Showing posts with label Readers Advisory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Readers Advisory. Show all posts

Sunday, October 24, 2021

How to Recommend a Book

 Malia Wallan, "How to Recommend a Book," New York Times Magazine, October 24, 2021, p. 15.

"Recommending books you love is the hardest thing of all," says Joyce Saricks, 72, who worked for nearly 30 years as a reference librarying in suburban Chicago.  Saricks has written several textbooks on so-called "readers' advisory," which largely disappeared from libraries after World War II and is credited with helping spark a national revival in the practice of librarians' suggesting books to patrons.

...

When Saricks was stumped, she often led patrons into the library stacks, where book spines would spur ideas and conversation.  "My colleague used to say, 'The books know when you're desperate,'" she says.  


COMMENT

The librarian in this story is an author of a book for librarians that, according to this author, helped restore a culture of reading and literacy to contemporary libraries.   The story includes a plug for physical browsing, which can lead to finding something unexpected.   The Internet most definitely does not know when you're desperate. 

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Chuck Kosterman (By the Book)

Chuck Klosterman (By the Book) New York Times Book Review, July 21, 2019, p,. 7

Whose opinion on books to you most trust? 
Part-time bookstore employee and research librarians. They have no agenda and plenty of free time. The research librarians are especially good, because they don’t even care if their suggestions make them seem cool. 

COMMENT


    Klosterman is repeating a stereotype that librarians have a lot of free time to read.  In fact, the life of research librarians follows the academic year, incredibly busy at some times and in the summer more relaxed since many students and researchers are away. Despite his misconception, he values the service of readers’ advisory. 
      As for myself, I’m constantly recommending books, and I appreciate his vote of confidence.  It makes me realize, though, how often I’m enthusiastic about books that probably do sound fairly un-cool. I keep thinking that it would change people's lives if only they would read William Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces  or Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking it would change their lives.  Lately, I've been using Eric Klinenberg's Palaces for the People which basically says that libraries are going to save the world. 

Monday, March 18, 2019

Like This or Die

Christian Lorentzen, "Like This or Die: The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm," Harper's, April 2019, p 25-33.

To be interested in literature all you need is a library card. Literature is any writing that rewards critical attention.  It's writing that you want to read and read about. It's something different from entertainment. It involves aesthetic and political judgments and it's not easily quantifiable.  Negativity is part of this equation because without it positivity is meaningless. 
... 
The past two decades have been a phase of upheaval, panic, and collapse.  The crisis of closures that has struck America's regional newspapers hit their books pages first.... But as these losses piled up, it was difficult to feel that something wonderful had been lost, even if it had real value in swaths of the country that were losing many things all at once.  What mattered most were the big city papers, especially the New York Times and, as [Elizabeth] Hardwick wrote, "All those high school English Teachers, those faithful librarians and booksellers, those trusting suburbanites, those bright young men and women in the provinces, all those who believe in the judgment of the Times and who need its direction."
COMMENT

      This view of libraries is contradictory.  All you need is a library card, and yet the librarians are lumped in with those poor provincial souls dependent on Times reviews to know what to read.  The writer, a book critic, wants people to read and appreciate capital "L" Literature and engage with some national community of readers and writers. He pooh-poohs the idea that regional writing matters compared to the 750 or so books reviewed annually in the New York Times Book Review

  And yet he knows what's going on in publishing-- "An ever consolidating set of big houses in New York and an ever expanding array of small presses across the country."  Personally,  I find myself  gravitating increasingly towards small publishers such as Milkweed Editions or Torrey House Press, and spending more time with literary journals (I especially like Bicycle Almanac, Dark Mountain,  Orion, saltfront, Sugarhouse Review, and Terrain.org).

     I am a librarian who also writes book reviews but reading this essay I get a sense that I am probably the type of "anti-intellectual" reviewer that Mr. Lorentzen despises.  I got my start writing capsule reviews for Library Journal -- 100 words to let you know whether or not to buy the book.  Nowadays my interests have shifted to poetry and more broadly, environmental humanities.  I read reviews to decide what to read.  I write them becasue I'm convinced that they are an essential part building of a local literary culture, supporting writers and poets whom you can hear at readings and meet at book signing events.  Since small press publications are unlikely to appear in the Times, it's up to us regional  librarians to nurture regional literature.

     Lorentzen sneers a the new Match Book column in the NYTBR that is essentially a readers' advisory -- "The world is full of desperate people." he writes. "Who know they were so desperate for book recommendations? Aren't those easy to come by in any bookstore or on Amazon?"  Well, sure.  Or at the library for that matter. But if people are going to discover literature at the library then the library has to collect literature, and approval plans are not very helpful.  There is a need for librarians to become acquainted with the expanding array of small presses across the country and someone (librarians?) needs to review the books published by them.  Lorentzen is right that the model of a few fancy critics writing for the NYTBR no longer works, but I think he's dead wrong about the irrelevancy of regional and local book reviews.  All those faithful librarians have a gap to fill reviewing, purchasing and collecting literature that's not covered by the NYTBR. 

     

   

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

How to Tap Your Inner Reader

Gregory Cowles, “How to Tap Your Inner Reader,” (Here to Help), New York Times, March 3, 2019, p3.
     In early high school, my authentic self read a lot of Stephen King. I had always been an avid reader — my mother worked at the local library when I was growing up, so I spent hours there after school, making why way methodically and indiscriminately from shelf to shelf and section to section inhaling it all.
     So when my English teacher asked me during a conversation what I liked to read outside of school, I answered honesty and enthusiastically. And he sneered.
     “I mean, Stephen King is a good story-teller, I suppose,” he said or something like it. “But you’re not going to learn anything about writing from him. Don’t you think you should read more serious authors?”

COMMENT

    The library as an after-school refuge; coming of age through unfiltered reading; discovery of beloved books through browsing; the disapproving (and deeply wrong) adult censorship of childhood reading -- this story has it all!

     Several other writers have related memories of clueless adults criticizing their juvenile reading choices [1] and it's obvious to any reader that these adults were dishing out terrible advice.  Who wouldn't want to write like Stephen King? He literally wrote the book On Writing. [2]

     "It's totally fine to read for pleasure," Cowles advises and he's perfectly right.

    The American Library Association has a Library Bill of Rights  that says, "Books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves." It's an uplifting though,  but the language treats reading as a very serious pursuit and glosses over reading for fun.

   Author Daniel Pennac [3] rectified that with a Reader's Bill of Rights that includes "the right to read anything" (#5), "the right to escapism" (#6), "the right to browse" (#8) and "the right not to defend your tastes" (#10).  Go ahead and enjoy Stephen King, and while you're at it you might even learn to be a better writer.

 
[1] What are we Teaching Boys when we Discourage Them from Reading Books about Girls? (librarian says Shannon Hale is not for boys) ; Well Read, Well Known (Teacher says Maya Angelou is not a good writer)...

[2] Stephen King. On writing. Simon and Schuster, 2002.


[3] Daniel Pennac. The rights of the reader. London: Walker, 2006.

Monday, January 21, 2019

At the Gates of Deep Darkness

Scott Russell Sanders, "At the Gates of Deep Darkness: Examining Faith in the Face of Tragedy," Orion, Autumn 2018, p.41-51.

While I was doggedly reading the Bible, three or four pages per night over several years, I was also reading books on science from our public library.  I followed my passions: fascination with dinosaurs led me to study evolution; model rockets led me to astronomy; birds and bugs led me to biology; rocks led me to geology; kitchen table experiments led me to chemistry and physics. When I had exhausted the offerings in the young adult section, I moved on to the books for grownups.  On the advice of a teacher, my parents brought me a subscription to Scientific American, a magazine that reported new discoveries along with the rigorous methods by which they had been achieved. The passages I could not understand-- and there were many-- only inspired me to deeper study.  While my Bible reading was dutiful, homework for graduation to heaven, my reading of science was driven by curiosity and delight. 
COMMENT

     Here's a lovely description of coming of age at the library, transitioning from children's science to the scientific method.  The author does not specifically mention librarians helping to find these books, though he does mention a helpful teacher.  For the most part, it seems to be a self-directed research process.
 
     There are two elements in this story that I've  noticed in other library stories: [1] The transition out of the juvenile section of the library as a rite of passage (See posts on Children's Literature) and [2] The use of library resources to investigate religious faith (Hypocrisy of Hanukkah; Go and See Jane and Emma; God is Going to Have to Forgive Me).   In this story, however, the library research is not about theology but a contrast to a childish understanding of theology.  In fact, when the author needs spiritual comfort, neither form of study turns out to  offer adequate solace.

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

New in Town

Frank McCourt, "New in Town: The Initiation of a Young Irishman," New Yorker,  Dec. 3, 2018, p. 20-24 [reprinted from Feb. 33 & March 1, 1999].

     It's a warm October day and I have nothing else to do but what I'm told and what harm is there in wandering up to Fifth Avenue where the lions are. The librarians are friendly.  Of course I can have a library card, and it's so nice to see young immigrants using the library. I can borrow four books if I like as long as they're back on the due date. I ask if they have a book called "The Lives of the Poets" by Samuel Johnson, and they say, My, my, my, you're reading Johnson.  I want to tell them I've never read Johnson before, but I don't want them to stop admiring me. They tell me feel free to walk around, take a look at the Main Reading Room, on the third floor. They're not a bit like the librarians in Ireland, who stood guard and protected the books against the likes of me.
      The sight of the Main Reading Room, North and South, makes me go weak at the knees. I don't know if it's the two beers I had or the excitement of my second day in New York, but I'm near tears when I look at the miles of shelves and know I'll never be able to read all those books if I live till the end of the century.  There are acres of shiny tables where all sorts of people sit and read as long as they like, seven days a week, and no one bothers them unless they fall asleep and snore. There are sections with English, Irish, American books, literature, history, religion and it makes me shiver to think I can come here anytime I like and read anything as long as I like if I don't snore. 

COMMENT

     To this new immigrant, the freedom of America is represented by a public library where anyone can come in to sit and read as long as they like.  After an Irish bartender chides nineteen-year-old McCourt for drinking instead of educating himself he heads for the New York Public Library to find a copy of Lives of the Poets.  In the baffling big city, the library is the one place where his literary ambitions don't seem laughable.

   
   

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Illiberal Values



Kirn, Walter. Easy Chair: Illiberal Values. Harper’s vol. 337, no 2019 (Aug. 2018). p5-7.

Paula was our town librarian. She used Ms. in front of her name and held opinions— on Nixon, the Vietnam War, and civil rights— that I’d heard on the news, from protest leaders and such, but hadn’t experienced up close.  Since the library was on the first floor of the town hall, an old wooden building with a bell on top and an air of venerable officialdom, I wondered whether she was endangering herself by sharing her views while on the job. To demonstrate my own courageous spirit and win her respect, I picked out books that struck me as controversial or sophisticated from the adult shelves, then plunked myself down to read them in an armchair that was visible from her desk. Though I was just eleven, I read Slaughterhouse Five and Future Shock this way. Sometimes we ended up talking about the books. Through gentle questioning, she would elicit from me opinions I wouldn’t have dared to share with others, such as my hope that humans would die out as punishment for harming whales and dolphins. [p. 5]

COMMENT: 


     I have a bit of a crush on Paula. She’s what I would like to be as a librarian. I especially love her willingness to discuss books with her callow young admirer.  

     I can remember doing this kind of reading when I was about eleven, but I didn't always rely on the library.  Slaughterhouse Five and Future Shock were on the bookshelves of my parents or my friends’ parents, as were the utterly fascinating Joy of Sex and Our Bodies Our Selves.  I don’t recall ever trying to discuss them with an adult. Even though I had a perfectly good library card, in Jr. High I loved Kurt Vonnegut so much that I spent my own money on paperback copies of his books so I could read and re-read them. I recently re-read Slaughterhouse Five because it was on my daughter’s high school reading list, and was pleased to find that it is still as good as ever. “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”  It gives you chills, doesn't it?

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

What are we Teaching Boys when we Discourage Them from Reading Books about Girls?

 
Shannon Hale. “What are We Teaching Boys when We Discourage Them from Reading Books about Girls? (Special to the Washington Post), Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 14, 2018. P. D2. 

A school librarian introduces me before I give an assembly. “Girls, you’re in for a real treat. You will love Shannon Hale’s books. Boys, I expect you to behave anyway.” 
 COMMENT

     The librarian who Hale mentions is one of several anecdotes about teachers, booksellers, parents and other adults who should know better. Hale says that  she has plenty of fans who are boys (No surprise. She's a good writer.), but they’ve  been reading in secret because they feel embarrassed to enjoy “girl” books.  It must be really aggravating for an author to get fan mail from people who have been shamed about liking her books. But as Hale points out, the social effects of gender-stereotyping books are far more harmful than just irritating writers. Boys who are told they can't read about girls are learning that it's shameful to feel empathy for girls. Hale recommends that we can all do better by learning to say that  a book is about girls without saying it’s for girls. 

     Hale mentions that books about boys like Harry Potter are considered gender neutral, though perhaps Harry Potter is not the right example since since the series has exemplary diversity as well as a lot of strong female characters like Hermione Granger, Luna Lovegood, and Minerva McGonagal Even Harry Potter had its own run in with gender stereotyping. When it first came out the publisher told J.K. Rowling to use initials rather than her actual name because they thought boys wouldn't want to read a book written by a woman. (They also felt it necessary to issue an edition with an “adult” cover for grownups who felt ashamed to be seen reading children’s books).


     The two illustrations of Hale’s book covers that were chosen for the Salt Lake Tribune article are The Princess in Black and the Hungry Bunny Horde and Real Friends.  Both books feature highly feminized cover designs --pastel colors and cute, long-haired  female figures making smiling eye-contact with prospective readers. 


My copy of Princess Academy (top left) that I bought when the book first came out shows a group of women trekking through a rugged mountainous landscape. I was sorry to see that the new cover (top right) has an image that looks a lot like Belle from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast.  Even I, a dispassionate middle aged librarian, might feel a twinge of embarrassment to be caught reading a book with a fake Disney princess on the cover.

Monday, September 17, 2018

The Portable Veblen






Elizabeth McKenzie, “The Portable Veblen, Penguin Press, 2016.


“Veb, did I ever tell you how I became interested in neurology?”
“Can’t say that you did,” she said stiffly. 
“Kind of painful,” Paul continued. “I was spending all my time in the library to get away from the freaks at home, and the librarian took me under her wing. Mrs. Brown. She was a stern old bag who pitied me, I think. I was all over the place. So one day she handed me the Life picture book called The Mind — up to that point I’d mostly been reading science fiction — but The Mind was even weirder.  I remember seeing this one page, ‘Isolate human.’ A Princeton student in a lightless chamber with no sound, his hands in gloves.  I think the guy went totally crazy after thirty or forty hours. [p.219]

COMMENT

This is an amusing fictional variation on the transformational book narrative, but I’m pretty sure I remember reading this actual book as a child, or at least one very much like it.[1] The joke is, the transformational book is both life-changing and self-delusional. Grownup Paul becomes a mad scientist. 
         Libraries, librarians and books occur frequently in this effervescent novel offering the characters ways to view the world and themselves (some more helpful than others). Mrs. Brown the Librarian turns up in another part of the story when young Paul is setting up a science fair experiment hoping to document the sound of screaming snails. She helps him find reference material in entirely made-up books called Invertebrates Around Us and Gastrapoda Today. When his experimental snails fail to scream young Paul, to his lasting shame, falsifies his data. Veblen, the protagonist, is named after the Norwegian-American philosopher Thorstein Veblen and she frequently channels her namesake. Her kind but self-effacing stepfather Linus, “had been an academic librarian at UC Berkeley, and a rare-book dealer.” He mentors his stepdaughter by offering her carefully selected books. As young Veblen is being sent on court-mandated visits to her insane biological father he supplies her with White Fang, Call of the Wild, and “a few other novels about ill-treated beasts.” 

[1] Wilson, John Rowan, The Mind,  Life Science Library, 1965.   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1135687.The_Mind

Saturday, September 15, 2018

Recently Returned Books

Gabbert, Elisa,” Recently Returned Books (Letters of Recommendation), New York Times Magazine, Sept. 9, 2018, pp 20-21.

My favorite spot in my local library — the central branch in Denver — is not the nook for new releases; not the holds room, where one or two titles are usually waiting for me; not the little used-book shop, full of cheap classics for sale; and not the fiction stacks on the second floor, though I visit all those areas frequently.  It’s a shelf near the Borrower Services desk bearing a laminated sign that reads RECENTLY RETURNED
The “recently returned” shelf is perhaps the subtlest most indirect way of advising readers, nudging them towards what others in the community are reading — an index of local interests, a a record of your neighbor’s whims.

COMMENT

     The most charming thing about this essay is how the author experiences the returned book shelf as a community connection. She imagines other people reading the books and wonders if they might be personal friends. I wonder if the librarians ever thought of it that way? The shelf is probably just there so that librarians can locate books in transit and so that shelvers can sort them onto carts.  

     As far as selecting what to read, the author lists her favorite ways to find books, none of which are keyword searching in an online catalog which is how librarians think people find books.

      I used to work with a library administrator who fancied  himself a prescient futurist. He loved to talk about how book circulation is going down and how "useless" books should be weeded so that shelf space could be put to “better” use. The circulation statistics he cited were deeply flawed, but never mind. He was utterly convinced that digital reading was The Future and that libraries should therefore purchase everything on clunky ebook platforms (the kind that will become instantly obsolete if technology ever really does replace print). 

    This administrator seemed to believe that book circulation arises from internal information needs of individual readers. He could never quite grasp that librarians (and booksellers) can persuade people to check out more books simply by putting more books in front of them. Likewise, librarians can suppress circulation by hiding books in onsite storage and remote repositories where nobody will ever stumble across them.


Monday, August 13, 2018

Transported

Ruth Franklin. Transported: How should children’s books deal with the Holocaust? New Yorker, July 23, 2018, 64-69. 

I was fourteen when “the Devil’s Arithmetic” was published. Although it won numerous awards, no teacher or librarian ever gave it to me.  I wish someone had, because the book speaks in a profound way to the painful paradox I felt then and still feel now: how to be an adequate witness to something I haven’t myself experienced.[p. 66]

COMMENT

In this anecdote the librarian has failed, probably without ever knowing that this student needed to learn about the Holocaust.

Franklin writes that as a child  she had relatives with tattoos on their arms who had survived the Holocaust, but she had little information to understand exactly what it was they had survived. She was given “The Diary of Anne Frank," an excellent book, but one that stops at a confusing place. An adult would know the implication of the Frank family being sent off to Nazi death camps. To a child the ending conceals the true atrocity.

Children are often aware of horrifying world events, but lack vocabulary or background knowledge to really understand the truth of what happened. Adults want to protect not only kids but also themselves from facing the full horror. They end up either refusing to talk about it or offering information so thoroughly sanitized that it doesn't really make sense. 

 “The Devil’s Arithmetic” uses fantasy as a frame to help children cope with emotionally difficult information. Some adults didn't like the use of fantasy for such a serious subject, but Franklin thinks it would have worked well for her 14-year-old self.  In the documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” Fred Rogers uses hand puppets to address children’s fears after the assassination of President Kennedy. Through the voice of Daniel Striped Tiger, Rogers timidly asks Lady Aberlin, “What does “assassination” mean?”

Probably Franklin never asked for book suggestions. If so, what could a librarian have done? It might have been hard to guess at this particular information need. An astute librarian who knew that there were Jewish families in the community might have made a selected list of Holocaust books for kids-- something that a kid could pick up without having to ask a scary adult. [1]  But often, kids find the kind of books that adults don't quite like through word of mouth. 

[1] A letter to the editor in the August 6 & 13  issue of the New Yorker says that quite a lot of Children's literature about the Holocaust was written in Yiddish but for the most part it was never translated.