#52 What to Read

How could I NOT instantly admire a woman who, in 2003, wrote a guide to good reading called "Book Lust"? I think I've found a new literary guru in Nancy Pearl. Despite her academic background and celebrity, Pearl promotes books with the understanding that the most important aspect of reading is enjoyment. Of course, educators and others will still want people to be familiar with the classics (I recommend "The 5-Minute Iliad" by Greg Nagan for time-strapped individuals). Classics provide us with cultural bedrock and exemplary literary models, but Pearl's philosophy is simple. Serve patrons by attempting to address their needs without pretense. To me, Pearl's outlook was like discovering the Tao of Reader's Advisory. Her "Rule of 50" is simply divine. It states, "If you still don't like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you're more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages."

In my opinion, the best way to recommend books is to read lots and lots of them. Go to any book on Amazon.com and scroll to the "customers who bought this item also bought" section, for some surprisingly good suggestions as well. I also like Stacy Alesi's advise on providing great reader's advisory service:

Start off simply: if they're looking for a best seller that isn't on the shelf, ask if they've read other books by that author or authors who write in a similar style.
Ask them for the name of the last good book they read. This can lead you to the style or author or genre or setting that is appealing to your customer.
Always resepect a person's reading tastes. Just because you liked a book doesn't mean everyone will.
Be familiar with current and popular books and know your collection.
Ask customers to share their opinions about books they've read.

I searched for a read-alike using the NoveList data base, for "Pompeii" by Robert Harris. When submitting a request, the user can choose to narrow the search, and so I did that, restricting results to historical fiction and ancient civilizations. The results included "The Price of Victory", "Maia of Thebes", and "Dawn of Empire". I was surprised that, out of the first 20 results, I hadn't heard of any of these titles! Then I proceeded to Fiction_L Booklists, the Morton Grove Public Library's Reader's Advisory website. I searched "genre based lists" and "Historical Fiction of Different Cultures" (just because those seemed like the most appropriate options). The result was different from the NoveList search, and included authors such as Pearl Buck, Ken Follett, and James Michener. The NoveList search was faster...I simply typed the book's title....but I liked the results of the Fiction_L Booklist search better.

Then I looked for 2 books about animals for a 4th grade girl. NoveList has a link for "older children". I clicked on "recommended reads" and "animals", which took me to a linked page of animal groups. When I chose the group "horses", there were oodles of results. I decided I would recommend "Album of Horses" by Marguerite Henry, because my own daughters loved this book, and we have a copy at our branch. When looking further for a 2nd book, I suddenly remembered a book I really like called "Owen and Mzee" by Isabella Hatkoff, so although I didn't get the actual recommendation from the database, it was NoveList that jogged my memory of this lovely story.

The next challenge was to find 2 books for a 13 year old boy interested in ghost stories. I searched the Welles-Turner Memorial Library site for young adult books. Unfortunately, the link to a list of ghost stories, as well as several of the other links, didn't work. I was able to access a list of horror stories, and since I'm not familiar with this genre at all, I found the brief summaries after each title very helpful. I decided to recommend "A Fate Totally Worse Than Death" by Paul Fleischman, and "Cirque du Freak" by Darren Shan (the description told me this series is about vampires, but the Cirque books are so popular I felt I should include them in my choices). Hmmm...I think I need to read both of these!

For the patron who has read everything by Dean Koontz and wants an author read-alike, NoveList recommends Greg Bear, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon. The What Should I Read Next site recommends Richard Laymon, Joe McKinney, and W.E.B. Griffin. I thought Stephen King or James Patterson would come up. I wonder why they didn't?

Finding what's next in a series is a breeze with Kent District Library What's Next database. To find the book after "Alanna: the First Adventure", all you have to do is type in the author's name. There are eight series (serae?) by Tamora Pierce. "Alanna..." is the first book in the Song of the Lioness quartet. The rest of the books, in order, are "In the Hand of the Goddess", "The Woman Who Rides Like a Man", and "Lioness Rampant". Piece-O-Cake.

My hero, Nancy Pearl, has stated that the biggest challenge facing librarianship today is that "we have yet to balance the three important functions a library has in a community: information access, providing people with books and material for their recreational learning and reading, and offering quality programs for our patrons. The pendulum swung way over on the information access side and has yet to right itself. We graduate people from library schools (information schools) knowing how to build a website, but not knowing how to recommend a book to someone who comes in asking for something good to read."

Ms. Pearl obviously wasn't talking about individuals completing IHCPL training.