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.