover's Club.

Here is the link to the BPL's page with all of the details on when and where, plus past month's lists of the books people talked about, including notes on what they said.

I am going to talk about Life After Life by Kate Atkinson tonight. It is hands down the best book I have read this year.

What I'm Reading: A Land More Kind Than Home

Yesterday, I reminded you about the Browser's Corner, and working on my review for this book is why it was in the front of my brain.  Let me explain. At our May 29th meeting of the Book Lover's Club Alena said this about A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash:

"This is a debut novel by a southern writer.  This book got a rare five stars from me.  It is about a creepy preacher man in the North Carolina mountains who handles snakes.  Of course he is crooked but no one can prove it.  You have these ugly horrible people and this gorgeous writing.  The action is in 48 hours.  It is not pleasant; there is no hero, there is killing, death and destruction.  But the whole thing ends the way it should end.  Cash is a writer to watch.  I love Southern fiction and religious extremism as a background to novels.  A down and dirty book that has writing that elevates it."

When the Book Lover's Club meets on the last Tuesday of odd numbered months, I take notes on what the participants have to say about the book they have come to share.  We then post the notes on the Browser's Corner, here.  These notes serve as an annotated reading list of patron picks for both the members of the group to go back and look at, and for any one to peruse.  The Book Lover's Club notes on their own are a fabulous RA tool, and they are just one section of The Browser's Corner.

Needless to say, after that description by Alena, I put the book on hold for myself the next day, got it within a week, and finished it right away.  I have to agree with everything she said.

This is a beautifully wrought story that at every turn gives you more than you expected.  The "plot" involves the killing of a mute child at a prayer "healing" by the creepy preacher mentioned above.  But we know from the first pages that the child will die.  Thus, this novel is not about the murder.  It is about rural communities and the intimate links between the people who live there.  And it is about the setting.  In the end this is a story where a drama unfolds, a conflict which has it roots back a generation from the current murder, and once we reach the last page, everything has changed and yet, at the same time, we are back to the way it always was.

That is the general review.  Here are some specific things I want to point out about the appeal of this novel.  I would classify this book as psychological suspense meets Souther Gothic.

First let's look at its psychological suspense aspects. Terrible stuff happens, and we see it unfold from the point of view of the murdered boy's younger brother, the female town elder/midwife [she is the moral center of this community], and its current Sheriff.  The story is bleak and atmospheric. The tension is thick, and I was on the edge of my chair turning the pages with trepidation both wanting, and not wanting, to know what would happen next. It is intricately plotted, with layers overlapping and time frames shifting, but the style adds to the uneasy atmosphere and provides key details to the story.  But again, it is not straight suspense or mystery because the investigation is not part of the story.  The reader knows what happened and why; the murderer is never in question.  The questions come from how people will react.

Second, and probably even more key to whether or not someone will like this novel is its deep roots into the Southern Gothic tradition.  This is a lyrically written novel in which the setting [North Carolina hill country] is a character.  Cash describes the tough landscape and its weathered people, but with an obvious affection.  His love for the place is evident despite the bleakness of the story.

Another key thing in A Land More Kind Than Home is the characterization.  The setting and characters go hand in hand.  Without careful construction of fleshed out characters whose motivations, history, and present situations we truly understand, Cash's carefully constructed novel falls flat.

A Land More Kind Than Home is a novel you experience.  While there is not fast-paced action, the novel's contradiction of the beautiful language with the horrible actions compelled me to stay in my seat and keep reading the pages.  While technically I would classify the novel as leisurely paced, I was so enchanted by the world Cash created that I read it in 2 sittings.

I can't wait to read Cash's second novel.

Three Words That Describe This Book: lyrical, mutliple points of view, atmospheric

Readalike:  Wiley Cash's novel is everything people always claim  John Hart is.  Hart doesn't do it for me as you can see here, but many people do enjoy Hart's North Carolina set suspense novels, so I think he is a good suggestions option for some readers.

But the author Cash most reminds me of is the great Joyce Carol Oates.  Of course, Cash has 1 novel and Oates is one of our greatest living American writers, but I see a lot of Oates in Cash.  A good similar read here would be The Falls.

The Cove by Ron Rash which also came out this spring, is a suspense story which hinges on its North Carolina setting and is probably as close to perfect a match as you could get here.  At the same May 29, 2012 Book Lover's Club, Marilyn had this to say about The Cove:

"I was immediately caught by the cover - a stream with wooded hills on both sides and the back of a woman with long hair wading in the water.  There is a brief introduction by the author which says that during WWI Germans in America were taken to internment camps. It is set in the backwoods of North Carolina.  It starts in the 1930s with a man who is doing a land survey.  He is from out of town and not feeling very welcome.  He finds an abandoned well and pulls out a skull.  Flash back to 1918 where a young sister and brother are trying to run their farm after their parents die.  The sister helps a man who has been stung by wasps and she finds a note in his pocket that says I am a mute and trying to get to New York and that is all I will say…"

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier shares the southern setting, lyrical language, and vivid characterizations with A Land More Kind Than Home. They also share a shifting point of view and a storyline in which characters must come terms with the difficulty of their life situation.

A suggestion that is a little more off the beaten path would be Alden Bell's The Reapers Are the Angels. Like Cash's novel, Bell's is also a psychological suspense story merged with a Southern Gothic feel, only in Bell's novel, the characters inhabit a world where they has been a zombie apocalypse.  Take out the zombies though, and they are remarkably similar stories.

And for a cross format watch alike, the entire time I was reading A Land More Kind Than Home, it kept reminding me of the HBO series Carnivale from the early 2000s.  Both have weird preachers and an atmospheric, odd, bleak, yet beautiful story driven by psychological suspense, setting, and characters.  Go seek out the DVDs for the series if you liked this novel.

Berwyn Public Library: No Longer a "Shhh!" Place

This week, the library was the COVER STORY in our local newspaper.  Click here for the article.

After years of Tammy and I and now Kathy fighting to reshape the library's image as a fun and vibrant place, people are finally getting it.  Props to Kathy for getting her catch phrase as the title.  In the RA Department we don't Shhh! anyone; in fact we encourage conversation.

The article begins with a nod to our fabulous Book Lover's Club (which meets again on March 30th, by the way) and also mentions Trivia Night (which meets again March 6th), both of which are run by the BPL RA Dream Team.

So today, I just wanted to toot our horn! And remind you that the Library is a vibrant place.  Come join us for some fun.  Yes we have books and some designated quiet areas off in the corners of the basement, but for the most part you will find us smiling and chatting about what we are reading, watching, and listening to.

Please feel free to share with me some of  the ways your library is trying to shake the "Shhh!" label.

On a related note, we conceived our Book Lover's Club to be a social club for people who like books.  We hoped that by simply coming together to informally share books, people would not only find their next good read, but also meet some new friends.  After 4 meetings this is starting to happen.  Kathy and I couldn't be happier; we are bringing people together through books.  It is a dream come true.

Here's an event for book lover's in NYC which takes our social club to the next logical step...Literary Speed Dating.  If I weren't already happily married, this would be my kind of dating scene.

Have a great weekend.

Book Lover's Club Tonight

Back by popular demand, it is The Berwyn Library's Book Lover's Club, featuring me, Kathy, and you, the book lover, at  Olive or Twist!

Click here for the full info.

Come join us as we moderate a discussion by you, about the books which are captivating you at the moment.  Share your favorite titles, listen to what others have to say about their reads, and go home with a list compiled by us of everything that was discussed.

The idea is that this is a no pressure place way to share books with like minded people. It is part book discussion, part social club...all fun.  The discussion goes from 7-8:15 and then we move to the bar to encourage people to mingle, meet, and continue sharing.

So come and join us.  But please, give us a call first. We are trying to be better prepared for the crowds this time. 708.795.8000 ex 3005.

If you can't make it tonight but want to join us at a future Book Lover's Club, we will always meet on the final Tuesday of odd numbered months.  Huh? Yeah blame me on this one that was my cute idea.  What it means for you normal calendar carrying citizens is that we will gather again on November 29th (same place and time).

Still on the fence, click here to see a sampling of what was discussed back in June at our first meeting.

Book Lovers Club

As I mentioned here, the BPL RA Department had its first ever Book Lovers Club on Tuesday night.  Kathy and I were pleasantly surprised at the turnout (30 people!).  We were overflowing.  But ever better than the turn out was how excited everyone was to come together to talk about books that they love.

For those who want to try a program like this at their own library I will explain how it went.  We were at a restaurant which had a back room set up for us.  Kathy set up the ground rules:

• The library was buying appetizers and non-alcoholic beverages.  Participants were encouraged however to order their own drinks and food if they wanted right at the start to be brought throughout the discussion.
• We asked everyone to introduce themselves and say why they came (ie why they love books).
• We asked each person talk for no more than 2-3 minutes about their book or author and then a few questions could be asked by the group to each person.
• We also told everyone that this was as much a chance to share our favorite books as it was a social club.  So after everyone had a chance (or 2) we were going to leave the second hour for less formal mingling.  And in fact, that was what happened.  At about 8:15 everyone got up and talked in small groups around the room and others moved into the bar.  Kathy, Jose (another BPL employee but there for the fun) and I were the last to leave at 10:30.
• Finally, with such a big group, we split into 2 smaller groups with Kathy and I each leading a table.

So that's the set up.  Below I will provide a list of what books my table talked about, as well as a few of the participants' comments.  Everyone was super happy that Kathy and I were taking notes.  I think this was a key to the night's success.  As people came in they were anxious about getting all of the suggestions written down.  They came as much to share their favorite books as they did to get new reading suggestions.  Assuring them that we had it covered and that we would get everyone a list was a vital component to their enjoyment.

We did pass around an email and phone number sign-up sheet.  Kathy and I will type up the reading list which was created that night and post it on the Browsers Corner.  We will be creating a new page there in the coming weeks where we will continue to catalog the list of books spawned by this group over time.

Yes, over time.  It was such a hit, we are doing it again, for sure!  Kathy and I will meet in August to nail down the details, but it looks like The Book Lovers Club may be come an every other month social club event.

I for one am excited about the opportunity.  I feel this is a program not offered by any library I know of in the area.  Since it is not a book discussion group, but rather a social club for readers, I think we have a great opportunity to reach a whole new audience.  I will be writing an article for NoveList about this program in the Fall also, so that we can share our success with others.

Now on to my table's suggestions, with links to the record in our catalog.  Remember the full list will be available next week at the Browsers' Corner.  The comments are theirs (not mine unless noted).

Finally, please notice how when given only 2 minutes to share a book, people do NOT waste time on plot.  Every single participant spent their time on why they loved the book, and what it was about (the plot) does not figure into that very highly.

• In the Woods by Tana French (suggested by me, comments from here): In the Woods can best be described as, police procedural meets psychological suspense.  This is a dark book, with an extremely flawed narrator.  Bad things are happening here and even when the crime is "solved," no one is satisfied; in fact, just about everyone involved with the case has been ruined as a result of the investigation.   And the kicker is, you know that it will not end well from the start, but you are so compelled by the complex plot, the interesting, 3-dimensional characters and their interactions that you cannot look away. 
• Devil in the White City by Erik Larson: I heard it was interesting when it came out, but never got around to reading it.  When I read it I got a lot more than I expected.  The narrative style was compelling; it draws you in.  If you are a Chicagoan, you have to read this book!
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov: This is the best book I have ever read in my life! It has three plot lines that slowly come together.  It begins with the Devil coming to town with a talking cat.  I find it captivating and have read it 15 times.
• God Knows by Joseph Heller: Most people know Catch-22.  This is the story of David, from the Bible, but with a modern twist.  It is humorous and gently blasphemous.
• Agatha Christie and Janet Evanovich: This person suggested 2 authors.  Christie because she is not brutal with her mysteries, but they are always clever and convoluted.  She stays a step ahead of the reader.  Evanovich because they are fun, bright, and snappy.  Her novels are some of the only books where as I am reading to myself, I literally laugh out loud.
• Lee Child: You  don't have to read the Jack Reacher series in order, which is nice.  Although they are modern suspense, they feel like an old time Western-- good guy rides into town and fixes everything before riding out again.
• Tony Hillerman: He wrote great murder mysteries immersed in the Navajo Indian culture.
• Ahab's Wife by Sena Jester Naslund: This book was a lucky accident.  A friend just handed me a book and said you'll love it.  I was a bit worried because it was thick and based on Moby Dick, which I hate!  But, I loved it.  It is one of my favorite books.  I loved how it wove in different pieces of history.
• Marshall Field's: The Store That Helped Build Chicago by Gayle Soucek: This is a nonfiction book about the store and the man who started it.  If you are from Chicago you will like this.  I was surprised by how much I liked it.  I learned how Fields was the man who first brought women into shopping.
• Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks: I love historical fiction in general and Brook specifically.  I cannot stop thinking about this book.  She constantly gives me the history and new information I crave, but I am also invested in her characters.  She always starts with one small fact in the fringes of history and then uses her imagination to fill it all in.
• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson: Although it was nonfiction it read like a novel to me.  Centered around 3 people; one who went to Chicago in the 1930s, one who went to NYC in the 40s and one who went to CA in the 50s.  I lived through much of this time, and even for me, it changes the way you think.  Today we tend to forget the struggle African Americans had so recently.  (Eds note: I promised the group I would share this link to the reading map my student Jeanne did on this book last semester).
• You're Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation by Deborah Tannen: I love how she dissects how we communicate with each other.  This is something you don't consciously think about, and reading about it is fascinating.
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace: It is very long, but if you read it in pieces it is worth it.  It still stays with me.  It is about the mundanity of life, yet also how at the same time how wonderful and magical life is.  I compare it to the years of raising my small children.  There is a tension between how bored out of your head you can be while at the same time you know that it is glorious to watch your small children grow.
• The Radleys by Matthew Haig (me): This is a family drama, about family tensions and secrets and how they can eat a family apart.  It just so happens that the secret these parents are keeping form their children is that they are all abstaining vampires.  It is similar to Tom Perrotta or Elizabeth Berg.  This is a great choice for people who think they would hate a "vampire" book.
• Dracula in Love by Karen Essex:  The story of Dracula from Nina's perspective.  No fangs here; it is a historical story of Nina discovery who she really is.  There is also reincarnation.
• Shirley Jackson: I like scary, creepy stories.  She is horrifying with no blood or guts. Particularly, the story "We Have Always Lived in a Castle," still gnaws at me. Why don't they ever leave the house? When the twist comes, it is bad.
• Damon Runyon: I like him because he writes about lots of different subjects but for all he romanticizes them in a way that makes me love them too.
• New Miss India by Bharati Mukherjee: New book about present day India.  A girl in a backwater town escapes an arranged marriage.  Great story.
• Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones: It has a great first line, " My father James Bigelow is a bigamist." It is the fascinating story of his two families, one which knows of the other family, the other which does not.  It is told from the alternating points of view of a daughter in each family.
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak: I have read so many books about Nazi Germany, yet this one was still fresh and original.  I liked how I had a view from a little town and saw the day to day life of ordinary German citizens.
• A few books/authors mentioned in passing at the end: The Immortal Life of Henreitta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga and Jane Austen.