With this week's assignment, Be More Bookish were given the task of reading the following Readers' Advisory primer. This primer was a great follow up for the previous list of Readers' Advisory tips. The primer is more detailed in giving the reader general themes and strategies for readers' advisory based on what appeals to the patron. For example, there were seven points about how to develop recommendations for a patron and how using a triad of those seven points can lead to a competent readers' advisory.
This is similar to the approach in music. There's so much variety in the type of music that people find appealing. Just like genres in books there's obviously genres in music such as popular, jazz, rhythm and blues, classical, rock and so on. Within those genres there are even particular niche genres that get as fine as splitting human hair. Also there is variability in the lyrics in music or they way that they are sung such as opera, acapella, rap, or even screamed. There is musical structure such as preludes, movements, concertos. There's such a complicated pattern for how music is made and performed that it's often easy to forget that there are several different ways that anyone can participate either on the performance, production, creation, or listening. It's often just as easy to forget that there are many points of entry for how someone can enjoy a book many of the same reasons.
The article describes that there are several appeal factors for a book under seven areas: pacing, characterization, story line, language, setting, detail, tone, learning/experiencing. Among these factors, the article states that a reader generally gravitate to tone and pacing. However one strategy to giving a readers' advisory is to use the concept of what the person likes about a book and just cater to those areas. This is pretty much the simplest of the concepts generally meaning that you match what appeals to the reader with a similar book.
A second approach the article states is to take someone's appeal factor and match it with a genre that features that style. For example, if the reader wants a fast paced book they will probably want something from thrillers, adventures, suspense, or romantic suspense. If the reader's appeal is to intelligent script then one may like science fiction, literary fiction, mysteries, and psychological suspense.
Below is my attempt at readers' advisory based on three books I've read in the recent past.
Be More Bookish - Week 2 Assignment 2
Bad Monkey - Remember all the buddy cop movies from the eighties? It was frequently an odd couple mismatch or a guy with a K9 assignment but the only real adventure was how the partners' antics unfolded on the silver screen. If you think you were more at home clumsy misadventures of Detective Clouseau or Fletch, you may what to check out Bad Monkey. A Detective in Key West FL is asked by a friend to hold onto an unidentified dismembered arm he temporarily keeps in his freezer. Meanwhile, an old flame is stalking him. She means to be helpful but she is also both seductive and unpredictable. While finding out who the arm belongs to, he crosses paths with a balding monkey who may have belonged to Johnny Depp during during the filming of Pirates of the Caribbean but was let loose from the film for aggressively humping everybody on the set. The antics that ensue play out in one giant hilarious adventure that could only happen in the setting of the southern tip of Florida.
Manifest Destiny - Have a penchant for history? Do you like alternative history? Do you like your alternative history with zombies? You may find the graphic novel Manifest Destiny to be up your alley. In two volumes, Lewis and Clarke are contracted with the federal government to explore the West for future expansion of the United States. But they are given a secret order that their crew is not yet aware of and may cost them their lives during the exhibition. When faced with insurmountable odds of an inhospitable environment, surrounded by the dead, only one warrior may give them an edge to find a way out. But their chances for survival are bleak, their mission doomed, and getting out of the West alive and in one piece is their new priority.
Rendezvous with Rama - If extra terrestrials landed on Earth tomorrow, how would you deal with them? Let the imagination of Arthur C Clarke, who coined "Houston, we have a problem" before Apollo 13 ever happened, take you into the near future where the expansion of the human race into earth's solar system has already happened. However, we still have no evidence of there being intelligent life elsewhere other than Earth. Until one day an unknown comet appears in the solar system. Only it's not a comet, it's an alien space vessel, unlike anything anyone has seen before. Earth responds by sending a team of scientists as Earth's ambassadors but to also investigate the interstellar object. What will they find? Will they discover an alien race? More importantly, will they be able to return to tell about it?
