A Few Good Books: Using Contemporary Readers’ Advisory Strategies to Connect Readers With Books by Stephanie L. Maatta
My rating: 5/5 cats
yayyyy textbooks!!!
the best thing is, this isn’t even a textbook i had to read for school. i opted to read this textbook. for fun. one better—i asked for this textbook for christmas, because i couldn’t even get it into the store, and we don’t get discounts on textbooks, but then santa claus came down the chimney and gave me a readers’ advisory textbook!
ho ho ho!
readers’ advisory textbooks are a ton of fun. but that might just be me talking. i suppose people who are cuckoo for trigonometry find trig textbooks fun to read. but i assume most people on this website are bookish, and enjoy reading, except for those kids who can’t find anywhere else on the internet to RP. and this is a book about reading. and how to ensure that you can learn to make better choices as a reader, and read fewer books that you dislike.
i mean, this is a book for information professionals, to help them help library patrons and bookstore customers, but you guys can train yourself do this. most of the resources are available to you. and this book collects a ton of them and they are all there in the back matter of the book.
i have a lot of them listed in the RA group i started on here:
http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/4…
which, yes, is for school, but i think these kinds of forums can be useful for readers, and i am not just pimping my group for my own good. readers’ advisory is something i am very passionate about, because who wants to struggle through an unsuitable book? it is both an art and a science, and maybe i am just exceptionally good at it, but it isn’t that hard to learn, seriously. and it’s fun! if you already like books, and are motivated enough to learn how to select books that are more likely to interest you, i would definitely recommend flipping through a readers’ advisory textbook at some point. these are the ones i have enjoyed:
The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction
Readers’ Advisory Service in the Public Library
Serving Teens Through Readers’ Advisory
and this one.
even though there is a lot of information in here that doesn’t pertain to me, necessarily, it is still a five-star cat book, because it reinforces a lot of ideas and practices that hopefully will help me in my future job as readers’ advisor to the stars. or queen of RA. i will take any job they offer me at this point, because this is what i am good at and this is what i want to do. so hire me already, jeez!
as far as weak points, they are few, and just personal irritants. i was a little tired of hearing how “robust” various websites were, because it mostly just made me hungry, and how “holistic” reading was, because ew, and the section on e-readers was kind of adorable because of how many changes there have been in just three years, but overall, this is an excellent book, and a very merry christmas (in october) to me.
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