Week Six - Assignments

1. I started following the mystery blog Stop You're Killing Me. It's a great resource for people who follow specific authors and are looking for his or her next book. The Awards section is very useful for the major and lesser-known prizes given to mysteries. The most interesting and helpful areas are the location and diversity indexes. I enjoy the setting of novels almost more than anything else, and characters and plots that take place in specific countries and areas may appeal to me despite a weak mystery or characters that aren't fully-fleshed out. I would probably be more forgiving with a mystery than a literary novel. Diversity is also a neat index as the many ways of solving a puzzle come through with sleuths representing various cultural traditions and backgrounds.

2. The genre Prezi was really interesting. Being in Collection Development but not as a fiction genre print selector, I was impressed by the many variations of the major and minor genres. As my focus for Be More Bookish has been on mysteries, I was particularly interested to check out the various subgenres of it.

3. I focused again on the Mystery subgenres for those that I am not that familiar with. I decided to choose Culinary Capers, Pet Investigators, and Police Procedurals.

a. For Culinary Capers, I looked into the Diane Mott Davidson catering works, the dessert mysteries by Joanne Fluke, and Christine Wenger's new series on Comfort Food mysteries. These are books that I could imagine enjoying an afternoon when I want some light reading. For readers who are foodies, like to cook, and pore over cookbooks, these may not be the best for those looking to lose weight!

b. Pet Investigators led me to Annie Knox's new Pet Boutique series, Rita Mae Brown's classic cat mysteries, and Laurien Berenson's Melanie Travis dog mysteries. I was also reminded of animal mysteries from my youth, such as the Bunnicula series. As much as I enjoy animals, I find many of these too far-fetched (pun intended) to want to spend too much reading time on. Readers of fantasy may also be interested in books featuring animals as crime solvers.

c. There are so many police procedurals so I thought the best thing to do was to simply look at Stop You're Killing Me as a jumping off point. Louise Penny is very popular among my friends and I wanted to learn more about her Inspector Gamache series, which has won countless awards. For a darker look at the police procedural, I investigated J.A. Jance's series. She is also worth looking into due to her claim that she and her then-husband were once the near-victims of an Arizona serial killer. Claims that have been thus far unsubstantiated by our own departmental investigations. Finally I wanted to look into a British procedural, as I often like television versions of British police shows. Years ago I had started reading a Deborah Crombie procedural featuring Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James, and wanted to follow-up on the adventures they have encountered in the series since.  I would expect fans of darker material, including True Crime, to be fans of police procedurals.

d. Mashups have been riding waves of popularity. The Jane Austen and Bronte horror titles, such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Jane Slayre, are two of the most well-known mashups of recent years. These bridge the gap between realistic fiction and horror.

Week Five - Assignments

1. I have been following the Salon blog for a number of years. I like it because it covers books that, while having broad interest, are not always the most obvious. I enjoy reading nonfiction, especially unusual tales. One recent book review is Tony Dokoupil's The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana. This is the sort of fractured family tale that can appeal to a number of different readers - those who like memoirs in general, especially those of dysfunctional families; people who enjoy history, as this covers the Caribbean drug trade in the 1970s and 80s; and those who like adventure stories. Salon's essay-style book reviews, without an obvious word-count limit, also allows exploration into the books' assets and pitfalls.

2. Being in Collection Development, we use a lot of the sources listed. What is popular in our branch is what we monitor as having a lot of holds and/or a high percentage of items checked out. Earlyword.com is a site that we use all the time, particularly for the lists that appear on the sidebar. The Seasonal Previews lists are very useful to see what readers may be excited about investigating. Particularly valuable are sources that are perused by occasional readers. These highlight the biggest books and often detect sleepers. The Awards list is also useful when finding titles that may have been missed when they were initially published.

3. Amazon's Best Books of the Month - One of the titles is the No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who heard Edward Snowden's story, wrote and published it in The Guardian. This thought-provoking look at the limits of the NSA and Greenwald's searing indictment of the agency will be of great interest to everyone who believes individual privacy has been compromised. People who enjoy spy stories and contemporary issues will want to read this book. The news media has picked up on this book's release and interviews with Greenwald has added to the demand for this book. Geographically, the NSA's nearness to Baltimore County only further increases the likelihood that people in the area will have a personal interest in this title.