Week Five

Assignment One:


Since week one, Early World has been particularly useful as an overall sense of what new books are coming out and what they are most like. The break downs they have in posts are actually really engaging - consumer and peer recommendations, movie tie-ins, book trailers - these type of categories are good because they access different banks of knowledge and will be useful when working with different groups of people who are seeking out books for different reasons. The posts are regular and are brief so you can glean a lot of information just by scrolling down the main page. It also branches out from texts as a whole and gives information about authors and other relevant cultural knowledge.


The StreetFiction website updates consistently with new reviews and also is useful because it will give the bulk release titles for a month / week. What I like about the book the most is the different reviewers giving their own insight into books. Sometimes it seems like the voices from the internet are omnipresent and not really subjective, but this site has an author biography section so you can understand the personal interests. This site hasn't necessary made me more engaged in the genre, but allowed me to stay up to date on it.


Assignment Two:


Popular fiction, mysteries, and romances are definitely the biggest sellers at this branch. The New York Times Best Sellers list is one of the best resources because, often enough, this is the list patrons are using to find new books to search for themselves. Early Word would definitely be useful to find more titles for the mystery or romance genre, but it also seems like these readers stick to authors / series that they are interested in and get as many of those as they like at a time, constantly waiting for new works by them.


Assignment Three:


Speak by Louisa Hall is a sci-fi book that spans generations through the narratives of five individuals each searching to be heard. This book is a quick paced, easy to read novel that is quite a journey to find the overlapping connections between the narrators. The true gem of this novel is how it tells the story of human existence in an on-going and far reaching scope, deliberately reaching the reader in the conversation of their place in the text. Readers who enjoyed Cloud Atlas would enjoy this as a comparable, though far less dense.

Week Four

Goodreads Recommendations:


For colleague number one: Based on the amount of interest in the Harry Potter series, I would recommend the Septimus Heap series to them. It has all the magical elements and the fantastical world that Harry Potter made popular. Moreover, the Septimus Heap series introduces various characters in quick paced dialogue with wide scoped worlds. These series would be similar to people who really enjoy character building in terms of prolonging a series.


For colleague number two: A majority of her reads were dystopian novels, so I would recommend Ender's Game. It is a classic novel that has a lot of dystopian elements such as fatalistic points, dire situations, as well as struggles to combat the elite. The group dynamics in Ender's Game are similar to ones found in Hunger Games and Divergent. The worlds are confined to a smaller scope and there is a larger focus on interactions between power systems.


Goodreads is a valuable resource in terms of storing a bank of knowledge to draw from when customers are asking for recommendations - easier than trying to remember titles or authors off the top of your head. The recommendation feature for both books and authors is helpful as well because it allows for titles you might not have knowledge of with brief overviews to utilize.