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Reading Wildly


In January 2013, I posed the following question to my Twitter followers:

 @abbylibrarian: Can you give good readers' advisory without reading widely yourself? Please discuss.

In response to the ensuing awesome Twitter conversation, I developed a reading program for my staff to encourage all of us to read widely in different genres. I call this program Reading Wildly and here's how it works:

Each month, my staff members are required to read one book from a certain genre. Books must be from our Children's Room or Teen Scene, and they must be chapter books, nonfiction (applicable for some genres), or graphic novels (and, of course, audiobooks and ebooks are fine, but not picture books or easy readers). We each read a book and share a booktalk at our monthly Reading Widely meeting. This meeting is separate from our monthly department meeting if at all possible. Everyone is welcome to read more than one book, but only required to read one. I allow them work time to read only if their date-sensitive work is done.

At times, I have provided staff a related article to read. What worked best for me to make this happen was to research and save the articles ahead of time (in December for the following year), but I just wasn't always able to find the time to make it happen. In some of the genre recaps below you'll see an article noted that we read.

For the first year, I selected genres based on what our patrons are frequently asking for, on seasonality, and on areas I saw that my staff needed to expand their horizons. I also provided a list of suggested titles to give my staff a starting point. After that, I turned it over to my staff to brainstorm and select genres for the next year. It's worked well for us to create a list of suggestions for the next upcoming genre at our meetings. This gives everyone a starting point and helps add to our genre lists.

After each meeting, I update our genre book lists that we keep in our Evernote account, which gives everyone ready access to them. This gives staff a good starting point with reader's advisory questions.

Here are our genre/topics for 2017:

January - Reader's Choice*

February - Own Voices

March - Romance

April - Manga

May - Reader's Choice*

June - Reader's Choice*

July - Reader's Choice*

August - Nonfiction

September - Dystopian

October - Horror/Scary

November - Edgy

December - Animal Stories

* I like giving everyone free choice during times that will be really busy (i.e. the holidays and summer).

When we started, I asked everyone to fill out a book review form so that I could track that everyone was participating. As we got more comfortable with the program, I lifted that requirement, although staff are certainly welcome to use the form if they find it useful. Here's the book review form that I developed. Please feel free to use it and to edit it as you wish.

Reading Roundups by Genre/Topic
Looking for a place to start with a genre or need a book list? Here are our reading roundups by genre/topic:


We've had way more meetings than this, but the ones not linked are either months I missed blogging about our meetings or months that we had reader's choice or some other activity. You can find all the posts about Reading Wildly by clicking on the Reading Wildly label.

Any questions about our program? Leave them in comments!