Week 9: Assignment 3

I feel that "Be More Bookish" was a very useful tool in becoming more comfortable with unfamiliar genres.  It might be helpful to be able to spend more time on a specific genre or age group.  If we could perhaps focus on Teens, Children, Adults, separately, it might be possible to absorb more information. All in all, I learned quite a bit, discovered many new resources that I intend to regularly use, and I now have a much longer list of books I want to read!

Week 9: Assignment 2

Personally, I don't care for book trailers but I do realize that they can sometimes be a very useful marketing tool, particularly with younger readers, specifically reluctant readers.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

by Ransom Riggs

Week 9: Assignment 1

The articles on book trailers were quite interesting.

Week 8: Assignment 3

Biography

                                                                     

  Steve Jobs  by Walter Isaacson 

Call Number:  BIO J

Science

         

Death at Sea World by David Kirby

Call Number:  599.53 K 

Medical

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

Call Number:  616.89 K

Travel

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Call Number:  917.404 B

Week 8: Assignment 2

The E-Learning video from the Maryland State Library Resource Center was very informative.  The lists of 16 different genres and 16 different appeal factors will be extremely helpful with becoming more comfortable with nonfiction reader's advisory.

Week 8: Assignment 1

The two articles regarding narrative non-fiction were very interesting and helpful!

Week 7: Assignment 4

I spent some time exploring Tor Teen and Teens@Random.  The current trends that I noticed in these two websites is a prevalence of Science Fiction and Fantasy titles.  Ender's Game, the 1985 science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, will be released as a film in November 2013 and this has created a resurgence of interest in science fiction.




                                  

Week 7: Assignment 3

Forever Young Adult

This is a blog that is definitely intended for an adult audience, although the primary focus is literature for teens.  There are 14 writers (13 of which are women) who post reviews for young adult books on this blog.  As is stated on their "About" page, this blog is "a place where you can let your inner Lady Nerd loose and swoon over fictional characters without shame."

Stacked

This blog does not appear to be quite as successful as the FYA blog.  The blog and the reviews are written by librarians and the intended audience appears to be primarily librarians and other adults.

Week 7: Assignment 2

I read  YA Comes of Age and Who's Buying Teen Books? Lots and Lots of Adults.  I was a little surprised with the findings from the Bowker study, that over half of the customers who purchase young adult books are over 18.  It was also interesting to learn that the publication of The Hunger Games was a major factor in bringing an older audience into the realm of young adult books.  Personally, young adult literature has always been my overall favorite to read.

Week 7: Assignment 1

The "What to Read Next" flowchart was very interesting to examine and I got some great ideas for readers advisory while looking at it.

Week 6: Assignment 3

SUBGENRES

Paranormal Romance - authors
     Gena Showalter
     Lora Leigh
     Ilona Andrews

Techno Thriller - authors
     Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
     Warren Fahy
     Clive Cussler

Pet Investigators Mystery - authors
     Spencer Quinn
     Susan Conant
     Laurien Berenson
   
           

Week 6: Assignment 2

The Fiction Genres and Subgenres on the Prezi link were interesting to explore.

Week 6: Assignment 1

The genre link that I chose to follow was Stop, You're Killing Me!  This is an amazing website, packed with all of the features one would expect, but also with an incredibly useful indexing feature.  I love the fact that I can search for mysteries involving librarians or a psychotic Vietnam Vet hit man in Iowa or an investigator in Athens, Greece in the year 461 BCE.

Week 5: Assignment 3

From Huffington Post - Best Books of 2013

Year of the Jungle: Memories From the Home Front, by Suzanne Collins and James Proimos.  This 40-page picture book, due to be released on September 10, 2013, has already received rave reviews from Time Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal.  It's an autobiographical account of a little girl named Suzy, the youngest of four children, whose father has gone to Vietnam.  Suzy struggles to conceptualize what "war" means, and gradually senses the truth through the increasingly distressing tone of the postcards her father sends home.  He eventually returns from Vietnam, very different, but, is some ways, still the same.

As her first picture book, the award-winning author of The Hunger Games series is sure to find success and a new following with her heartwarming story of love and family and reassurance.

Week 5: Assignment 2

Early Word is an incredible website that I will definitely begin using on a regular basis.  So many useful things are included in this site, such as a huge list of awards, including a few I had never heard of, such as the IACP Cookbook Awards.  Also, it contains links to 14 different Best Seller Lists.

Week 5: Assignment 1

I chose to follow NPR and Stop, You're Killing Me!

NPR Books - I found this to be a very comprehensive site for book reviews.  One of my favorite features is "Three Books..." found under "Reviews."  In this section, authors will recommend a set of three titles based on a shared theme.

Stop, You're Killing Me! -  This is an amazing resource for people who enjoy mysteries, thrillers, suspense novels, etc.  The site includes awards and reviews, but is also indexed so that searches may be done according to character diversity (ie., African American, Jewish, disables), location, historic period, sub-genre, and many more!

Week 4: Assignment 1

I have been using Goodreads for almost three years and still continue to discover new features that help with finding, organizing, and sharing books.  I enjoy creating my personal "bookshelves," reading recommendations and reviews, exploring various book lists in "listopia," and keeping track of what I have read as well as what I would like to read.

Because M'Lissa Moss read and enjoyed "The Art of Racing in the Rain," I recommended another book that I thought she might enjoy called "One Good Dog," by Susan Wilson.                                                                     

Week 3: Assignment 3

 

Conversation 1

I also love books like that! One of my favorites is A Year in the World by Frances Mayes who also wrote Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany. In this book, she and her husband travel to several different locations and in each place, they usually rented a house so they could reside there for a while and get a true sense of the landscape and the people and their culture. Also, she loves exploring the local food and has actually included many recipes in the book! There would certainly be quite a bit to discuss with this book!

Conversation 2


My very favorite book that involves vampires is Let Me In by a Swedish author named John Ajvide Lindqvist. The story takes place in Stockholm, Sweden during the 80's and the main characters are a 12-year-old named Oskar and a girl named Eli who appears to be around the same age. Oskar is terribly bullied at school and has a morbid obsession with collecting newspaper clipping of horrific murders. Oskar and Eli become friends and, while the bond that forms between them is really beautiful, the events surrounding them are extremely graphic and gruesome. This is nothing at all like the typical vampire story!


Conversation 3

If you like true stories and ill-fated expeditions, I think you might enjoy Between a Rock and a Hard Place.  The author, Aron Ralston, recounts the 127 hours he spent fighting to survive after an unimaginable accident while hiking alone in Blue John Canyon in Utah.  He slipped and dislodged an 800 pound boulder, crushing and trapping his right hand between the boulder and the canyon wall.  At 27, he was a seasoned and accomplished mountain climber, but this time, he hadn't told anyone where he was going and had very little with him in the way of supplies.  After five, unbelievably  excruciating days, he amputated his right arm with a dull, multi-purpose tool.  A wonderful, true story of courage and the immeasurable, primal will to survive!

Week 2: Assignment 3  Recommendations

After reading Brenda Johnson-Perkins' annotations, I found two books, one in NoveList and the other in Goodreads, to recommend based on the two that she had posted. 

Week 2 - Book Annotations

In the riveting page-turner, Ashfall, by Mike Mullin, a super volcano in Yellowstone National Park erupts and, in the aftermath, the world as we know it is completely changed. The reader is immediately thrown into the life of the protagonist, Alex, an average fifteen-year-old boy trying to reach his family, one hundred miles away, and survive in the face of a natural disaster of cataclysmic proportions. The landscape, climate, and humanity itself have all changed and Alex, an extremely sympathetic character, must learn how to survive in a world that is covered in ash, then by snow, no sunlight, sparse food supplies, and plagued with violence and anarchy.  Graphic and sometimes gruesome details are disturbing yet necessary in the depiction of this new dystopian reality.  The most frightening aspect of this compelling and thoroughly researched novel is the fact that the occurance of such an event is completely plausible.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."  This quote, taken from Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, is the inspiration for the title of John Green's novel, The Fault in Our Stars.  Intellectually and emotionally challenging, this is the sort of book that the reader would want to read repeatedly.  Humor, wisdom, and love help to keep the heavy plot line not only bearable, but also very interesting.  Hazel, Augustus, Isaac, and so many others are far more than just sympathetic characters; they become good friends and family members that the reader will love, worry about, laugh and cry with and hold gently in their hearts long after the last page is turned.

Week 1 Assignment

                

After looking at all of the book review sites, I decided to follow NPR - Books.  I appreciate the way the site is organized; I love the lists, author interviews, and having the ability to browse different genres. 

I need to learn more about the mystery genre, so I will be following the "Stop, You're Killing Me!" website.  I have only read a very limited amount of mystery, mostly by Nordic authors, so exposure to a wider variety of mystery authors would be very beneficial to me.