Monday, 4 August 2014

Task 2 - Three examples of each genre and MORE !

Genres and sub-genres

Fiction
                The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
                To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
                Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Poetry
                The Complete Poems by Emily Dickinson
                Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
                The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot

Childrens
                Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
                Charlotte’s Web by E.B. Whie
                A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Young Adult
                Just One Day by Gayle Forman
                Splintered by A.G. Howard
    The Shadowhunter’s Codex by Cassandra Clare

Drama (mainly intended to be performed in a play)
                Hamlet by William Shakespeare
                Macbeth by William Shakespeare
                Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare


Crime
                In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
                The Godfather by Mario Puzo
                And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Mystery /Thriller
                Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow
                The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
                Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

Romance
                Effortless by S.C. Stephens
                Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire
                Slammed by Colleen Hoover

History
                A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
                The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
                Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Fantasy
                Dune by Frank Herbert
                Enders Game by Orson Scott Card
                Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Adventure
                King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
                Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
                The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

Supernatural / Paranormal
                Silver Shadows by Richelle Mead
                Illusive by Emily Lloyd-Jones
                Halfway to the Grave by Jeaniene Frost

Horror
                Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice
                Salems Lot by Stephen King
                Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Western
                True Grit by Charles Portis
                Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
                The Virginian by Owen Wister

Literary Fiction (eg Salmon Rushdie, Margaret Atwood)
                Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
                To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
                The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Humour/Comic
                Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams
                The Zombie survival guide by Max Brooks
                Your still hot to me by Jean Kittson

Science fiction
                The Long Mars by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
                The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson
                Divergent by Veronica Roth

Hybrid – a combination of 2 or more genres
                The Invisible Man by Herbert George Wells (Sci-Fi & Romance)
                World without End by Ken Follett (Historical & Adventure)
                The Mosaic of Shadows by Tom Harper (Adventure & Romance)        
      
Erotica
                The Mammoth Book of Erotic Romance and Domination by Maxim Jakubowski
                Shadow’s Stand by Sarah McCarty
                A Girl Walks into a Wedding by Helena S Paige

Short story
                Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell
                The Burial of the Guns by Thomas Nelson Page
                Bellflower by Guy de Maupassant

Novella
                The Third Man by Graham Greene
                Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
                Three Blind Mice by Agatha Christie

Graphic Novels
                The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
                Hellboy: Library Edition Volume 1: Seed of Destruction/Wake the Devil by Mike Mignola
                Marvels (New Printing) by Kurt Busiek

Abridged or condensed novels (Readers Digest)
                Crossfire by Dick Francis
                Letters from Home by Kristina McMorris
                Sweet Misfortune by Kevin Alan Milne

Translated Fiction
                Horses of God by Mahi Binebine (from French)
                Blinding by Mircea Cartarescu (from Romanian)
                Tirza by Arnon Grunberg (from Dutch)

Non-Fiction
                The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
                Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
                Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything by Steven D. Levitt

Biography
                John Adams by David McCullough
                The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
                Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Autobiography
                Angelas Ashes by Frank McCourt
                The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
                Night by Ellie Wiesel

Memoirs
                Eat, pray, love by Elizabeth Gilbert
                Running with scissors by Augusten Burroughs
                Naked by David Sedaris

Titles of 3 well-respected scholarly books on literature that you would find on the reference shelves of a university library

The Collected Letters of W.B.Yeats: Volume IV 1905-1907 by John Kelly, Ronald Schuchard
Adonis to Zorro. Oxford Dictionary of reference and allusion Third Edition by Andrew Delahunty, Sheila Dignen
Cervantes in Seventeenth-Century England / The Tapestry Turned by Dale B.J. Randall, Jackson C. Boswell

Other useful reference books (at least 5) on literature and/or fiction and/or reading as a cultural activity

On writing: A memoir of the craft by Stephen King
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 1: The Middle Ages through the Restoration & the  Eighteenth Century by M.H. Abrams
The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J.A. Cuddon
The Reader's Companion to World Literature by Lillian Herlands Hornstein
On Literature by Umberto Eco
How Fiction Works by James Wood
A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose by B.R.  Myers
New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction by Kingsley Amis
Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction

Readers advisor - give a description (reasonably current) - what do they do and what skills and knowledge do they need?
Doing a bit of research about readers advisory gives me the impression that it is more a service rather than a  person - a service which a lot of libraries try to offer in one form or another. It is something that a lot of people who work in a library will face - the request to recommend a book. A reading adviser needs to understand that they cannot just recommend their own favourite books, as that would not be a broad enough base. One of the databases which can help is the Ebsco Novelist database, where you can find the 'Adult Popular Fiction Checklist, which contains many genres, and nearly 300 different authors. Discussing with friends, too, can be helpful. It is vital to keep up-to-date with the latest authors, as well as not losing track of the classics. Using resources such as goodreads and librarything can certainly be helpful as well. The right questions must be asked of the patron, but sometimes they may not be prepared to answer a lot of questions, just looking for something which they can pick up quickly.
It would probably be beneficial to keep some sort of list for yourself - which can be easy to check if someone requests a specific genre. 
With the advent of these databases, it can be a very simple matter to offer this service, particularly as many of them also offer the opportunity to leave a personal review. 

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