Week One

The genre blog I have chosen to follow will be StreetFiction. It appears to offer a wide array of sub-categories including urban fiction, non-fiction, teen, Christian, and poetry. Urban fiction as a whole is one that I have not tackled yet and this is a good incentive to learn some authors or books within the genre to have a wider frame of knowledge.


EarlyWord is the blog I have chosen for books. The way it is structured in terms of the tagging system, as well as the vast array of tags available, seem like a useful function to learn different books that I would not normally encounter on a general daily blog.


Both activities identifying the covers of books (the quiz as well as the blank covers) proved a little difficult. Some of the books I knew because they had been popular, whereas some of the books I had never heard of before. I found the blank cover activity especially challenging because there were a lot of sub-genres within the groups that I had never heard of, but sounded generically easy to grapple with overtime and exposure.


I think the Golden Rules of Advisory are a handy reference to remember that you can't know what to recommend if you don't have the tools and knowledge to spot overarching trends. The two that seem really important are five and six, to not pigeonhole books or patrons. Making assumptions based on tropes, loose ideas, or even just past experiences are a barrier to being fully committed to offering honest service. These are good opportunities to practice listening skills!


That kid made good guesses about the covers. Sometimes the cover is the most interesting part of a book, but that doesn't mean it hits the target in terms of showing the audience what it provides. Purposefully misleading covers, or extreme graphic design, sometime seem like a downfall to providing the context clues necessary to correctly place a book where it should be.