LISNews: Librarian News

When NPR Books invited audience members to nominate and vote for their favorite Young Adult novels, more than 75,000 responded. The extraordinary outpouring speaks of the passion connecting the books section and its followers.

But in that response also lie the seeds of a defect, for lack of a better term, in the poll. The resulting "Your Favorites: 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels" included only two books whose protagonists are people of color, which critics called unjust.

Full piece on NPR

The pileup has left publishers jostling for shelf space and publication dates, and critics wondering how they can review all of the elite writers worthy of attention — not to mention the debut and midlist authors who might be neglected.

“You can only read so much,” said Ron Charles, the fiction editor for The Washington Post. “There are some real giants this year. It’s difficult for places like us that just run one review a day.”

Book: The Woman Reader
Publisher: Yale University Press
Description: This lively story has never been told before: the complete history of women's reading and the ceaseless controversies it has inspired. Belinda Jack's groundbreaking volume travels from the Cro-Magnon cave to the digital bookstores of our time, exploring what and how women of widely differing cultures have read through the ages.

Jack traces a history marked by persistent efforts to prevent women from gaining literacy or reading what they wished. She also recounts the counter-efforts of those who have battled for girls' access to books and education. The book introduces frustrated female readers of many eras—Babylonian princesses who called for women's voices to be heard, rebellious nuns who wanted to share their writings with others, confidantes who challenged Reformation theologians' writings, nineteenth-century New England mill girls who risked their jobs to smuggle novels into the workplace, and women volunteers who taught literacy to women and children on convict ships bound for Australia. -- Read More

Sometimes we engage in threeways, fourways, or even orgies of reading, in which there are so many books involved, well, we might not even be keeping track. It's horrible, isn't it? But, for as many books as exist, there are also any number of different reading types a book lover (or even a book hater) might demonstrate. What kind are you?

The Hate Reader
The Chronological Reader
The Bookophile