Hey! It's been awhile since I posted about our Reading Wildly meetings! Part of that is because SUMMER (we don't usually have time to sit down and have meetings during summer) and part of that is because we've been short-staffed and going crazy for the past couple of months. We've done several months of Reader's Choice and share-with-each-other-when-you-can.
But now it's September and we're back! We met last week to share nonfiction titles and to talk a little bit about Becky Spratford's Call to Action: Get Out There and Read Something You Are "Afraid" Of. This felt like the perfect piece to get us back in our groove of Reading Wildly meetings because this is exactly what we try to do with Reading Wildly every month. When we choose our genres for the year, I ask my staff to think about what books they do Not normally gravitate to, what genres or topics they get asked about that make them nervous.
If you are thinking about ways to improve your own reader's advisory skills or about working with your staff to improve your team's skills, read that post above. It is definitely a call to action that deserves an answer!
And while you're at it, I want you to think about helping a patron with a reader's advisory question about any genre and what your reaction would be if that patron said "Great, which of these books feature people of color?" And then tell me that you don't think librarians should need to read diversely.
Ahem. Nonfiction.
Here are the books that were shared this month:
- Fighting Fire!: Ten of the Deadliest Fires in American History and How We Fought Them by Michael L. Cooper
- Head's Up Philosophy by Marcus Weeks
- I am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World (Young Reader's Edition) by Malala Yousafzai
- Last of the Giants: The Rise and Fall of Earth's Most Dominant Species by Jeff Campbell
- Lift Your Light a Little Higher: The Story of Stephen Bishop: Slave-Explorer by Heather Henson, illustrated by Bryan Collier
- Saved by the Boats: The Heroic Sea Evacuation of September 11 by Julie Gassman, illustrated by Steve Moors
- Some Writer!: The Story of E.B. White by Melissa Sweet
- Ugly by Robert Hoge
- World War II (Blast Back series) by Nancy Ohlin, illustrated by Adam Larkum
I am really super excited about October because we will be welcoming the wonderful RA librarian and trainer Becky Spratford to our library to hold some RA workshops for our Staff Day. And also we will be reading thrillers. This is in direct response to some teens who were looking for April Henry readalikes and I came up empty from my own personal experience. I'll be filling that void this month!
