JCPLA Staff Development Day notes

I don't know about you, but I thoroughly enjoyed the 2011 JCPLA Staff Development Day.  I hope you attended as many sessions as you could and were able to take something valuable from each and every one.  The RA option this year was a reboot of last year's "Opening Doors, Opening Books" program and I am sharing the results of our discussion here.  We had a talkative and rowdy group of attendees, ready to share their knowledge and expertise with the group.

*In reference to our mini breakout discussion about apps, it is People magazine that puts a changing selection of 5 interesting smartphone apps on the back of each weekly issue.*

This program was a condensed version of reader’s advisory guru Nancy Pearl’s 2010 Public Library Association half-day preconference program. In order to effectively match up a reader with just the right book, it’s helpful to understand how to apply the concept of “doorways” in suggesting reading material. This session will focus on defining, identifying, and using doorways in RA interviews.

Nothing cements a library in a community like providing the connections that service gives and this is a service EVERYONE has the chance to excel at on a daily basis.

Whole library RA – don’t be afraid to recommend an audiobook or a video on a subject someone might like. Also, readers need to discover that they can have the same reading experience by taking books from different parts of the library, not just the same area they always visit (i.e. the patron who only reads one genre/author).

RA isn’t like a reference interview. In a RI, the capital of Peru is always Lima but a person’s reading interests change depending mood.

Don’t feel like you can only suggest books you’ve read, it’s impossible to remember every book much less the plot details of each one.

RA is not about us. The reader should never know our opinion about a book unless they ask for it.

It’s essential to make an effort to read books in areas we wouldn’t normally read, especially if those areas are popular in your library. We need to be willing to read anything. Even if we don’t like it we only need to read it long enough to be able to answer the question, “What kind of reader would like this book?” Read promiscuously

Provide three suggestions: one spot on, one similar, and a “reach” choice.

“suggest”, not “recommend” because “recommend” carries with it the subtle insinuation that the potential reader should have the very same experience with the book that you did.

Don’t ask what they like, but what they liked about it.

Invite the reader to come back and discuss the book with you.

The Doorways: Story, Character, Setting, and Language

Each book has all four but the difference is in the size of each doorway within the book.

These are the EXTREMELY on-the-fly notes I took via Google Documents while session participants fired titles at me! Please forgive the informality of it all! 


STORY / PLOT


Possible display title: “Stories You May Not Have Heard”

The drive to know what happens next becomes the main motivation, “I stayed up all night, I just HAD to know what happened”, and “a real page-turner”


burnt mountain - anne rivers siddons
room - emma donoghue
abandon - blake crouch
escape - carolyn jessup
the millennium trilogy - steig larsson
crooked letter, crooked letter - tom franklin
laurie king - mary russell series
charlaine harris - southern vampires
daniel silva - gabriel allon series
adriana trigiani
anne rice
ranger’s apprentice - flanagann
hunger games
city of bones trilogy
charles dickens

CHARACTER


Possible display title: “People You Ought To Meet”

“I felt like I knew him/her”, “That was my family”, “I know people like that”

Is the main character named or described in the title? This MIGHT be an indication of a character-drive book.


glass castle
garden spells
prince of frogtown
art of racing in the rain
snow flower and the secret fan
winter’s bone
rutherford - new york
the haunting of hill house - shirley jackson
we have always lived in the castle - shirley jackson
never let me go
the house next door
freedom - jonathan franzen
the book thief - markus zusak
song of ice and fire - george r.r. martin
patricia cornwell
alexander mccall smith
philippa gregory
sandra gulland
lonely polygamist - brady udall

SETTING


Possible display title: “Places You Should Go”

“This book just brought this place to life”, “I felt like I’d been there”, “I could see it clearly in my mind’s eye”

Is the place name in the title? This MIGHT be an indication of a setting-driven book.

SF/F world building makes great setting portals, westerns, dystopian fictions, Scandinavian mysteries, any sort of regional/ethnic literature (why do we like Southern literature so much?),


james michener
anne george
pat conroy
sci-fi/fantasy
westerns
southern literature
low country fiction
jan karon’s new book
peter mayle
frances mayes
anna and the french kiss
snow flower and the secret fan
night
day in the life ivan dnisovitch
kite runner
thousand spelndid suns
swan - frances mayes
the worst hard time - timogh egan
the falls - joyce carol aotes
robert mccammon
geraldine brooks

LANGUAGE


Built in lists in the literary awards: Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker Awards, Orange Prize, National Book Awards, etc.

Usually “the classics”, more literary, sometimes require more effort to read and get into, frequently feature complex plotting and potentially confusing viewpoints


geraldine brooks
gabriel garcia marquez
moby dick - herman melville
wolf hall - hilary mantel
w. somerset maughwayam
ernest hemingway
raymond carver
daniel woodrell
per petterson
jonah leher
murakami
irene nemirovsky
tom robbins
jonah lehrer
comedy / humor
david sedaris
lewis grizzard
erma bombeck
dave barry
lane smith
jon sczeska
kate dicamillo
shell silverstein

What have we missed?  What authors/books would you add to the list in each category?

Happy reading!
Holley