Week 1, Assignment 1: I did better on identifying children's book covers than adult book covers. The easily-recognizable children's book covers show me that publishers must keep memorable images and colors in mind when marketing towards children. I'm sure they do this for adults as well, but it seems to have a more lasting impression on children's books. Also, adult fiction books can be re-published with many different cover designs depending on art and publishing trends of the era. Children's picture books need to have the same cover designs because the illustrations always stay the same.
Week 1, Assignment 2: I found the sub-genres of Romance, Realistic Fiction, and Mystery to be easy to identify, while the sub-genres of Thriller, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy were much harder to identify. I think this speaks to the type of books I read (I read a lot more realistic fiction than thriller, for example) but it also reflects on the type of readers' advisory I've done at the branches I've worked at. I have a lot more experience doing Romance or Realistic Fiction readers' advisory than I do with Thriller or Sci-Fi, so that could also explain why the sub-genres were easier to identify.
Week 1, Assignment 3: I definitely agree with the reading and writing aspect of reader's advisory. Since I started blogging with Between the Covers, I found that my reader's advisory improved because I was able to refer customers to books I had actually read and reviewed. Also, the blog helps me because when I read other bloggers' posts of books I can recall their enthusiasm when referring a customer to a title in a genre I might not normally read. I need to work on not "pigeonholing" readers or books. I know that I personally don't feel that I could be pigeonholed as one specific type of reader, and I'm sure many of our customers feel the same way!
Week 1, Assignment 4: I picked NPR books as my book link and Locus Online (Sci-Fi/Fantasy) as my genre link. I like NPR books because their site is easy to navigate and in addition to posting reviews of recently published books, they also have many supplemental articles about literature in general that are particularly interesting to me as a graduated English major. I haven't read much Sci-Fi or Fantasy but I'm really getting into how much it's been trending among young readers. If you think of all of the popular teen series out there, like The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent, etc, they all follow that same post-apocalyptic, society-is-corrupted sort of theme. Of course, Sci-Fi and Fantasy have been around and popular for a long time, but I'm interested in looking into what makes SF/Fantasy appealing to different generations, depending on the time period they grew up in and the technology available at that time.
Week 1, Assignment 5: I know this was written from the point-of-view of a 6 year old, but a lot of their thoughts are similar to the ones I had when I first had to read these books in high school! I had no idea what The Great Gatsby was about when my English teacher first handed it to me in 10th grade; I probably would have guessed it was a science fiction novel about aliens. Also, to this day there are still some classics whose covers I recognize but I wouldn't be able to tell you what they're about. What's Catch-22 about again? :P
