Week Five: What have I learned so far?

What useful information have you learned from the resource that you have been monitoring  since week one?

I chose Goodreads, which I've used for many years, and Street Fiction, which I've only begun to use.  From the former, due in part to this training we're receiving, I've given and received far more recommendations than in the past, and I've reviewed more of the books I've read than I normally do.  It's been fun and enjoyable!

Street Fiction I've not found as useful as I'd hoped -- it's more a list of books than a good review source, with links to Amazon sites, though I admit there's more I need to check out there.  A page within the site called "Librarian Resources" offers several good lists, and articles such as Daniel Marcou's "History of Street Fiction and Why it Appeals to Readers," which traces the genre back to Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, in 1722! 

RA-wise, Street Fiction is easier to use than Goodreads, if only because of the narrower focus, though even within "street fiction," there are many sub-genres -- you not want to mix up "urban Christian" and "urban fiction," for example.

Week 5: Assignment 2 -- What’s popular in your branch?  ...   Do your customers want to read the book before the movie comes out?  ... Early Word.  Take a look at the site and click around....  Post to your blog: What resources are new discoveries for you?  What do you think that you will continue to use?

Zeke W helpfully printed out a list of the "Top 25 Titles for Catonsville Branch, April 2013" and the results were not too surprising to me, who works daily with the public and places a lot of hold requests for people.  Of those top 25, five are by James Patterson.  Actually, Patterson's five come in the top 15!  He's prolific and popular both -- a modern day Dickens, maybe.  Others in the top spots include Gillian Flynn, David Baldacci, J.K. Rowling, and Barbara Kingsolver -- the usual suspects.  People who use the library know what they can find here, and make good use of the resources we offer.

Generally, I think people do prefer to read the book before they see the movie, though I haven't noticed a huge upswing in Great Gatsby checkouts.  This is true for fiction -- I think for non-fiction topics, the opposite is probably true -- people may see a movie that spurs their interest in a topic, so they'll seek out the source material.  I know I do that -- after I saw Les Miserables, I wanted to find out more about the June Rebellion of 1832 that forms the framework of the second half of the book/show/movie (if you do the same, here's a place to start, the Wikipedia article).

I found Early Word to be overly busy and dull looking -- this is how every data-rich website looked in 1994!  The content is good but they could use a re-design.  Some new-to-me resources there include the "Ideas to Steal" column and a good "Poetry" section.  I will continue to use both, and the page in general, as needed, and will keep my fingers crossed for a beautifully redesigned site!

Week 5: Assignment 3 -- Pick a title from the highly anticipated titles of 2013, found under the right-hand “Coming Soon- Season Previews” sidebar on Early Word.  Write a blog post using appeal factors or read alikes to describe the title.  Why is this title expected to be popular and to whom would it appeal?

As a warning to you all, the USA Today "article," like that "newspaper" itself, is barely a level about the New York Times Best-Sellers list: it's pretty worthless in establishing appeal factors, though it does offer nice big jpgs of cover art.  Better by far, I found, was the article from The Atlantic: the article itself is very brief, but there's a couple of telling paragraphs on each title. 

Among upcoming titles are two from the factory we call Stephen King: Joyland, with a June publication date, and Doctor Sleep, scheduled for September.  The former looks to be a return to the creepy stuff King started with -- the cover design looks like pure 1950s pulp.  This book will no doubt appeal to horror fiction aficionados, amusement park romanticists, and the coulorophobics who weren't scared off by King's It.  (It's hard to recommend by appeal factors when the book is unreviewed at this point: publishers don't give a lot away, especially for a guaranteed best seller like King.)

Doctor Sleep revisits little Danny Torrance, begun in The Shining (1977).  Danny has grown up in these past years (though I bet he'll somehow be younger than the 45 or 50 he should be, from the original chronology), still flashing back to that Winter in Colorado, but now using his "shining" to comfort the afflicted.  Then something happens, something (you can bet) awful.  But neither King nor the publishers will say much more.  That reticence won't stop sales.

Appeal factors?  Revisiting favorite characters is a big one (Danny, if you haven't read it in a while, was a VERY appealing kid), and hopefully the setting (New Hampshire) will be as much a character as the Overlook Hotel was.  If King can return to his slightly more controlled style of his early books (before his publishers told him, "Write as much as you want -- your 'editor' will just correct your spelling"), and if the book lives up to my personal expectations, the closest possible read-alike with be The Shining itself, my second favorite King novel (after The Stand).

Both of these books should appeal to King fans of every age -- I bet Doctor Sleep will bring a few back who left him circa Firestarter, like me, just because they want to see "whatever happened to that poor put-upon Danny Torrance?"