Week Six, Assignment Three: Pick Three subgenres with which I am unfamiliar

My three subgenres are "Swords and sorcery," of the Fantasy genre; "Paranormal," part of Horror; and "Pioneer families," from Westerns.  I read at least a little in each of these genres but nothing in any of the subgenres.

In attempting to find fan sites for each of these, I Googled "[subgenre] fan sites" or if I got too few hits, "[subgenre] fan".  For "Sword and sorcery fan sites," I got way too many hints for usability.  Changing "fan sites" into "fansites" helped a little. 

I found a good fansite (or fan site) for the Red Sonja character (so memorably and miserably played by Brigitte Nielsen way back in '85), http://www.boomvavavoom.com/redsonja1.html, that goes into nearly all imaginable Red Sonja incarnations.  (Pun intended). 

Finding more general fan sites (or fansites) was more difficult.  This particular subgenre is rift with fan-boys and cosplayers so those things need to be filtered out.  I realized that to do this more efficiently, I needed to be in a reading site.  Hmmm, if only there was a place where readers of all genres might share their reviews, one that was easily searched by subjects or "tags," if you will.  If only someone would come up with something like that ....

So I went to the old reliable Goodreads. 

Sadly (?), Goodreads doesn't use the phrase "Sword and sorcery."  Instead thtere are slightly broader subgenres of fantasy such as High, Low, Dark and Epic.  All of these contain some elements of what Herzberg called "Sword and sorcery," so I'm going with Epic, which seems closest (the only Fantasy I've read religiously is Tolkien, which also fits into several of these subgenres). 

Also sadly, Goodreads method of using tags is voluntary to the point that many people may not use them at all (depending on how they use their Goodreads account).  And there's just not anything there I can find that leads outside Goodreads itself into the wild and wooly world of Fan Sites. 

Second attempt:  Following a suggestion from a colleague, I'm going in by individual author's name.  Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, is probably the single biggest purveyor if Sword and Sorcerism, and Googling "Robert E. Howard fan site" gave me what seems to be the be-all and end-all, the Alpha and the Omega if you will, of Conan-related sites: The Newcomer's Guide to Robert E. Howard.  But it's not really a fansite (it IS, but not in the way the assignment expects a fan site to be.)

I am no longer Conan.  I am no longer The Terminator.

Perhaps more what was in mind is REHupa, the Robert E. Howard United Press Association.  A warning: both the Newcomer's Guide and REHupa are like gateway drugs into the weird and semi-dark world of Robert E. Howard and The Hyborian Age.  Another example: an ad-ridden Angelfire site (open at your own risk), by a certain Joe Marek.

I'm done with "Sword and Sorcery." 

*****

Paranormal Horror.  This oughta be somewhat easier -- the subgenre itself seems more current and popular (though again, as a non-reader of any of these subgenres ... what do I know, apart from what I've learned professionally?).  We'll see ....

***

[moments later ....]

Most of the subgenres I looked into are not widely used as such.  On Goodreads, there's a genre of Horror, but no subgenre of Paranormal Horror,  Under Paranormal, there's no Paranormal Horror.  Grrrr .....

*****

Westerns -> Pioneer families?  Should I even bother looking? 

*****

Part Three, Subsection B
Three authors in each sub-genre (and a representative title or two)

The Godfather of Sword and Sorcery, as I stated above, is Robert E. Howard, who published the first Conan story, "People of the Dark" in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, a pulp magazine of the time, June 1932. 

Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser was published in 1939 and seems to have begun the tradition of Making the Place Names All But Unpronounceable.

Charles Saunders published Imaro in 1981, which is noteworthy as the first S & S to feature a black protagonist.

Appeal factors for Sword and Sorcery include simple characters (usually savage and primitive and somewhat Rousseauan), exotic setting (otherworldly but not too alien), and action-packed plots.  The plot and setting seem paramount.

***

Paranormal horror is typified by the vampire novel -- and as we all know, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) was both the first and (arguably) the best of the lot, combining a modern (at the time of publication!) setting, an ancient villain, and romantic, Byronic plotting.  The most important single factor is probably the setting (as the characters, apart from the Count himself, are fairly one-dimensional, and the plot is pretty predictable).

Anne Rice worked major miracles with the classic vampire with her Vampire Chronicles, beginning with Interview With the Vampire (1976), adding strong characters and more complex plotting, along with wonderfully realized backstories and histories for all the major players, and the whole realm of the Undead.

Then along came Stephanie Meyer, who somehow caught the apparently vapid imagination of a generation with her retrograde Twilight series.  Again, the drippy and dripping setting of Washington State's forested regions are a major attraction, along with a romantic plot, with a little sappy teen romance and terrible characterization.

The movies?  Let's just say Kristen Stewart does a more than capable job playing the undead Bella.  Oh, you say she's not undead?  My mistake.

Leave me alone, I'm trying to act!

Of course the king of Paranormal horror is ... naw, that's a too-easy pun.  It's Stephen King.  His Carrie (1976) put him on the map and he had a good run through The Shining, The Dead Zone, and The Stand.  Then, as each little piece of dreck with his name on it continued to earn major profits for his publishers, his writing went more and more astray until he has become a self-indulgent, self-important word-spewer.  If an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters typed for an infinite number of years, eventually they'd come up with Shakespeare -- is that how it goes?  If you took a hundred monkeys and set them typing for a week, you'd get a Stephen King novel, circa 1990.  His short stores, generally better written (disclaimer: IMHO), might take a year each.

King's appeal factors include violent and bloody action and wonderfully creepy settings. 

I do look forward to Doctor Sleep, as I said in a previous post, but I'm prepared to be disappointed.

***

The subgenre of Pioneer Families was pretty much begun by Bess Streeter Aldrich.  Her A Lantern in Hand (1928) preceded Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods by three years, though Wilder's book is more firmly rooted in reality -- her family really were Minnesota (and elsewhere) pioneers, and Aldrich was at least one generation removed from "Pioneer Life."  Setting in a foreign, "untamed" (meaning by European-based civilizations) land is the major appeal, along with the descriptions of pioneer privations and the resulting feeling in the reader of "well, my life is rough, but at least we've just about got this bed-bug-thing licked."

There's a whole sub-subgenre of Pioneer Families, Mormon Pioneer Families, typified by Gerald Lund's many books.  Fire of the Covenant (1999) is one.  These appeal to the reader for the same reasons as above, but with the added aegis of that sect's reputation for adherence to its rather strict rules of governance and, to a "Gentile," or outsider, its unusual belief system.  

*****

Part Three, Subsection C
Mashups

Some books may fit into one of more subgenres.  Describe two titles, not identified by Herzberg, and rationalize your choices.

I read Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith (2010 -- he also wrote what may the kick-off title of this sub-sub-subgenre of "literary zombie fiction," Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, usually credited to Jane Austen and Grahame-Smith, and catalogued in most public libraries under Austen) when it was first published, and enjoyed it immensely.  Being a huge 16th-President fan, I could easily see where Lincoln's life story ended and the fantasy-horror elements began.  It's a great story, fairly well-told and not badly written.  It combines Lincoln's actual life with the zombie idea in a way that's both entertaining and satisfying.  It's really a mashup of biography, pioneer history, horror, alternative history, and ... well, there must be at least one more thing there ... but I'll let you figure it out.  It's much more fun than the movie adaptation.

Also in the vein of Presidential mockrography is The Remarkable Millard Fillmore: the Unbelievable Life of a Forgotten President, by George Prendle (2007).  This is pure nonsense, a highly fictionalised and humorified biography of one of our least remarkable presidents -- when this came out, there hadn't been a "real" biography of Filllmore in about fifty years -- since then, there's at least one legitimate one, which is not nearly as fun as this.  Prendle takes the basic facts of Fillmore life and makes him into a Paul Bunyan/Davy Crockett-esque, larger-than-life figure, which is pretty much the opposite of what the real 13th President was like, apparently.  Its subgenre must me something like "humorous biography/tall tale."  I recommend it whenever I get the chance.  But please, kids, do not cite it in a serious research paper.

*****

Whew!  On to Week Seven!  Glory be.

Week Six, Assignment Two: Explore and comment on a Prezi link, by Alex Herzberg

Over all this is a good and well-thought-out flow chart of fiction genres and subgenres.  My friend Monty has something erudite to say about the history and relationship between science fiction and fantasy -- which Herzberg makes a genre and subgenre, respectively -- which makes a lot of sense to me. 

My biggest reservation about this chart is Herzberg's opinion that "culinary capers" and "pet investigators" are both subgenres of Mystery, equal to (in his hierarchy) "cozies," but I would argue that those two are sub-subgenres of "cozies."  They are simply "cozies" with heightened emphasis on food and pets, rather than something new and different.

In my not-so-humble opinion, the Mystery genre is only really broken into four major subgenres: Detective fiction, Cozies, Hard-boiled, and Police procedurals.  There's a lot of overlap between them -- Cozies may (and usually do) feature a detective, usually an amateur like a Miss Marple or a Nancy Drew, and usually employing the methods of induction and logic first presented by Poe with his detective stories featuring Auguste Dupin. 

Detective stories may feature a "hard-boiled" detective like Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer, but may be equally at home with more sedate investigators like Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance.

There are also sub-subgenres like "whodunits," and in contrast there are some that may feature crime but no solution -- I'm thinking of Jim Thompson in particular.   Thompson's books are very hard to categorize -- he was more a writer on criminal psychology than a conventional "mystery writer."

Maybe "hard-boiled" is more a style than a genre.  Hemingway, Hammett, Chandler, Thompson and many others wrote in what we might call a "hard-boiled" style, but they don't really share much more than a clipped style, pithy sentences, a certain cynicism and/or "world weariness." 

Herzberg's "Foreign intrigue" doesn't need to be separated out at all from his other subgenres.  I can imagine a non-English-language librarian classing everyone from Rita Mae Brown to Agatha Christie to Charles Dickens under "Foreign intrigue" if its major identifying characteristic is just that it's set in a place that's "not here."

A nicely done flowchart but imperfect, as all human endeavors are.

Week Six, Assignment One: Something I learned about my "genre link."

Street Fiction is owned (or at least heavily subsidized) by Amazon.  But so is Goodreads and so, soon, will be Google!  Or vice-versa, one of those. 

That said, all the books that are being pushed on Street Fiction are (surprise!) available through Amazon.  The "reviews" are your common garden-variety Amazon reader-reviews, but that's not a bad thing -- some of these reviews are well written and very useful, especially in genres we're not familiar with. 

I clicked on the sub-link for "urban non-fiction" and found at least two books I want to read, one based on the reviews herein, the other based on them and the personal recommendation of a friend who happens to be reading that book at the moment.  The first is an academic bibliobiography of Iceberg Slim, by Peter Muckley -- which also makes me want to read Slim's fiction.  The second is the autobiography of the actress/semi-reformed-criminal Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, who played Snoop on HBO's The Wire, of which I'm a big fan. 

Amazon reviews are hit and miss, as is much of the Internet -- and there's always the suspicion that at least some of the reviews in Amazon are written by paid shills rather than real readers. 

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?"

Week Four, Assignment One:
Goodreads

After establishing a Goodreads account and making friends with colleagues, "recommend a title to a colleague based on a title or titles that they have enjoyed using the comments field on Goodreads.  Be sure to include appeal characteristics in your recommendation and note why it is similar to the title or titles they enjoyed."

Having been a Goodreads customer for nearly three years, and on LibraryThing before that, this assignment was a relative piece du gâteau. For me, the hardest part, like in a previous assignment, was determining who would be the Lucky Colleague who'd get to receive a recommendation.

Again, this proved harder than I thought.

At first I didn't want to chose anyone I knew too well already, thinking it would be more like a "real" RA experience with a random library customer.  But then I found the colleagues I don't know well tend to have tastes that I don't really relate to.  I probably should have stuck with this method, to flex my RA muscles (i.e., the muscle some refer to as a "brain"), but decided since time was valuable, I'd go down a path of less resistance.

So I narrowed my list to people I thought I knew.

Man, some of you people read weird stuff!  Just kidding.  But I also found, though surveying selectively, that many people either have so recently established their Goodreads accounts that they simply didn't have enough books listed that I had much to go on.  Another cause seems to be the combined pressures of a full-time job, maybe school on the side, and children or other family obligations that take away from your Goodreads time. 

After spending too much time selecting, I chose Marlene K. and sent her the following recommendation:

"Based on the many (who knew were that many?) books you've rated on art, art history, and art related crime (not to mention your apparent love of good narrative non-fiction), I can heartily recommend Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo's 2009 work, Provenance (it's also a mutual friend's favorite book). It tells the story of John Drewe, who commissioned an artist-acquaintance to paint 'in the style of' several modern painters, and sold them after intricately-fabricated provenances had been created and museum archives compromised. I can guarantee you will be delighted with this book."



The basic subject matter seems to be an interest of Marlene's, and it has a lot of the same appeal factors she mentions in reviews of not only art and art-crime books, but others as well, such as character and a facile writing style.  Both the main "criminals" -- John Drewe, the mastermind/con-man, and John Myatt, his artist and conspirator, though he is as much a victim as anyone in the book -- and the police who (eventually) investigate and solve the crimes, are fully realized, as are the more minor characters.  I really believe Marlene will love this book, and I hope she lets me know so!

Impressions of Goodreads:  Despite having been a "member" of the Goodreads community for a decent amount of time, this was really my first time being more interactive with it.  I was able to easily find Marlene's page, sort her 199 books by ratings (so that the ones she liked best came first) or by author (I wanted to make sure she hadn't read and rated what I was about the recommend).  I could read her reviews, all grouped together, recommend a book to her and then go back and find my recommendation to copy-and-paste it here.  The interface mostly works well, though there is so much opportunity to manipulate the info that some times the method of doing so can be cumbersome -- but mostly it's not. 

I've long enjoyed adding my reads and reporting on them through Facebook, but now I see how easy it is to use as a Readers' Advisory tool.

Week Three, Assignment Three: Three conversations, three recommendations

Conversation One:  The reader loves Eat, Pray, Love, and apparently the strong and brave female character is the draw for her.  If she were only hooked on Elizabeth Gilbert's personal story, I'd suggest Committed (2010), her sequel/conclusion to E,P,L, but as she seems more into the strong-brave-woman aspect, I'd go with one I'm also recommending for the Third Conversation: Pirates!  The true and remarkable adventures of Minerva Sharpe and Nancy Kington, female pirates, by Celie Rees (2004) -- it sounds like something I myself would truly enjoy, combining proto-feminism with piracy with 18th century shipboard-life.  What's not to like?

Conversation Two: This reader wants vampire stories "just like" Twilight, only totally different: she doesn't want the teen-love, angst-driven navel-contemplation but instead wants more blood and violence.  For her I suggest some of the Japanese vampire manga -- some is very good and certainly fast-enough paced for anyone with a short attention span.  Graphic novels aren't for everyone, of course, so I'd also recommend Seth Graham-Smith's 2010 Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, which is both biographical (well ... sort of) and action-packed (and much better than the recent filmed version).   

In the Young Adult class, there is a virtual plethora of titles, but one of the promising is Cheyenne McCray's Night Trackers series, about a group of dedicated (you guessed it) high school vampire slayers.  And there's a passel of books based on Josh Whedon's Buffy TV series, any of which might work for this reader.

Conversation Three was definitely the one closest to my tastes (though I love a good vampire story, too -- but my tastes run more toward Stoker's original Dracula [1897], Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian [2005], or Anne Rice's Vampire Lestat [1985]).  The reader wanted fast-paced true adventure stories.  I really loved Aron Ralston's Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2004) -- he is the hiker/skier who ran off solo without telling anyone his plan, got stuck (literally) and was some days getting rescued -- if you saw James Franco's Oscar-nominated performance in 127 Hours, you know the story.  The original book has been called the Greatest Adventure Story Ever, and it's way up there.  Well-written, exciting ... though maybe a little lacking in the fast-pacedness, at least until you fall into the rhythm of the prose.

Other great true-adventures include Halsey's Typhoon, by Bob Drury (2006), about the World War II typhoon that nearly wiped out Task Force 38 of the US Navy (and features in both the movie and novel of The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk), Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose (1996), a biography of Merewether Lewis cloaked in a retelling of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06, fills all the reader's requirements.  Others I think s/he'd enjoy include almost anything by Nathaniel Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea [2001], Mayflower [2006], and The Last Stand [2010], most notably).

Week Two, Assignment Three: RA to a colleague

"Visit a colleague’s blog and suggest two titles which they might enjoy based on their postings.  You may find these two titles via NoveList etc. but do not spend longer on these than you would with a customer."

Okay.  My semi-randomly chosen colleague -- who I have never met before tonight (in case there are grumblings of foreknowledge from the Groundlings) -- is Randalee G. -- though to be honest, I have met her.  I probably spent more time selecting my "randomly chosen" colleague than I did making the recommendations -- Randalee actually mentioned two of her favorite books, which someone would do if you were trying to readerly advise them. 

Randalee mentioned Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth and the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich.  I have read neither, which will make this RA even more entertaining to you, the viewer. 

Randalee's write-ups indicate characters and setting are particularly strong appeal factors for her, and I deduce that she enjoys the intellectual challenge of puzzle solving, as well.  From these factors I think she might enjoy the original Sherlock Holmes stories, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which have good characters (who will surprise you some, if you only know them from the movies and various TV series), unique and evocative settings (the Dartmouth moors, and of course foggy London itself, among others), and are rift with conundrums, murders and threats of violence -- who WOULDN'T like them?  Which makes recommending Sherlock Holmes almost a cheat.

From her enjoyment of the characters and medieval setting of Pillars of the Earth, Randalee might like Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles -- the trilogy about King Arthur.  These are set much earlier in British history than Pillars, but with similar intent, namely, to tell modern readers what it Really Might Have Been Like to Live in Medieval Britain.



And now, for no reason whatsoever: Shetland ponies in sweaters.