Holiday Book Lists

I haven't talked about some of my favorite resources for book lists in a while and I thought with Thanksgiving tomorrow, now would be a good time both to mention them and use them to find Thanksgiving books.

Library Booklists is a compilation of book lists from libraries all over the world. If you have a topic, setting, character, genre, or really just about anything you want a book list on, Library Booklists has compiled it for you.

Case in point, here is the link to holiday lists. And here is the link that gets you to Fall and Fall Holidays directly. Scroll on down for something to read this week as you give thanks.

I always have a link to this useful website in my "RA Blogs and Sites to Checkout" list in the right gutter of this blog.

Fiction-L, a listserv for RA librarians also has a great archives of lists to be found here. Use it to find something different to read, or click here for a list of suggested Thanksgiving titles.

Since the lists are generated by the discussions that are constantly occurring on the listserv, there are new offerings all of the time.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Shelf Renewal Has Moved

In this post I mentioned the new blog, Shelf Renewal, by my friends Rebecca and Karen.

Since that original post, their blog has been bought by Library Journal. Go here to follow their relocated blog. After some initial growing pains, it is all set up for your subscription.

And, of course, you'll want to read this post.

Best Lists-- Looking Back and Looking Forward

Tired of trying to catch up with the best of 2009? Why not revisit the past decade's best or get a jump on 2010 instead?

Paste Magazine has been posting many lists of the best books, music, TV and movies of the decade. Click here to see them all. My favorite two are their lists of the 20 Best Books of the Decade and their 10 Best Debut Novels of the Decade. I have read 6 of the 10 Debut novels already and highly recommend them all.

If you are more of a "don't look back" kind of person, my go to resource for all things speculative, io9, posted this list of SF novels they are excited to read in 2010.

So there are many options for all types of readers. You can also access any "best lists" I have ever posted using this link.

BPL Book Discussion: Olive Kitteridge

This past Monday, my ladies and I met at the BPL to discuss Olive Kitterridge, the winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, by Elizabeth Strout. I read this book about 9 months ago for the first time and this is an excerpt from what I said about it then:

Olive Kitteridge is the story of the eponymous woman. She is a retired middle school teacher in a small town in coastal Maine. Olive has a husband and one distant son, she is crotchety and probably suffers from untreated depression. Sounds like fun, huh? It is though because what makes this story so engrossing, goes way beyond who Olive is. Strout's choice to reveal Olive through connected stories, all told from different points of view (including Olive's) gives the reader a unique experience. We learn about Olive, her family, and her town. We get intimate portraits of many of the inhabitants of Crosby, Maine. And although Olive is an abrasive woman, at the conclusion of the 13th story, the reader sees her finally moving toward an
understanding of herself and what her behavior means to those around her.

Click here for my full report including some readalikes (I will have a few more at the end of this post.)

On to our discussion. I began with the following quote from Strout (which I got from the NoveList book discussion guide for the book)

I don't have a stake in whether people like Olive. Some people have told me they absolutely love her, and some people have said they can't stand her but they're still very drawn to the book. ...I hope that even if they have a negative response to much of Olive's behavior, they are maybe still drawn into this humanity that is underneath all of her action(s).

I then immediately asked the group, "Did you like Olive?" The most common response was, "yes and no." Some comments were that Olive was real, she was like actual people the participants knew. Stories were shared of friends and family who are "just like Olive."

More general comments about Olive:

• she irratated people, but they saw her humanity
• she had falshes of true compassion and caring
• she was opinionated and brusque, but still fragile
• Olive was the best representation of older people that my group of (mostly) senior citizens had read
  
• ...and my favorite: Olive had a shell around her; for us to get through we need the views of all the townspeople.

This last comment led us to discuss the format. Strout wrote Olive Kitteridge as 13 linked stories. For the most part it alternates back and forth between stories where Olive is the main character and those where she is more peripheral. These "periphery" stories range from Olive being a participant in the story, to barely making it into a crowd scene, to not being there at all, but mentioned by a character.

The group was mixed about the format. A few participants don't like short stories, so they were turned off from the start. But others liked how it was "a different way of writing." They enjoyed how Olive's character was developed through other people's eyes. We all were happy for the portrait it painted of the town of Crosby, Maine. Without the story format and the shifting points of view, we would have only had a story about Olive. Instead we also got a story about a town and its residents over time.

But no matter the opinion on the format, surprisingly, everyone enjoyed the experience of getting to know Olive and Crosby, Maine.

We also spent time discussing Olive relationship with Henry (her husband), Christopher (her son), and Jack, her "friend" at the end of the book.

I ended the discussion by going through the "non-Olive" stories and giving people a chance to comment on them. A few led to a couple of comments, but it was clear that, as a group, we were more drawn to the Olive stories.

We ended as someone said that this whole book is about life as an experience. We take the good and the bad and it makes a life. Well said.

Readalikes: As I mentioned above, I read this book earlier this year and if you click here, you can see some readalikes. To that list I would add Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson for those who want to read another novel in stories; any book of stories by Alice Munro, who is both one of the best short story writers today and one of Strout's favorite authors; any book by fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Hijuelos, whose novels about Cuban Americans have an episodic feel, and are about both individual people and a larger community, like Olive Kitteridge.

National Book Award Winners

NBA's were announced tonight and Galley Cat was Live Blogging at the event.

Full and official results here.

Student Annotations: Special Reading Interests

Tonight we talked about the fact that in every community there are special interests you need to be aware of. The four most popular special reading interests in the Chicagoland area are Inspirational Literature (both religious and non-religious), African American Literature, Latino/a Literature, and Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Literature.

These are not genres, but rather specific interest areas which include books in all genres. It is also important to note that you do not have to "be" in one of these groups to read books in these special reading interest areas.

My students read some books in these 4 categories and posted about them on the Word Press blog.

Since people are less familiar with these areas I thoughts I'd also share just one web resource from each area.

Inspirational: Beliefnet
African American: African American Literature Book Club
Latino/a: The Boston Public Library's Latino Life Bookmarks
GLBTQ: I'm Here, I'm Queer. What the Hell Do I Read?

Use the resources or the student blog to find something new to read.

Forum On the State of Crime Fiction

The Huffington Post has been trying to increase their book coverage, in order to compete with their rival, The Daily Beast.

We, leisure readers, are the beneficiaries of their on-going battle for readers. Case in point, today's post by thriller writer, and Huffington Post blogger, Jason Pinter. He gathered six well known crime fiction reviewers and asked them a series of questions about the current world of crime fiction.

This is a must read for any librarian or reader, for that matter. This idea of "crime fiction" which combines some (but not all) books in the following genres-- mystery, thriller, suspense, romantic suspense, and even psychological suspense-- is something I have been interested in for a while, both as a reader and as someone who helps leisure readers. Click here for other posts where I have mused on crime fiction. This link will lead you to a lot more resources.

Keeping Up With the Year End Best Lists

Even I have a hard time keeping up with all of the best lists that come out this time of year; so I rely on the help of other great resources. Which leads me to point out a particularly important rule of being a librarian. Librarians do not know all the answers. We know where to find them though.

Early Word, is also trying to stay on top of it for all of us. Click here for a link to their spreadsheet of all the major bests lists (it is toward the bottom of the post).

But even Early Word cannot keep up, so following their lead, I will direct you to Largehearted Boy's self proclaimed compiled list of every best book list. Use this link to get the first post, and then follow his daily update link.

And, if this is all too much for you to keep up with, those of us in the RA department at the Berwyn Public Library will be putting up a comprehensive display of all the "best" book of 2009 up for you in January-- when you finally have the time to read them.

BPL Displays: November 2009

This month we are featuring 2 displays with annotated lists at the Berwyn Library.

The small display has novels with recipes, so you can enjoy a good story and get ideas for all of your upcoming holiday feasts.

The tall display has been up for a week already and is extremely popular. It is filled with first books in some great series. If you like to read books in a series, then stop by this display to get some new ideas.

Don't forget we keep all of our past annotated lists archived here.

What I'm Reading: The Guinea Pig Diaries

Not only does my husband subscribe to Esquire, where A J Jacobs is the Editor-at-Large, but I have read all three of his books, and one even made it to my favorite books of the year list. So of course I put my name on the hold list for his newest, The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life As an Experiment. His other two books follow his exploits through a full year: reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica one year and living his life to the standards of the Bible for another.

Guinea Pig Diaries is different in that it is a series of essays recounting shorter experiments. My favorites were when he outsourced his professional and personal life to India, the month he tried not to multitask at all, and the month he did whatever his wife told him.

Guinea Pig Diaries would be a good introduction to Jacobs' writing style which is funny, but personal. His works are about him trying something, but they are also a memoir of his life with his wife, kids, family and friends. He takes himself seriously enough that his experiments are worthwhile, and he pokes enough fun at himself to keep you smiling. He also learns something from each experiment and ends each with a coda outlining how his experiment has changed him.

However, unlike his first two books, which followed an experiment over an entire year, some of the essays in Guinea Pig Diaries, in which all experiments are only for 1 month, are not as compelling as stories in and of themselves.

Overall, Guinea Pig Diaries will appeal to readers who want an episodic book which is heartwarming, insightful, thoughtful, introspective and hilarious all at the same time.

Readlikes: Jacobs is one of the most popular authors in the genre that is becoming known as "Year in the Life." Those of you with access to NoveList, they have a great list under the record for Jacobs' Bible book to get you started (Berwyn patrons, click here). A few highlights from this list are Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody, The Year of Yes: a Memoir by Maria Dahvana Headley, and Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping by Judith Levine.

Jacobs has been described as a modern day George Plimpton. I agree. Plimpton's immersion journalism still has resonance today. I even named my fantasy football team after his classic Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback.

Wall St. Journal sports reporter Stephan Fatsis is another similar author in both tone and subject. He has gone on the professional Scrabble circuit and tried out as a kicker for the Denver Broncos.

David Sedaris and Roy Blount, Jr are also humorists who would appeal to fans of Jacobs. They all use humor as a way to talk abut serious issues. All three also use their personal lives for material.

Jacobs mentions a ton of books throughout Guinea Pig Diaries, and he lists all of them in a chapter by chapter bibliography, but of special interest may be The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis, and Marriage, and A History by Stephanie Coontz.

In terms of fiction, I would suggest anything by Christopher Moore (humor, satire, horror elements), Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon (Jewish, writer, funny), and On Beauty by Zadie Smith (humor, introspective, satire).