Dracula's Birthday and a New Authorized Sequel

It was on May 26, 1897 that Dracula by Bram Stoker was first published.

The Rap Sheet did a nice write up to mark the anniversary here. Their post has tons of links and excerpts from some of the original reviews of this mother of all vampire novels.

Although Dracula was not the first vampire novel, it has endured as the most influential. Horror maven that I am marketed to be, I have to admit that I am less interested in today's vampire books, mostly because they tend to be more about romance and less about horror. That being said, Dracula is a great book that has stood the test of time.

Interestingly, Stoker's great-grand nephew will be coming out with Dracula the Un-Dead in time for Halloween 2009. (Thanks Rap Sheet for the heads up) This novel is being hailed as the first authorized Dracula story since the 1931 Bela Lugosi film.

I have a feeling this new novel will be very popular. Libraries, start ordering now.

New Book Discussion Group Beginning at BPL!

Our book discussion groups at BPL are getting so popular that beginning in July we will be adding a Saturday group led by Briana. She has decided to go with a "greatest hits of Berwyn's book discussion" theme. After polling Kathy and me she has come up with the following 6 month schedule (links are to my blog posts about past discussions):

July - My Sister's Keeper
August - Thirteenth Tale
September - River of Doubt
October - Behind the Scenes at the Museum
November - Suite Francaise
December - Loving Frank

Briana's group also highlights the fact that Briana, Kathy, and I take our old book discussion books and create kits that patrons can check out. Each kit contains at least 9 paperback copies of the book, discussion questions and read alike suggestions. Click here to see our full list of available titles.

Kathy and I have also announced our July-December schedule. Click here to see it. We accept anyone who can make it in person to the meetings, whether you live in Berwyn or not.

While I am talking about book discussions I should also mention our list of book discussion resources, available here. Personally, my absolute favorite free resource is Reading Group Guides. I use this to get ideas for titles to discuss, read author interviews, acquire discussion questions, and just to read their great blog.

A new resource I just found is Readers Place. I like this one because it is from the UK and offers a different perspective.

That should keep your book clubs busy for the next few months.

If you have had a great discussion and want to share with the rest of us, let me know.

Joyce Saricks New Genre Book

Speaking of Joyce teaching our class solo this semester, her newly revised genre fiction reference book just came out.

We use this book as the textbook in our Dominican University class and the new edition will be useful to our students and librarians all over the country.

Personally, I an excited to see the finished copy.

Click here or here to order it.

Student Annotations: Fantasy, Western, Historical Fiction

I may not be teaching this semester, but Joyce is and her students put up their first annotations for the "Landscape Genres:" Fantasy, Historical Fiction, and Westerns.

Go on over to our Word Press blog to check them out.

Romance for All

I have talked about Romance getting a bad rap many times on this blog. One of my favorite resources to combat this unfair treatment of romance novels and their readers is the web site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

This no-nonsense web guide to romance has now morphed into a book, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels, which I also purchased for the Berwyn Public Library's collection.

These ladies are pretty amazing. They are tireless in their goal of legitimizing the genre and its readers. For example, a few months ago they went on NPR to try to get the anchor to read a romance. Click here to read all about it.

Kudos to these ladies. Come check out the book at BPL (ignore the non-circ call number; we'll let you check it out if you want to) or go to their website to find the perfect Romance for you.

Is Suite Francaise Historical Fiction? Depends on Who's Asking.

When writing about my book discussion group's meeting on Nemirovisky's book, I forgot to talk about our discussion of historical fiction.

For the record, Suite Francaise is not historical fiction because Nemirovsky was not writing about the past, she was writing contemporary fiction both during and about the 1940s; it was simply not published until recently.

For you librarians, historical fiction is defined as a novel written about a time before the author's birth. So Pride and Prejudice is not historical fiction since Austen was writing about her own time, but the novels of Bernard Cornwell are.

That being said, if our patrons come up talking about how they love historical fiction and you ask what they have read recently and enjoyed and they say, "Suite Francaise," this is not the time for you to correct them. To that reader (to many in fact), Suite Francaise is historical fiction simply because it is about the past and is realistic. Go with their lead and find that reader novels set in the past (whether true historical fiction or not) that would fit with their overall reading tastes.

For specific historical fiction resources to help you help your patrons, click here. For things I have tagged histoical fiction, click here.

BPL Book Discussion: Suite Francaise

This past Monday the group got together for a great discussion of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise. First some background on the book. One reason Suite Francaise makes such a great book discussion book is that it has the powerful double pronged attack....the book itself (really 2 novellas) is a well crafted and entertaining work of literature, while the back story, Nemirovsky's life (and death) story add another dimension to the work. The two are so intertwined, it is impossible to separate her from her novellas.

Suite Francaise is the title Nemirovsky gave for her planned collection of 5 novels about France during WWII. Nemirovsky wrote the first 2 books and outlined the third while she and her family were trying to allude the Germans, who had occupied Paris and its suburbs. As stateless Jews (of Russian descent) Nemirovsky and her husband were subject to deportation. Ultimately, Nemirovsky and her husband were sent to concentration camps (separately) where they died. Their children were hidden and managed to save the manuscripts and notes, which published with her translated notes and correspondences with her husband and publisher once Nemirovsky was arrested by the Germans, make up the book Suite Francaise.

For more on Nemirovsky's story you can go here.

What is so intriguing about this work is that it is almost definitely the earliest work of fiction about WWII. Writing in 1942 about the 1940 fall of Paris and the German occupation of France, Nemirovsky was not even sure where the last 2 unwritten sections of her work would go. The war would have needed to progress further and her life would have needed to be extended for her to figure out where the book would go.

This led our group to discuss how different Suite Francaise was from the myriad of WWII books and novels we have read. This work is not a readalike for The Diary of Anne Frank or Night; these books would be readalikes for her biography, rather, this work is about the day to day aspects of living in a country controlled by the enemy. We marvelled in her descriptions of how the villagers coped with housing the German officers in their homes, while their own young, male family members were either fighting the Germans, prisoners of war, or already dead. One participant likened their arrangements and general friendliness to one and other as remarkably similar to the relationships between plantation owners and house slaves in the American South.

We spent most of our time talking about the second novella,"Dolce," which is set entirely in one village, as mentioned above, and goes into remarkable detail about the occupation and how the villagers lived. While the relationships between the Germans and French was important here, there was also quite a bit about the strict class distinctions among the French villagers. The situation was described multiple times as the "eye of he storm." It was a soft, sweet time as the novella's title suggests, but it was all the more powerful after reading her notes, knowing Nemirovsky planned to follow "Dolce," with a novel entitled "Captivity."

The characters in "Dolce" were sympathetic and fully realized. Many participants remarked on the detail in character descriptions and the lyrical language (how she could describe the weather so beautifully, for example). Even without the fact that she wrote this novella while literally on the run, we were amazed by the work's technical virtuosity.

We did talk about the first novella, "Storm in June," we just spent less time on it. A lot of this has to do with the style of the section. "Storm in June" follows a few characters who are frantically fleeing Paris as the Germans take over the city. We talked about how the style of this first section accurately reflects the plot. The narration jumps around to different people's points of view. It is scattered and incomplete; filled with violent and mean spirited acts. In short, is is as uncomfortable and unsettling to read as the evacuation itself.

We hit a few other topics such as the French resistance and where Nemirovsky might have gone with her book if she had lived.

I would highly suggest this title to groups who are looking for a different view on a popular topic, who are willing to mix fiction and nonfiction, and/or groups who do not mind an unfinished work.

In terms of readalikes, click here for a list of books on occupied France.

Fiction readers who enjoyed this book should also try Sebastian Faulks, most notably Charlotte Gray and Birdsong. I would also suggest Geraldine Brooks' most recent title People of the Book which I also wrote about here. This novel hits at the issues within Nemirovsky's novellas, living with the enemy and surviving through war, as well as addressing the author's life story, keeping a book safe despite terrible odds.

Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Finalist

One thing you can always count on from the Amazon Breakthrough Novel awards is that they will really choose unknown novels.

Here are the three finalists as announced yesterday. You can also use this link to download an excerpt of each novel.

Have you read any of them? Chances are the answer is no, and that is great! Amazon may be trying to shove the Kindle down our throats, but with this award they are doing things the right way. By choosing to showcase lesser known, yet worthy novels by truly "new-to-you" authors, Amazon is using their might for right.

The winner will be announced on May 27th.

Adult Reading Round Table Wiki

As I have mentioned before, I am on the steering committee for the Adult Reading Round Table, a group of RAs in Northern Illinois who help librarians provide better service to leisure readers. After hosting Nora Rawlinson, the editor of the blog Early Word, at a program in March, ARRT is working with Ms. Rawlinson to start a wiki for its members to use to write reviews on advance reader copies of books that will be coming out soon.

Click here to see the wiki.

Anyone can view the wiki, but it is only available to members to add to the content. If you are an ARRT member, go here to sign up.

This new wiki serves two purposes. First, it allows interested librarians to preview upcoming titles and present early reviews for our colleagues. Second, this wiki is meant to serve as a place for the members of ARRT to practice using a wiki and incorporating this technology into their work with leisure readers.

It is important for librarians to stay up to date with the newest technology. Our patrons are using it and expect us to incorporate it into our services. The La Grange Public Library just finished a similar technology training with their staff here.

How do you keep up to date? Even if you aren't involved with the two groups mentioned in this post, take a look at what they are doing and try some of it on your own.

Read Alikes on NoveList and BPL Website

NoveList has posted my Read Alike article on Jonathan Lethem. I don't know about other states, but in Illinois, the state library makes NoveList Plus available to all public libraries for a very nominal fee.

The NoveList Read Alike articles are detailed and extensive, including an essay by leading readers' advisors as to exactly why readers enjoy the specific author and others they may enjoy and why. These articles are among the most popular features on NoveList. Berwyn cardholders can access NoveList at any time by clicking here.

On the Berwyn Library website, we have also begun to offer a simplified version of read alikes to our patrons who need just a quick list of authors. Click here to see our growing list of authors. RA staff members take our most popular authors and create lists of other authors who share similar appeal factors. Here is the direct link to my list of read alike authors for the genre bending Jonathan Lethem.

The entire staff has been working hard to create the lists, all as part of our larger effort to anticipate our patrons' needs on the web. However, beyond helping our patrons, Briana and I have been working on having Google pick-up our lists when readers, anywhere, search for their own read alikes.

I am happy to report that after a few months, we have been successful. Now if you search "If you like Jonathan Lethem try" or "Lee Child read alikes" in Google, the BPL read alike offering appear on the first page of results. You can try it for any of our authors.

Please feel free to use our lists to help your patrons. But remember, for more detailed information, turn to NoveList.