Peoples, peoples,

There are some 3,000 library students currently in the U.S. (right?). Word is on da street that only 404 of you library science majors and faculty have signed up for the free one-year subscription to Library Journal….Frankly, I’m aghast.

So here are the details: Subscription Form (PDF)

1. Must have a valid student ID and this offer is limited to the USA only.
    a. When the form asks for a student ID, that means just a photocopy of the ID is needed.
    b. If you are an online/long distance student and do not have a student ID, a letter on school letterhead that confirms you are a student is acceptable.

2. You can also fax the form and supporting material to 646-746-6814.

3. We will not give out your information to third-parties, although we *might* email you promoting our own products, but then again, we might not.

Please circulate this wherever you see fit.

*I extend a special apology to recent graduates and Canadian library students: I’m really really sorry.

Cheers,
AK

Let everyone else nitpick about awards. (Do they really sell books? What, he won for that tripe?) For me, awards matter because they can highlight terrific reads that otherwise might get lost in the media backwash. Like most folks, I could name a dozen books I think should have been among the recently announced nominees for the National Book Awards. (Not Thomas Pynchon’s protean Against the Day? Not Olga Grushin’s exquisite and insightful The Dream Life of Sukhanov?) Yet I am happy enough with this year’s nominees in fiction and poetry, my own assigning areas, because generally they are neither boringly predictable nor aggressively obscure, as can happen with awards. The fiction list reminds me that I’ve been meaning to pick up Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker and sent me back to LJ’s reviews of Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country and Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document; I’d forgotten how strong they were. And because I tend to get exasperated when the collected works of grand old poets get nominated–how can a fresh new voice compete against a lifetime of achievement?–I am very happy to see not a single collections on this year’s poetry list.
    
Will the books chosen as National Book Award winners on November 15 really be the year’s best? Of course not; how could they be? With the number and quality of books published each year, prickling a range of tastes and interests, it’s not possible to declare anything the best—just intriguing and important enough to be the favorites of some serious readers. And that should be enough. An award winner cries out, “Get me, and let’s start talking,” which makes winning not the end of the conversation but only the beginning. Just tune in on November 16 to see whether I still agree.

Frankly, I cringe at the thought of anyone discovering my adolescent poetry and publishing it, but then I’m not Sylvia Plath. A poem Plath wrote at Smith College, inspired by her study of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, has just surfaced and now appears with commentary on Blackbird, an online journal of arts and literarture published jointly by Virginia Commonwealth University’s English Department and New Virginia Review. A Commonwealth creative writing student researching the Plath archives at Indiana University made the lucky discovery. What’s striking is that while many young poets struggle to find themselves, trying on styles like so many prom dresses, this poem shows Plath in full possession of her voice: ironic, acidulous, blackly funny, and demanding more of life. No, it’s not “Ariel,” but it’s an immeasurable treat.    

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.

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

If you’re betting on book award winners—and you can; note that according to top British betting site Ladbrokes.com, odds are three to one that Turkish author Orhan Pamuk will win the Nobel Prize in literature tomorrow—don’t look at me. Okay, I was rooting hard for last year’s National Book Award winner in fiction, William Vollman’s Europe Central, and for the previous year’s poetry winner, Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain. But generally my favorites don’t come up winners. So it was with some trepidation that I approached the list of Quill Book Award winners—so many categories, so many opportunities for egg on the face.

First the good news. I was thrilled to see Al Gore win in the history/current events/politics caregory for An Inconvenient Truth, though I wish more people had voted for him in another, bigger race way back when. It’s good to know that people (dare I say) warm to perceptive discussions of current events; as LJ’s book-buying surveys have shown over the last few years, books in this area are trumping diet manuals and pop fiction at libraries nationwide. And, yes, I’m thrilled that John Grogan’s Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog got not one but two nods, for biography/memoir and audiobook. Among the dozens of books I have had the good fortune to introduce at FOLUSA-sponsored panels at the American Library Association convention over the years, this one remains at the top—funny, unsentimental, and a great read. Mine, by the way, is just about the world’s best dog, but I can still relate.

In my own assigning areas of fiction and poetry, alas, I came up short, though I’ll bow to the people’s choice. Winning in a fiction free-for-all is always A Dirty Job, and Christopher Moore had to do it, but now and again a literary title of historical significance captures the public’s imagination, and I was hoping that this was the year for Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française. In general, this was a good list; I’m still looking hard at contender David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green and Sarah Gruen’s Water for Elephants for our best books compendium and would recommend that others look hard, too; Mitchell is a stylist with subtance who belongs up there with the best British novelists, and it’s gratifying to see an affecting tale like Gruen’s reach bestsellerdom.

A President’s poet, Maya Angelou not surprisingly was crowned people’s poet this year; it’s a diadem she already wears anyway, though I was thinking maybe Mary Oliver would be borrowing it this year. I can see why the meditative Oliver and the all-embracing Angelou would be popular, but I do wish that readers at large would get over their fear of American poetry. Edgy, lyric, and engaging, books like Jane Hirschfield’s After, Louise Gluck’s Averno, Carl Philips’s Riding Westward, and Kevin Young’s For the Confederate Dead could have been contenders. Check them out if you haven’t already, and while you’re at it, check out finalist Debra Dean in the debut category. Since nearly everyone loves to cook (just count me out), Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia did not shock as a winner, but Dean’s The Madonnas of Leningrad is at once elegent yet riveting fiction. 

Whatever anyone says, book awards are worthwhile because they make people talk about books, and they give critics one more way to spin good books at readers. The Quill Book Awards is an interesting means of expanding the literary conversation, though this year I could have done with a few less obvious choices (but, then, it’s not my choice). I wish there were more forums for promoting the little gems that aren’t so heavily marketed or don’t necessarily soar to the top of the best sellers lists. In fact, I’m working on an idea for that in LJ right now. In the meantime, in case you’re wondering, I’m rooting for Pamuk tomorrow. Just don’t bet on it.

Award season has begun, what with the Booker announced yesterday and the NBA finalists coming out later today, but the Quills, announced last night are unique, not least because it’s one award where librarians get the kudos they deserve in the book world. Many librarians vote on the awards, now in its second year, and the winners noticed, as many of their remarks included librarians among the list of thank yous. About half-way through the ceremony, Harry Connick, Jr. talked about the reopening of the Alvar Street Branch in New Orleans, and a video clip of the library played to a warm reception.

Some half-dozen LJ staffers attended, all in black tie (an uncommon enough event for any editor) and ready to compare thoughts on the winners. If you’re ever betting on the winners and you’re next to LJ editor Wilda Williams, here’s some advice: go with what she says. As we tag-teamed our way through the 19 categories, Willy got six of the winners cold and had strong instincts on several others. It’s true, she picked Calvin Trillin’s A Heckuva Job in the humor category, but right before the winner was announced she said, “You can’t underestimate Madea.” Sure enough, Madea won for Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings, and that title also won book of the year. Later, when Marley and Me was up for biography/memoir (it had already won for audio), she added, “You can’t compete with a dead dog.” And she was right again. 

My home bookshelves have runneth over since I started working at LJ in 1998. This, as many of my friends and relatives have pointed out, is one of those good problems to have: what to do with tens of pounds of beauteous converted pulp, all lovingly stockpiled under, on top of, and around my desk. The cons: My books don’t always fit so well in my Brooklyn apartment; sometimes, a poorly placed tome has come close to causing a serious accident (broken ankles, anyone?). My cat, Cleo, however, loves the bounty. A fat dictionary doubles as a kind of scratching post and a bed. Of course, I always have something excellent to read when I’m burned out on a book (see Half Reads Nearly Finished) or a trashy women’s magazine. Just last night, I couldn’t help but congratulate my bad self on the holdings of the shelf that sits next to my bed. This is where the music literature is at, from Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and Henry Rollins’s Get in the Van to Alyn Shipton’s A New History of Jazz and Toure’s Never Drank the Kool-Aid. I wasn’t that surprised to realize that I hadn’t read about a quarter of the titles. Will this force me to refrain from acquiring more free booty from my job? I think you know the answer, and the proof is in my work cabinet, freshly stuffed with, among other hardcovers, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.