BPL Book Club News and My Upcoming Patron Training...Free and Open to the Public!

It is the third Monday of the month and a little later today my book discussion group will be meeting to talk about The Housekeeper and the Professor  by Yoko Ogawa, which, if you want I teaser, I wrote about here.

As I prepare for our meeting today, I noticed these nice words over on Book Group Buzz from Ted Balcom about "Boosting Book Clubs in Berwyn." Ted lists some of the resources I have highlighted on our current "Book Club Favorites" display.

 But, as I commented on Ted's post, I also want to let everyone out there know that the good job we are doing with our book clubs here at Berwyn goes back to Ted's influence. Ted taught me how to lead a book club when I was in library school. So thanks for the solid foundation Ted.

Checkout the post to get some links to energize your book club. And just read Book Group Buzz in general. I subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you want to come and see me live (and for free) talking to actual book club participants about how to energize your book club, come and see me on May 25th at 7pm at the Fremont Public Library District in Mundelein, IL. Click here to register.

If you cannot make it, remember, the presentation materials will be available here in the coming days.

New Pages Added

In case you haven't noticed, I have been adding new content to the blog by posting  pages in the right hand gutter. Like this:

Pages

• Home
• Recent Presentations
• RA for All...The Road Show!
• Reading Maps

Right now I have a page enititled "Reading Maps," which is a replication of my student's reading map archive.

I also have a page entitled, "Recent Presentations" with all of the handouts and power points of, you guessed it, my most recent presentations. These are available both to program attendees and any blog readers for about 60 days.

After posting the recent presentations I realized that I do not have a listing anywhere of all of the programs I have done in the past. That page is called, "RA for All...The Road Show!" and will eventually list all of the programs I have ever done and other topics I could do. No documents though, just a listing.

Please feel free to leave comments on the pages with suggestions or requests to be contacted for further information. I get all comments forwarded to me before they are posted, so if you are nervous about your contact info being posted, I can get it this way without the comment appearing on the blog.

I am also in the VERY early stages of getting RA for All: Horror, the horror only version of RA for All, up and running. I will keep you posted, but look for it to be unveiled at the end of the summer.

Customer Service

I was finishing up my presentation coming on May 18th at the North Suburban Library System entitled, "Basic RA for Public Desk Staff." and I realized that I hadn't posted about Customer Service in a while.
 
At the BPL RA desk we have 2 mantras:

1. Never let a patron leave unsatisfied
2. Try to never say "no."

These are 2 variations on a similar theme; the theme of putting the patron first. Now I do want to clarify that I am realistic. If a patron comes in today looking for The Help, I will not have it and she will have to wait. But when I offer to take hold, I also offer to send them home with something else right now. They may not want it but the offer goes a long was toward making the patron leave satisfied that they were helped.

Here are some of my other tried and true examples of good customer service: with links to the BPL's examples (where applicable). All of these have the same result...satisfied patrons:

• Listen to patrons
• Remember names
• Print out lists for later
• Treat phone patrons the same as those in library 
• Take reserve-offer another book for today
• Call other libraries to pull and hold books for your patrons
• Offer homebound/home delivery of books
• Holds Without Hassle
• Leave out return carts for browsing: patrons love it
• Have chairs to sit in and/or places to put books down
• Keep shelves neat and clean-- Weed!
• Keep catalog records accurate
• Offer lots of lists--everywhere! In building and on the web [Click here, here, and here for examples of lists that can be found in both places @ the BPL]
• Anticipate popular trends; be prepared for alternative options on heavy holds (we updated our Urban Fiction list as Precious was becoming popular)

Also, please make sure to read my "Get off your Butt!" rant here.

Now stop reading this and get out there and help some patrons.

What I'm Reading: The Weed That Strings The Hangman's Bag

Last year I couldn't stop raving about Alan Bradley's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie which introduced the world to the fabulous Flavia de Luce, an 11-year-old, poisons loving sleuth in 1950s rural England.

I originally wrote about Flavia in this post, and over on the Browser's Corner I have written this shelf talker about the book:

 In this fresh and intelligent cozy, readers are swept back in time to rural England in 1950. Flavia de Luce, an 11 year-old aspiring chemist with an interest in poisons, finds a man lying in her garden, taking his last breaths. Readers will root for Flavia, who is just old enough to look out for herself but has not yet lost her adventurous spirit, as she investigates this mysterious death and ends up entangled in a decades old rare stamp smuggling ring.

[Oh, and as I promised to reveal in last week, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie was the book I bought for the moms for Mother's Day this year.]

So it should come as no surprise that I was excited to read the next Flavia de Luce mystery which came out last month, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag. And, I am happy to report that I enjoyed the second installment as much, if not more than the first.

It is only a few months later and Flavia still lives with her Dad and two sisters in a dilapidated manor house.  She meets a BBC puppeteer and his assistant who have broken down near the churchyard. Turns out the puppeteer has been here before, but when he is murdered, Flavia needs to reconstruct how and why someone would kill him, digging into the death of a young boy a few years before in the process. The two are tied together by weed and a hanging, but how? Read it for yourself to find out.

A patron and I were talking about the novel and we both agreed that although the appeal of discovering and slowly falling in love with Flavia could not be replicated in this second installment, we did appreciate that Bradley improved in his storytelling here. In the first book, Bradley seemed to have trouble resolving the mystery and had to put Flavia in mortal danger in order to wrap things up. Here Flavia is never in danger, yet she still solves the case. I think that is a sign of Bradley's maturity. The story was just as compelling without me having to worry about Flavia surviving.

It is also worth remembering that Bradley's series is a cozy. Why does this matter? Because a cozy is more about the characters and the frame (setting, time period, chemistry details, etc...) than the mystery. Cozies are appealing without the mystery; the mystery is simply a plot device to let the reader enter a world full of interesting characters and background details. The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag is a perfect example of this.

Three Words That Describe This Book: cozy mystery, original, captivating

Readalikes: Following I have re-posted the suggestions I first made for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, but first here are a few more new suggestions.

As I mentioned here, another new series with a great sleuth and an interesting frame follows Tarquin Hall's Indian PI Vish Puri.  Beginning with The Case of the Missing Servant, Puri, the owner of Delhi's Most Private Investigators Ltd., is a detective in the classic sense of Sherlock Holmes, but he uses very modern technology to solve this complicated case. I loved how the book was modern and old fashioned, all at the same time, much like the city of Delhi and the country of India itself is portrayed.  Click here for my full review of Hall's novel. The next installment of the Puri mysteries is due out in early June.

Besides the suggestions below, I would also suggest the Maisie Dobbs Mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear and the Spellman mysteries by Lisa Lutz (reviews here).

Suggestions from the first time I read a Flavia book (June 2009):

Other cozy mysteries with intriguing and original narrators that may appeal to readers of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie are the mysteries of Bradley's fellow Canadian Louise Penny. Her Three Pines mystery series is set in a small Quebec village. The first is Still Life.

If you liked the original voice and unique setting in Bradley's novel as well as the eccentric characters, you should also try Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. When I was reading Flavia's story I realized that I hadn't been so taken in by both a narrator and a setting since I had first read Precious Ramotswe's tale of solving problems in Botswana.

For more cozy reading suggestions, visit the Cozy Library.

A few reviews also mentioned how Flavia is reminiscent of Harriet the Spy.

Those who liked this book but want a little more sarcasm (this book has none), I would suggest Confessions of a Teen Sleuth by Chelsea Cain, which is the fictional biography of Nancy Drew.

In terms of nonfiction, readers may want to try these books about stamp collecting, poisons/chemistry, and rural England in the 1950s.

Booklist's Crime Fiction Free Webinar

Our fearless leader Kathy attended the live viewing of Booklist's webinar entitled, "Crime Fiction Past and Present" last week. Her report: it is worth your time, especially the parts where David Wright from the Seattle Public Library and Jessica Tribble of Poisoned Pen Press talk.

The focus of this presentation was on new crime fiction, backlist treasures, and identifying readalike options.

Thanks to Booklist for both offering these Webinars and for making them free to view on their website after the fact.  Click here to experience Crime Fiction Past and Present for yourself. Or view it embedded below:

Crime Fiction Past and Present from ALA Publishing on Vimeo.

One final note, I got a survey from Booklist today (which I filled out) asking me what kind of webinars I would like to see in the future. Look for more to come, but for now you can click here to see all of the past webinars.

RA for All Featured on RA Online

Too many RAs in the title, here I know, but I just wanted to thank Sarah Statz Cords over at the RA Online Blog for her nice words about me and this blog:

"Her topics are timely, her information solid, her posts filled with helpful links, and perhaps most importantly, her tone honest and personable."

Click here for the full post that is all about RA for All.

You should also check out Sarah's awesome Nonfiction blog, Citizen Reader.

10 Worst Mothers in Fiction

In preparation for Mother's Day Lit Lists published this list of the 10 Worst Mothers in Fiction.

Originally compiled last year by BookFinder.com last year, this list makes all of us mother's look pretty darn good. Especially that Flowers in the Attic Mom. That really is a great choice for #1 worst mother. Yikes!

Laura Bush Memoir

Like it or not for 8 years the country had Laura Bush as our national example of a librarian.

I will be up front that I was not a Bush supporter, but Laura always intrigued me. She had what seemed like the traditional stand-by-your-man attitude and demeanor, but she was a working mom before George's political career and seemed to genuinely be interested in reading and talking about books. It always annoyed me that she had an empty smile and vacant stare, when I knew there was real substance behind it.

But because of the respect people had for her literary prowess, her new memoir is getting a lot of media attention.

Yesterday, as I was driving home from an ARRT Steering Committee meeting, I heard this interview with Laura Bush on All Things Considered.

No matter their politics, I think people will be interested in hearing what the former first lady has to say about her life. She kept her opinions to herself while living in the blinding spotlight of the White House for 8 years, and now people are literally lining up to read her book. Holds are pretty high, even in Democratic strongholds like Berwyn.

Click on over and listen to the interview or read some reviews of Spoken From the Heart.

Also, I want to remind people of a read alike here. Back while Laura was still the First Lady, Curtis Sittenfeld wrote American Wife, a thinly veiled, fictional memoir of the life of a woman very similar to Laura Bush.  I think a side-by-side reading would be an interesting experience.

New Reading Maps Added

Finals for GSLIS 763 are tonight, and new reading map urls are going up on the class blog as I receive them from students.  I usually direct readers of this blog to the archive to see what students have been working on, but today I was blown away by how many maps we have accumulated over the last 2 years (28 and counting), and feel the need to duplicate the list here. But first, a few comments...

When I started the class blog I was driven by the desire to share the great RA work our students were doing each and every week. Just the wealth of information, readalikes, and searchable appeal terms that are now accessible to anyone through the posting of their weekly annotations is worth the blog's existence. And no, the annotations are not perfect, but they are clearly labeled as being by students, and as a group, they are becoming a valuable RA resource.

However, adding the Reading Map Archive to the blog was for purely selfish reasons. I wanted to make sure I had access to these maps long after the students had moved on. But see for yourself below-- we have 28 great maps as of right this minute and that number will only grow. Each semester more students attempt a reading map as one of their 2 big projects (they have 5 choices).

For the record, our reading map assignment is based on this article by Neal Wyatt in Library Journal (11/2006). Thanks to Neal for leading the way.

So, here is the list, directly copied from the class blog. Click on one and start your virtual journey through a book. Also, use them to help identify readalikes or suggestions for you or your readers:

• Twilight by Colleen
• The Watchmen by Michelle K.
• A Great and Terrible Beauty by Sarah
• Sandman by Mike
• Plainsong by Anne
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Katy
• The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Marissa
• The Awakening by Allison
• Pride and Prejudice by Elizabeth
• Graphic Novels by Jill
• Fabletown by Chris
• Sookie Stackhouse by Christine
• Julie and Julia by Madeline
• Johnny Got His Gun by Chris
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Russ
• Year of Wonders by Maggie
• American Psycho by Anne
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Elizabeth
• Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Cris
• Shop Class As Soulcraft by Jason
• Big Stone Gap by Jessica
• Ballads of Suburbia by Shannnon
• War for the Oaks by Bethany
• High Fidelity by Kris
• The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Zach
• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Christina
• The National Parks by Elizabeth
• American Gods by Amanda

What I'm Reading: Aloft

Recently, I finished listening to Chang-rae Lee's Aloft. Lee, known for his depictions of Korean Americans, has an interesting protagonist here, an Italian-American, retired landscape company owning, Long Islander named Jerry Battle. Jerry is the patriarch of a family that includes his elderly father and his children from his marriage to a Korean woman (now deceased) named Daisy, Jack, who is slowly running the family business into the ground and Theresa, a graduate student about to marry an Asian American writer. Also playing a big role in the family is Jerry's long-time girlfriend, Rita a Puerto Rican nurse.

Jerry is retired from Battle Brothers landscaping and spends his time working part-time at the local travel agency and flying in his private plane. But Jerry is not a model father, husband, or boyfriend. He is not terrible either. Actually, this is the main problem in Jerry's life and the source of all of the problems plaguing his relationships with family and friends. Jerry has always avoided confrontations and hides his true feelings. At 59 he is in danger of drifting away from everyone and everything that has meaning in his life.

And then, tough circumstances bring his daughter and her fiance back East to live at home. And so the catalyst is introduced to this equation and Jerry's life begins to move forward for the first time in years, but not without problems, setbacks, and heartache. Jerry is forced to deal with life and all of its problems head on, but he is also able to reap the rewards of a life fully lived with feet firmly on the ground.

The appeal of this book lies in a few distinct area. First, there is no question that Lee is a fantastic writer. This book moves fluidly along. It has graceful and moving passages, it has times of reflection, it has action scenes, and Lee easily holds it all together in a moving and steadily building story. Just when the plot could drag, Lee introduces enough drama to keep you turning the pages, or in my case, listening to a few more tracks.

This is also a book for people who like a domestic-centered, character driven story. Here our main character is a complex, middle aged man sandwiched between his elderly father and his grown kids. He is having a minor mid-life crisis, but handling everything as it comes at him. Although he has made his share of missteps and his life is not without tragedy, he comes out the other side of the novel on the upswing; which in and of itself is refreshing for serious literary fiction.   The ending is not all happy, I should warn you though, but it is a classic example of bittersweet.

There are also some great secondary characters like Jerry's powerful lawyer friend, the elderly Battle Brothers accountant, Jerry's cranky dad, Jerry's travel agent office mates, and Paul, Theresa's fiance, to name only a few.

Finally, you cannot overlook the appeal of the main theme of Aloft, which is interracial families and the multicultural blending of modern Americans. Jerry is the patriarch of an Italian-Korean-American family with a Puerto Rican girlfriend. Lee has Jerry ponder how he got to be the head of such a blended family and what it all means, if anything at all.

Three Words That Describe This Book: character-driven, compelling, interracial families

Readalikes: Showing its age, the reviews of this 2004 novel mention it as a readalike to the then popular, but now not so much, About Schmidt by Louis Begley.  Begley's novel is worth a look for fans of Aloft who missed About Schmidt the first time around (or vice versa). John Updike's Rabbit novels were also mentioned by reviewers. Although I agree, I kept thinking more of Richard Ford's Bascombe trilogy and the novels of Richard Russo.

Specifically for Russo, I found Aloft very similar to Bridge of Sighs on many different levels. Click here to see what I said about Bridge of Sighs when I read it. I also listened to both novels and am pretty sure that they share the same reader, which may be influencing my suggestion here.

For a book with very similar themes but with younger protagonists, try The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Nonfiction about suburban sprawl (there is a lot about the history of the migration to the LI suburbs here), aviation, and interracial families (use the link to see suggestions of other titles too) could all be of interest to fans of Aloft.