Week Seven Prompt Response

Book Controversies

   While it's not really a controversy, the article by Angela Liao on Celebrity Book Clubs caught my attention. In general, I'm okay with celebrities having book clubs, mainly because if it gets more people to read, the better. It's along the same reasoning I have with editing Shakespeare plays for performance: if someone will go see a two-hour "Hamlet," but won't go see the four-hour "eternity" version, I'm not going to insist on the full text as the point is to expose them to Shakespeare. If someone is going to actually go to a library, check out a book, and read it because their favorite celebrity recommended it, great! While some of the "book clubs" listed and others I found in a quick internet search seem to me more like publicity occasions for the celebrity, the end result is really what we're after.
   The article by Butler, Cowan and Nilsson about the influence of Oprah's book club selections was interesting; it showed what seems to me a bit of blind following by her fans early in the book club's history and then a tapering off as either those fans matured in their reading and decisions or as Oprah's overall influence in media waned. This article highlighted a problem with the celebrity book club phenomenon in that some books that may not be all that good are elevated without perhaps much thought by those following the club, skewing the reviews and numbers for libraries and bookstores, which could then affect future purchasing and collection decisions.
  Another problem I saw was all the book clubs mentioned in the Liao article were led by female celebrities. After a brief search on 'celebrity book clubs,' I found that out of 27 such book clubs I could find, only three were by males. These search results were all of the "10 best celebrity book clubs we recommend!" variety. A more targeted search to 'celebrity book clubs men' only netted one more result. Either there really aren't that many male-led celebrity book clubs, or there may be a bias in favor of female-led celebrity book clubs.
  I'm not sure how many men read books because their favorite male celebrity (be it a movie star, tv star, or athlete) recommended it, but I'm guessing it's not many. I'm more inclined to pick up a book recommended by a male celebrity than a female celebrity, but I'm not all that inclined to pick up a book just because a celebrity recommended it in the first place. I don't know what the remedy would be, as we can't force male celebrities to run book clubs or male patrons to choose their reading based on them, but if men come to the library asking about them, it would be nice to have more than four to recommend, especially since one of them I found was a politician and those tend to turn off half of the potential reading audience.

Week Six Prompt Response

   Director,
   You asked about ideas to promote horror books. We should start with a social media campaign just after Labor Day, hinting through posts on our accounts through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that something mysterious is coming to the library for Halloween. We'll also have in-library signage about the program that won't give the idea away. Then in October after we've decorated for the season, we'll have online and in-library quizzes our patrons can take to find out what type of horror or scary books they like to read or would like to explore. Their results on the RA-style quizzes will give them hints and clues about a location in the library they'd have to go find. Those locations will have a display of similar books, movies, audiobooks, and comics to their quiz results.
   This will not be limited to adult material; the children's and teen areas will also have displays and quizzes to be found that will contain age-appropriate materials to "scare" them. Patrons will be able to follow a physical clue list or use our library app to scan QR codes pointing them to the next clue on their way through the library. There will only be a few clues so as not to make it too difficult or lengthy.
   We'll set up the displays to be only noticeable as a patron turns a corner, for example, so the display is a bit of a scare (we'll warn them at the beginning to expect it and along the way as they get closer, of course, since we don't want heart attacks). Next to the checkout machines, we'll have a "photo booth" with various frames that say something along the lines of, "My scary book/movie/audiobook/comic match is . . ." and then have patrons be able to have their pictures taken with them holding the book, movie, audiobook, or comic they've chosen. These pictures we'll post to our social media accounts to further drive interest throughout October with the appropriate hashtags.

This is something that could be done with any genre, of course, excepting the "scaring" part of the display, but we can start with horror and scary books since Halloween is coming up in a few months.

Horror Annotation

Stoker's Wilde

by Steven Hopstaken & Melissa Prusi

Synopsis
Supernatural monsters are attacking people in Victorian England under the direction of a mysterious figure known only as the Black Bishop. After teaming up to defeat a werewolf in their native Ireland, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde find their lives intertwined and have to overcome their difficult past and widely different personalities to save their friends and put an end to the Black Bishop's evil plan.

Characteristics that fit into Horror

• Pacing: The pace is generally slow, except for the action scenes retold within the diary or journal entries that can be exciting, which allows the growing sense of unease to permeate the action. As the narration is through epistolary style, the "writers" of the diaries, letters, or journals have the time to craft their narration and do so with care, taking their time to draw us in to what happened to them. Then the action scenes burst in, making us uneasy.
• Characterization: The two main characters are studies in opposites, with Stoker filling the haunted individual characterization, as we slowly learn there's something about him tying him to the supernatural. Wilde's character is somewhat unique in horror, as I would typify him as a happy-go-lucky character and this helps to juxtapose Stoker's staid and tragic personality.
• Storyline: The plot revolves around the growing unveiling of the presence of monsters in the midst of the characters' lives. Since there is a werewolf in the opening "chapters," we are set up to believe any kind of monster can then appear. The struggle for our heroes is to battle these monsters and save society from the darkness.
• Tone/Mood: The tone throughout is unsettling. From the first chapter in which our heroes battle a werewolf, there is a sense of dread and that something else could happen at any time.This builds with each encounter with a new character, as we're never sure who or what they may be.
• Style/Language: Told in an epistolary style through diary entries, letters, and journal entries, the novel evokes Bram Stoker's own "Dracula" from 1897. The language is formal Victorian English in many ways, with Oscar Wilde's flamboyant style and Stoker's more staid writing battling each other even as the two conflict. Other missives enter the narration, all set in the type of writing one would expect (i.e., audio interview transcriptions, telegrams). 
• Setting/Frame: The setting is Victorian Britain, a society sufficiently "advanced" to generally scoff at the idea of supernatural monsters, but also sufficiently (for us) historical where we can believe it would happen there. The dark and foggy streets of London allow a situation where anything can be hiding just beyond what the characters can see. The frame of the novel is the letters, diary and journal entries, and other missives in which we get first-person style narrations, making everything more personal and having us wonder when the entries will stop because the writer finally met his or her end.

Read-a-likes

• "Dracula" by Bram Stoker
• "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde
• "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" by Mary Shelley
• "Stoker's Manuscript" by Royce Prouty
• "Of Irish Blood" by Mary Pat Kelly
• "Interview with the Vampire" by Anne Rice

Personal Note

Bram Stoker's "Dracula" was an inspiration for me in writing my own novel and this story was an interesting blend of actual and literary history. The hints and nods at both Stoker's and Wilde's writings are well done without being pervasive and distracting.

Week Five Prompt Response

As an individual reader, I prefer shorter reviews. I'll usually be able to tell through the combination of the reviewer being someone I've learned to trust and what they have to say whether it's a book for me. The Goodreads reviews are usually not that long and if they are, I skim through them to get an idea of what the overall rating of the book is. The reviews that work best are those by readers who have read and rated similarly the same books I have, but that's not always a possibility.
   As a librarian, I think I would want a longer review to determine if the book is one appropriate for the collection.Negative reviews are just as valuable as positive reviews; if a majority of the reviews of a book seem to be negative, it may be a good idea to read the book myself to determine if it's worthy of being included (if I have that kind of ultimate power!) or have the staff all take a crack at it to see if we come to a consensus (if we had that kind of time!).
   I'm not sure how I feel about reviews on sites such as Amazon and individual blogs. There's no control over what gets posted, so in one sense it's the consumer driving the reviews and ratings, and hopefully those would be honest, but at the same time there's no way to keep trolls from driving down reviews or ratings just out of spite or because they're bored. The reviews for the Christmas romance e-book are rather bland and don't make me want to spend the money to add that book to a collection. This is the type of book I would probably wait to be recommended or asked for by patrons before looking further into it, unless I found other reviews.
   The reviews for "Angela's Ashes" all point to the book being of high quality and worth the read, even though the subject matter sounds depressing. It would be a good addition to a collection, not only as a memoir but also for the historical aspect of an "insider's look" at Depression-era Limerick. It's also a good tie-in with the film and would be good to have when film fans come looking for the book the movie was based on.
   It isn't fair for one book to be reviewed and another not, but then life isn't fair, and the book publishing and review industry certainly isn't fair. While it would be nice to have a fair review of every book that gets published, that's just not going to happen. This can affect the collection greatly as we tend to buy books that get reviewed rather than those that don't; it's simply natural that we can't honestly buy a book for a collection we haven't heard of or haven't seen reviewed. That would be a blind buy and is probably not a good practice in general.
   If a review source doesn't wish to publish negative reviews, that's their prerogative; as librarians we'd need to keep that in mind that whatever book we see a review for on, say, Booklist, will be at least neutral if not fully positive. We can use that in conjunction with other sites that do allow negative reviews to get a better picture of what the book is like to make a more-informed decision. Non-negative review sites remind me of social media sites that don't allow negative or critical posts about the subject or group; while some sites are for the enjoyment and appreciation of something and I can understand wanting everyone to have a good time as part of a group like that, fans of those subjects are also usually the most critical because they love that subject and that's when you get the best discussions, rather than just everyone saying they love it. The same would go with non-negative review sites. My response would be, "Okay, all the books on this site are liked; I don't have to read the reviews, then, or even waste my time on the site!" as I would already know the outcome. If a book doesn't appear on that type of site, then that's interesting and I'd investigate further.
   And I'll be honest that I usually don't use book review sites for choosing books to read. I've found my enjoyment or critique of a book is rarely influenced by someone else's review. Where reviews come into play is in the description of the book and if that makes it sound interesting enough to give it the first quarter of the book to decide whether to continue reading.

Kirkus-style Review

IF WE WERE VILLAINS

by M.L. Rio

KIRKUS REVIEW

A stunning and immersive debut novel that explores the inner workings of an arts school at which a student is found dead after a theater production.

When Oliver Marks is released from prison after ten years for a crime he may or may not have committed, the arresting officer, Det. Colborne, is there to greet him. Though Colborne is now retired, he wants to know the true story of what happened at Dellecher Classical Conservatory. Oliver reluctantly agrees to tell him and through flashbacks to his tumultuous fourth year in the acting program at Dellecher, we delve into the highly competitive and emotionally charged world of student thespians. Each student is typecast on-stage and off: Richard, the lead; Meredith, the femme fatale; Wren, the ingénue; James, the good guy; Alexander, the bad guy; Filippa, the extra; and Oliver, the "inconspicuous." When the usual cast list is shaken up, the plots and emotions of the Shakespeare plays "the seven" are living and breathing every hour of the day spill over into their personal lives. Then one of them is discovered dead and the rest not only have to accept one of them may have done it, but also have to convince the police (and themselves) they are innocent. The characters are at once both stereotypes in the roles they play both on and off stage, and fully realized individuals who want to be known for more than just how they look or how they act. Through Oliver's eyes, we see the various relationships between his fellow students who are closer to him than family, yet also strangers. Rio infuses every scene with details and modes of delivery that reinforce the dramatic atmosphere of the school (such as dialogue often appearing as it would in a playscript) and that heighten the ever-increasing tension between the seven students. With Colborne always in the background while Oliver relates his tale, the ominous feeling of impending tragedy builds with each scene change and line of dialogue delivered.

Written against the backdrop of Shakespeare's plays and woven through with a love of Shakespeare's language and characters, Rio crafts a tale of love, intrigue, jealousy, and revenge worthy of the Bard himself.

____________________________________________________
Pub Date: April 11, 2017              Page count: 368 pp.                  Review Posted Online: Feb. 11th, 2020
ISBN: 978-1250095282                Publisher: Flatiron Books

Romantic Suspense Annotation

Naked in Death

by J.D. Robb

Synopsis
Someone is murdering prostitutes. New York City Police detective Eve Dallas seeks justice for all, regardless of their social status, but when the murderer taunts her by sending her videos of the killings at her home, it becomes personal. And when she becomes intimately involved with her primary suspect, her objectivity and her integrity are questioned. Can Dallas find the murderer before another is killed? And can she keep her emotions and passions from interfering?

Characteristics that fit into Romantic Suspense

• Pacing: The pace is relatively quick, with the events happening in a few weeks from start to finish. Scenes move along rapidly, with little time for lingering or introspection, except for moments that build the characters and these are placed strategically for maximum impact.
• Characterization: Eve Dallas is much like the hard-boiled private eyes of Hammett and Spillane: independent, tough, stubborn, and closed from others. She has a true sense of justice and we feel she will continue pursuing it until she gets it, or is killed.
• Storyline: Without the sex scenes, this would still be a good suspense story, as Dallas is kept in the dark, as we are, about the killer's identity. The sex scenes tend to tell us more about Dallas and her history, which is important and related to the crime she's investigating.
• Tone/Mood: The tone is gritty, as this is set in a futuristic, but not Utopian, New York City, and Dallas lives in a run-down apartment, battling broken-down appliances and vehicles. There is a sense of being on-edge throughout, as Dallas is targeted personally by the unknown killer and she doesn't know how the killer knows her.
• Style/Language: The style is straightforward; there's not a lot of descriptive passages, but we still get a sense of the setting. The dialogue is snappy, with plenty of witty repartee between Dallas and Roarke, her primary suspect.
• Setting: A future New York City is familiar enough to not need much explanation, but different enough that Dallas can observe the differences for us so we can get immersed. Robb can therefore make NYC into anything she needs it to be for the story, but is remarkably consistent in where things are placed. While it's futuristic, it's not sci-fi.

Read-a-likes

• "Chasing Fire" by Nora Roberts (J.D. Robb is Nora Roberts' pseudonym)
• "1st to Die" by James Patterson
• "Postmortem" by Patricia Cornwell
• "One for the Money" by Janet Evanovich
• "A is for Alibi" by Sue Grafton
• "Dream Man" by Linda Howard

Personal Note

We used to record this series at the Talking Books studio in Denver. I came into the series many books in, so it was interesting going back to read the very first in the series. The series also just reached its 50th book, "Golden in Death." I kept hearing the narrator and her character voices as I read. This is one of the genres I don't read, mainly because sex scenes all tend to blend together after a while and I just skip on to the actual story. Outside of the romantic scenes (which aren't too bad, really, compared to others I've suffered through), the story moves along at a fast pace, keeping you in suspense about the true identity of the killer. Eve Dallas is a strong and independent character battling her own demons and is supported by a range of likable characters, each distinct and interesting.

Secret Shopper Experience

   My secret shopper experience was a bust. I asked for assistance at a satellite location for a township library and didn't get much help. The library worker went immediately to the new arrivals shelf when I said I was looking for something new to read, but I wasn't necessarily looking for a brand new book, just something new to me. She started with some of the "faced out" books in the mystery series before I said I was looking for fantasy and then she indicated a few books in the sci-fi section. She did say the line between sci-fi and fantasy was rather blurred lately, which I appreciated and knew was true, so she said I may find something of interest there.

   Then she took me to the general fiction new books, which is where they keep the fantasy, and indicated a new title by R.A. Salvatore, an author I'm familiar with but do not care for. I said as much, but she didn't take that and ask who I liked. I saw a new title by an author I do like, Terry Goodkind, and showed interest in the fourth book in a new series. I asked if she knew of the first book or if she could recommend someone similar to Goodkind, as I didn't want to start a new series without having finished his other work, but she went to see what the first book in the series was and didn't respond to my question.

   Overall, while I ended up with a book on hold and she was very nice, the experience was a bust for me. I wasn’t asked what type of book I like, what authors I like, or what I was looking for, even when I said fantasy in order to help her out a bit. As this course has indicated, library workers have "off" days and this could have been one, but it didn’t feel like it. I could have engaged more with her to try to get her to ask questions, but I tried to react to her the way I thought I normally would in order to get a better idea of how she would help someone looking for a new book.

   This experience helped a great deal, being on the "other side" of this type of interaction. My frustration wasn’t that great, since I was being a "secret shopper," but I can see how a regular patron could be more frustrated with the lack of help in actually finding something that is recommended by the library staff. If this is the kind of help patrons get, I could see some in the community wondering why librarians are needed or why librarians would need to be paid what they are. This experience will assist me in helping patrons find material to read.