“Do libraries carry sex guides?” a sales rep asked me recently. It struck me as a silly question, but I understood from whence she was coming—people still view libraries and librarians as prudish (and the proliferation of sexy librarian Halloween costumes isn’t helping—especially when they’re met with howls of protest from members of the profession). To offset this line of thinking, I answered with a resounding yes and recounted one of my favorite stories from the trenches.

In the summer and fall of 1998, I worked as an adult circulation desk attendant at the Fargo (North Dakota) P.L. One of my tasks was to reshelve books, and guess which title was constantly circulating or at least being read in the cubbies? The Joy of Sex (which I once found mixed up with the Danielle Steele novels). My point here is that Fargo isn’t the largest or the most liberal city in the Midwest, but it still had the decency to acknowledge that its citizens are sexual beings and may want some help between the sheets.

As the editor responsible for assigning psychology books, I assign sex guides, and never in my six years of dealing with these books have I thought that libraries were too rarefied a place to stock them. Sex may not be a public practice, but it is on the public’s mind, so I have sent out several dozen for review, mainly to my consummate sex guide reviewer, Martha Cornog (LJ’s Nonfiction Reviewer of the Year of 2001, you should note).

Her forthcoming and often funny assessments of titles ensure that librarians are in the know about the hottest (Nina Hartley’s Guide to Total Sex) and the most important manuals (Miriam Kaufman’s and others’ The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability). Martha is often at her best in LJ’s annual roundup of sex guides and memoirs publishing around Valentine’s Day (see “The Go-Go Golden Libido”). Just as her writing has become more complex, so has the literature on sex. Publishers seem to be looking for new ways to engage readers. Never fear, sex guide junkies—you’ll get your fill with books like LaDawn Black’s Let’s Get It On (One World). But the more cerebral among us also get Daniel Amen’s Sex on the Brain: 12 Lessons To Enhance Your Love Life (Harmony).

This year’s political campaigns have been dirtier and nastier than ever, but in Virginia the political mudslinging has stooped to scraping the bottom of the barrel: literary criticism! According to the Washington Post, Republican Senator George Allen has accused his Democratic opponent, novelist and former Secretary of the Navy James Webb, of writing dirty books. Campaign officials sent excerpts from Webb’s  novels—some depicting graphic sex and incest—to the Drudge Report web site as examples of Webb’s lack of moral character and unfitness for office. Obviously Allen’s staff don’t read Library Journal reviews because among the novels they classified as “Triple XXX” were the highly praised Lost Soldiers (blurbed by fellow Vietnam veteran  Arizona Senator John McCain) and the classic Fields of Fire  Webb unapologetically stood by his work, saying he was proud of his writing ” because it reflects the things he saw as a combat Marine in Vietnam and later as a journalist reporting on war-torn regions such as Beirut in the early 1980s.” LJ reviewer David Keymer who praised Lost Soldiers noted in an email,  ”Politics gets worse daily. I’d say this one was a new low but Rush Limbaugh won that award with his remarks on Michael J. Fox’s illness.”

Since Mitch Albom’s latest treacly opus, For One More Day, went on sale at Starbucks October 3, it has sold 45,000 copies , which Publishers Weekly reports accounts for 12% of the  total number of books sold. What does Starbucks put in its frappuccino to get readers to throw their money away on this sentimental garbage? When I first heard that Starbucks had chosen Albom as the first author the company was going to promote in its stores, I was so disappointed. What a wasted opportunity, I thought. Already a best selling author for such masterpieces of icky sentimentality as Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Albom certainly didn’t need the extra marketing attention. Why couldn’t have Starbucks been as adventurous, or at least as eclectic, in their first  book choice as they are with their music CDs? (This past Sunday’s New York Times has an interesting article on the Starbucks cultural asethetic.)

This would have been a perfect moment to introduce exciting and original first novelists like Keith Donohue (The Stolen Child), Leyne Mehu (Song of the Crow), and Maria Arana (Cellophane). But as I skimmed through Albom’s book, I realized why Starbucks chose it. The novel is short (197 pages, making for a quick read), compact (easily held in one hand while you grasp a grande latte in the other), and easy to display by the cash register. (Try doing that with Thomas Pynchon’s forthcoming 1000 page opus Against the Day!) With a built-in-reader fan base, Albom is the perfect Starbucks author—as easy to package and market as its coffee. [Starbucks is apparently searching for its second author and Galleycat.com speculates on who it might be.]

Ahoy,

Although we’ve been posting web-only, freely accessible Xpress reviews for awhile now, we figured that maybe, well, it might be good to publicize them (yay brain!). So every week, we’ll post here what titles are being reviewed and you can mosey on over, if you like.

Xpress Reviews: Week of Oct. 24, 2006

NONFICTION
1) Hall, Stephen S. Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness, and Success of Boys—and the Men They Become. Houghton.

2) Rimm, Sylvia B. Keys to Parenting the Gifted Child. 3d ed. Great Potential.

3) Siegel, Bernie, M.D. Love, Magic and Mudpies: Raising Your Kids To Feel Loved, Be Kind, and Make a Difference. Rodale.

GRAPHIC NOVELS
1) Amano, Jeff (text) & Craig Rousseau & others (illus.). RUULE. Vol. 2: Kiss & Tell. Image Comics.

2) Bendis, Brian Michael (text) & Mark Bagley & others (illus.). Ultimate Spider-Man. Vol. 16. Marvel.

3) Benson, Gabriel (text) & Jeff Amano (illus.). Fade from Grace. Image Comics.

4) Brandon, Ivan (text) & Hawthorne, Mike & others (illus.). RUULE. Vol. 1: Ganglords of Chinatown. Image Comics.

5) Bullock, Mike (text) & Jack Lawrence (illus.). Lions, Tigers, and Bears. Vol. 1: Fear and Pride. Image Comics.

6) Consiglio, Tony. 110 Per¢. Top Shelf Productions.

7) Hine, David (text) & Jim Muniz, Kevin Conrad, & others (illus.). Decimation: X-Men—The 198. Marvel.

8) Katoh, Tadashi. Project X Challengers—Cup Noodle: The Miracle of 8.2 Billion Served; The Magic Noodle, Nissin Cup Noodle. Digital Manga.

9) Layman, John (text) & Aaron Lopresti & others (illus.). Decimation: Sentinel Squad O*N*E. Marvel.

10) Ohtsuka, Eiji (text) & Housui Yamazaki (illus.). The Kurosagi Corpse Deliver Service. Vol. 1. Dark Horse.

11) Sable, Mark (text) & Paul Azaceta & others (illus.). Grounded. Vol. 1: Powerless. Image Comics.

12) Yamada, Yugi. Close the Last Door! Juné: Digital Manga.

13) Yi, Dong-Eun (text) & Yu Chung (illus.). Freak: Legend of the Nonblonds. Vol. 1. ICE Kunion.

A friend recently sent me a Metafilter Link, and after reading about why Washington Post writer Lonnae O’Neal Parker gave up on hip-hop, I asked my friend about how a tech-savvy senior in college like himself uses MetaFilter. Although the answer is “to waste time,” he explained that fairly eloquently and identified the site as a huge source of information. 

See Jessamyn West’s Oct. 15 LJ Reference Backtalk for information about how MetaFilter is best-used by librarians, primarily through Ask MetaFilter.

Here (only slightly edited) is how my friend explained MetaFilter (versus Ask MetaFilter) to me after reading West’s article:

“AskMe is a subpart of MetaFilter where people ask random questions about anything and anyone and everyone can respond. MetaFilter itself, though, is self-described as ‘the best of the web.’  It’s a community of users posting to one big blog.  Everyone can make one post a day and the goal of every post is to share something the poster thinks of as ‘the best of the web.’  So MetaFilter itself isn’t about answering questions, just sharing links.  Because of a few rules (no double posting, no self-promotion), a $5 membership fee, and a general fear of being made a fool of by commenters, the posts that are made (like 50ish a day) are usually pretty good, or at least interesting.  Which makes metafilter pretty much a limitless time wasting site.  Posts can be ‘the best of the web’ because they are breaking news, hilarious, cool, important, interesting, or just plain fun.  I mean, via MetaFilter I’ve read about how bad electric voting machines are, found great flash games, heard about the earthquake in Hawaii, found new music, books, and movies.

“It’s just a nice site to browse through when you’re bored, to see if any of the posts are interesting.”

Although that final word sounds like a put-down, for an antsy undergrad, I think it’s pretty positive.  And, as West points out, it’s just another version of the public’s “librarian bug” and itch to share information.

Biographies of current music groups tend to be of the cut-and-paste variety, stretched-thin magazine feature treatments meant to cash in on the of-the-minute act on MTV. Rarely do I assign these titles, not because I’m sticking my nose up at their low literary quality, but because I believe they often fall into the realm of our sister publication, School Library Journal. Kids and YAs, more so than “mature” fans, are more likely in my estimation to devour something like Marc Spitz’s forthcoming Nobody Likes You: Inside the Turbulent Life, Times, and Music of Green Day (Hyperion).

Then along comes a curious animal, indeed, a music biography that breaks and bends all the stereotypes: Gorillaz: Rise of the Ogre (Riverhead). As our always dead-on Matthew Moyer put it in his upcoming review (check the Nov. 15th issue), “[This] book is equal parts graphic novel, design catalog, and spoof of Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zepplin Saga….”

This book’s winningness is not surprising given the band that inspired it. Gorrilaz, for those not in the know, is one of the more interesting bands to form in the last five years, a literal (if I may use the term) cartoon band dreamed up by illustrator Jamie Hewlett of Tank Girl fame and singer Damon Albarn of the English band Blur. In 2001, they scored a massive single with “Clint Eastwood” and continue to be successful with their latest album, Demon Days. That Hewlett and Albarn have produced a book to realize their vision of a multicultural musical utopia further says something wonderful about my favorite piece of media—books equal authenticity and staying power maybe more so than the hottest CD. Long after Russel Hobbs, Noodle, Murdoc, and 2D lose their Midas touch and break up, their book will survive on library shelves as a testament to their inventiveness and impact.

It’s a rainy Friday afternoon and I have been going through my folder of fiction reviewers, clearing out the deadwood (reviewers who are constantly late, never return reviews,  or somehow have fallen off the face of the earth despite my urgent emails and phone calls). What I noticed is how few of my reviewers are male. Of the more than 200 kind souls who review fiction for me, only 20 are men. Is this because men don’t read as much fiction as women? (In the recent round of newspaper and web stories regarding the failure of Jed Rubenfield’s historical thriller about Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Murder, to become a blockbuster, many agents and publishers cited the surprising success of Diane Setterfeld’s The Thirteenth Tale, which they noted was more of a woman’s book. Of course, this reminds me of my friend’s husband who refuses to see any movie based on a Jane Austen novel. “It’s a friggin’ woman’s picture”, he complains. 

The gender of a reviewer really shouldn’t matter when I am assigning books, but sometimes I am indundated with more testerone-laden macho adventure/technothrillers (think WEB Griffin, Nelson DeMille, Tom Clancy) than even my most tomboyish of female reviewers can handle. (If you think I am gender stereotyping, I’ll have you know that my sole reviewer of sports fiction was female—she burned out on too many bad baseball novels, and that for many years Westerns were reviewed by the legendary Sister Avila whose reviewer notes read: no sex or cussing, violence OK.)

So I am putting a call out to all you hairy-chested male readers. If you are not afraid to tackle fiction and can write well, prove your manliness and email your resume and a brief writing sample to me at wwilliams@reedbusiness.com.

We are giving away a free 1-year subscription to all library students! And I mean free. No strings attached, no hidden fees, no exchange for your soul.

Email me at akim@reedbusiness.com and I will email you the PDF of the subscription form. Please feel free to pass this information along to anyone who would be interested.

Hey folks - we got the form online. Please use this link to get to the subscription form: http://www.libraryjournal.com/contents/pdf/studentform.pdf

*Must have a valid student ID and this offer is limited to the USA only. I’m sorry, Canada.

Have a good day,
AK

Cider Mill Press, distributed by Sterling, is fllipping the script on the ever-growing collection of books on the history of hip-hop (see “The Hip-Hop Library” and a forthcoming review of Total Chaos, a new collection of hip-hop scholarship): out in January is Hip-Hop U.S. History, which includes a CD and lyrics of original raps for high school students on history “from Columbus to the Civil Rights Era.” 

With praise for this “Flocabulary” series from Cornel West, TIME OUT New York, and MTV News, a look at the educational lyrics is disappointing: “Thirty thousand years ago some dudes / came across the Bearing Strait wearing snowshoes. / Eskimos chasing woolly mammoth, / Ice Age white like dandruff.” And the actual beef of the information, the stuff on tests, is in ordinary text-book prose in the margins.

This idea may work on TV (a la School House Rock), but I have trouble imagining a teenager that would be seen carrying this book or letting the beat to ”It’s the U.S. (Bust the A)” seep out of iPod ear buds. Thanks for the option, but I’ll stick with the history of hip-hop over the hip-hop of history.

Two years ago, I received a galley for the annual breast cancer roundup I write for Library Journal called Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy by Geralyn Lucas, a Lifetime Network programming exec who was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 27. The book was a wonderful amalgam of humor, anxiety, compassion, and truth about being struck down with this “older woman’s disease” (my term, not hers) when you are still so young. Lucas’s candor and forthrightness were refreshing and a call to arms for younger women brandishing the general invincibility that goes along with youth.

I had the pleasure of meeting Geralyn at the Ann Taylor Salute to Survivors event leading up to the 2004 Susan G. Komen Foundation Race for the Cure in New York City. She was the guest speaker and read an excerpt from her book. I introduced myself to her afterward. Having already seen the review, she said she was thrilled to meet me (LJ editors don’t live in hero worship land, so this was a kick), and her effusiveness over the review made me feel humble. We definitely had a mutual admiration thing going.

Geralyn is still trying to make younger women, especially, wise to their breast cancer risk. Last week I was invited to a premiere of the Lifetime Network movie based on her book, to be broadcast Monday, October 23, at 9 p.m. It is funny and sad and an eye-opener. All women (along with the men in their lives) should watch it. I emailed Geralyn my congratulations on the culmination of the project, and she expressed regret at not having had the time (oyyy [her phrase]) to set up screenings for librarians, because their feedback on the book had been very meaningful. So I’m inviting all librarians (and your patrons) to a “private screening” in your own home (or maybe on a big-screen TV in your library) of Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy. Lipstick optional. Tissues preferred. Awareness, essential.