Welcome to Check Your Shelf! This is your guide to all things book talk worth knowing to help librarians like you up your game when it comes to doing your job (& rocking it).
Check Your Shelf is sponsored by Libby, the one-tap reading app from OverDrive.
Whether you’re traveling around the world or relaxing on your couch this summer, Libby, the one-tap reading app from OverDrive will make sure you always have a good book with you. Instantly access thousands of eBooks and audiobooks for free from your library in just one-tap. Thanks to Libby and your library no matter what time it is or where you are, you’ll always have instant access to your next great reading adventure.
Libraries & Librarians
- Bartow County, Georgia residents can check out State Park Passes that give them free parking and admission to state parks and historic sites!
- The eBooks Minnesota program offers access to 4,000 eBooks to state residents, even if they don’t have a library card.
- How libraries can help migrant children, with an accompanying book list
- Anonymous graffiti artist Banksy offers support to keep Bristol’s 27 libraries open.
- Fargo Public Library is joining a growing wave of libraries by eliminating late fees for children’s books.
- How to create a classroom library.
Response to ALA’s Meeting Room Policy Interpretation
- ALA very recently updated “Meeting Rooms: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights” to explicitly state that if libraries provide study spaces for public use, they cannot refuse room space to hate groups. I have lots of thoughts about this, many of them angry.
- Many other librarians have shared similarly angry thoughts, including this Twitter thread by librarian Tyler Vachoff.
- The Office of Intellectual Freedom responded to the backlash with this press release.
- Which prompted even more angry responses from librarians.
- If you have thoughts about this (and I bet a lot of you do), you can check out this handy resource created by several librarians on Twitter – it has contact information and email scripts for your ALA leaders and representatives.
- And Rioter Beth O’Brien wrote last year about why neutrality in the library is bullsh*t.
Book Adaptations
- Megan Abbott has not one but TWO books simultaneously optioned for adaptation: You Will Know Me and Give Me Your Hand.
- Netflix is adapting Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie as a TV series.
- Greta Gerwig is following up Ladybird with her own adaptation of Little Women, starring Meryl Streep, Emma Stone, and Saoirse Ronan.
- Check out the first trailer for the Discovery of Witches TV series!
- Oprah casually mentioned on Twitter that she’s producing a film version of An American Marriage by Tayari Jones.
- Here’s a trailer for The Miseducation of Cameron Post.
Books in the News
- Look for a new biography of the late and sorely missed Anthony Bourdain, coming next year.
- Reese Witherspoon picks Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton for her July book club pick.
- Meanwhile, Emma Watson’s book club will be reading its first poetry collection: Milk & Honey by Rupi Kaur.
- South Carolina police object to the inclusion of The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds on local high school reading lists, saying that these books foster anti-police attitudes in teens. Now, I’m no expert, but this seems like a major professional overstep.
- Children of Blood and Bone has been picked as the first book for the Tonight Show Book Club!
By the Numbers
- Print sales are up by 2% in the first half of 2018!
- And on the other end of the spectrum, pleasure reading is apparently at an all-time low in the United States.
- 4 Houston schools receive 27,000 books to restock the libraries that were damaged by Hurricane Harvey.
Award News
- James LaRue, the Director for ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, offers his own perspective on the name change to the (former) Laura Ingalls Wilder Award.
- A group of Swedish authors, actors, and journalists have come together to award an alternative Nobel prize for literature. This comes after the Swedish Academy postponed this year’s prize following allegations of sexual assault within the Academy.
Pop Cultured
- Gone Fishing is a new true crime podcast for all of your crime-solving patrons.
- Expect to see more literary writers in the TV studio.
All Things Comics
- First novels, and now graphic novels! Stranger Things is getting the comics treatment from Dark Horse.
- Steve Ditko, creator of Squirrel Girl and co-creator of Spider Man, passes away at age 90.
- ALA approves a new Graphic Novel Roundtable, which will hopefully mean lots of new graphic novel resources, reading lists, and awards created by librarians, for librarians.
- 7 sexy comics that put the “graphic” in graphic novels.
- 10 short graphic novels & memoirs to read in one sitting.
Audiophilia
Book Lists, Book Lists, Book Lists
- Our list of the best books of 2018 so far!
- 20 (yes, 20) dragon shifter romances.
- If you’re new to the grimdark (dark fantasy) subgenre, here are 20 books to get you started.
- Publisher’s Weekly highlights promising debut novels for Fall 2018.
- Book Riot rounded up a bunch of posts about immigrants and the immigrant experience. Consider this your all-in-one resource on an extremely important topic.
- 6 transgender novels written by transgender authors.
- Books about Central America.
- A reading pathway for Tiffany Reisz’s super-intense romance novels.
- 50 must-read books about music.
- Whether you’re into clothes, amigurumi, or fancy granny squares, we’ve got a crochet book suited just for you!
- 50 classic memoirs written by authors of color.
- What is gothic fiction?
- Native American poets you should familiarize yourself with.
- 40 award-winning YA books to keep in your back pocket (and your front pocket). Basically all the pockets.
- I don’t watch soccer, but I bet your patrons do! Here’s a list of books to keep your World Cup readers happy.
- 10 middle grade book about the pioneer life (that aren’t Little House on the Prairie).
Bookish Curiosities & Miscellaneous
- Why aren’t schools teaching black literature?
- Demos Parneros, Barnes & Noble CEO, has been fired for violating unspecified company policies.
- Goodreads users vote on their picks for the modern “Great American Novelist” – see the results, along with the authors’ most popular books.
- Two interesting posts about the lack of diversity in historical romance.
- How one reader uses her library’s holds list to manage her reading schedule.
- Space-saving bookshelves ftw.
- Do you like bookends? Do you like Harry Potter? How about a list dedicated solely to Harry Potter bookends??
- University of Southern Denmark discovered three poisonous books in its collection.
- A small-town Connecticut restaurant gives away free books to every diner!
- Why were mice so darned popular in 90’s children’s books? Bustle investigates.
- Which literary cat are you??
Level Up (Library Reads)
Do you take part in LibraryReads, the monthly list of best books selected by librarians only? Whether or not you read and nominate titles, we’ll end every newsletter with a few upcoming titles worth reading and sharing (and nominating for LibraryReads, if you so choose!).
Last month, Kelly put together a reference guide for finding these books, along with a database of titles and publication dates to make reading and highlighting these books as easy as can be. Your only work is to read them and talk about them.
There is literally no excuse. Nominations for titles on the October list need to be submitted by August 20. Here are a couple suggestions to get you started:
- Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice. “Moon of the Crusted Snow imagines a small community on the precipice of winter without power or communication where leaders must grapple with control, restore order, and save their people from a grave fate.”
- The Lady Killer by Masako Togawa; translated by Simon Grove. “The Lady Killer leads a double life in the shadow world of Tokyo’s singles bars and nightclubs. By day a devoted husband and hard worker, by night he cruises nightclubs cafes and cinemas in search of lonely single women to seduce. But now the hunter is being hunted, and in his wake lies a trail of gruesome murders. Who is the culprit? The answer lies tangled in a web of clues, and to find it he must accept that nothing is what it seems.”
- White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. “In sixteen remarkable stories, Chaya Bhuvaneswar spotlights diverse women of color—cunning, bold, and resolute—facing sexual harassment and racial violence, and occasionally inflicting that violence on each other.”
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Thanks for hanging out and we’ll see you again in two weeks!
–Katie McLain, @kt_librarylady on Twitter. Currently reading Hope Never Dies by Andrew Shaffer.