REVIEW: THE READERS' ADVISORY GUIDE TO NONFICTION
Neal Wyatt. The Readers' Advisory Guide to Nonfiction.ALA, 2007. 13: 978-0-8389-0936-2. $48. Reviewed by Marylaine Block
I'm guessing that you probably maintain your own equivalent of my EERL, as in Eternally Expanding Reading List. If so, count on this book to add at least a couple of dozen books to your list.
Neal Wyatt treats nonfiction in the same way she treats fiction: she understands that its appeal for any individual reader rests on far more than its subject or genre. Like novel readers, nonfiction readers may be enticed by a book's story, its action and pace, its richly developed characters, its fully realized setting, its language, its tone, or the sense of total immersion in the experience. So to do effective nonfiction readers' advisory, you need to ask the readers what books they've enjoyed, and what it was about those books that appealed to them.
When you open up the discussion this way, it allows your mind to make unexpected but telling linkages across your collection - not just to other nonfiction on the same topic, but to novels, movies on DVD, and nonfiction on entirely different topics that share some of the qualities that gripped your reader.
Wyatt illustrates this readers' advisory approach in each of the 8 broad subject categories covered here: 1) Food and Cooking, 2) Science, Mathematics and Nature Writing, 3) Memoirs, 4) Sports, 5) True Crime, 6) Travel, 7) True Adventure, 8) History and Historical Biography. She'll pick a "benchmark" title, for example, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, and explain its basic storyline. Then she'll explain why someone would want to read this book, in this case because it is "strongly narrative nonfiction" with a "compelling story, rich and three-dimensional characters, a great sense of pacing, and lots of detail and description."
Then she tells you who to suggest the book to, in this case, those "who like their sports reading to be heartwarming, strongly character-based, and story rich," but also non-sports fans who enjoy well-developed characters and a good story. That allows her to suggest not only other books on horse racing, but also Stephen Ambrose's account of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Undaunted Courage, and Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. Why these? Because they share with Seabiscuit "the mix of history, character, detail, and riveting story."
Similarly, she suggests that the book Blackhawk Down could as easily lead to other classic war reporting, like We Were Soldiers Once... and Young, to a novel like Killer Angels, and to DVDs of Blackhawk Down, Platoon, or Band of Brothers.
What Wyatt is doing is showing you how to think sideways, how to see unobvious commonalities, undreamed of by Dewey, that will appeal to readers across the arbitrary boundary of mere subject categories. Since many of us do not have that habit of mind, she spends several chapters showing us how to shake up our thinking and find these commonalities in our collections, starting with just scanning our nonfiction shelves from time to time, picking out the occasional book and reading its blurb and seeing how the topic is approached. Do this often enough and you'll get a much better sense of what's available in your stacks.
Wyatt wants us to read reviews, of course (and she suggests resources that regularly review material in each subject category), but she also wants us to chat with patrons and with our own colleagues about the nonfiction they're reading, and what it is in those books that appeals to them. She shows how you can use techniques like Reading Maps to make cross-collection linkages in your mind.
She wants us to reinforce this way of thinking by consciously mixing things up in our topical displays, sprinkling in relevant fiction, movies, and even music in with the nonfiction. A Jane Austen-centered display, for instance, might logically include not only her novels and movies based on them, but also some Regency romances, books on Regency history, fashion, and art, CDs of music from the period, and biographies of Jane Austen, the Prince Regent, the Duke of Wellington, and Admiral Nelson.
For each broad subject category, and its subdivisions, she lists a couple of hundred excellent books, which is a wonderful starting point for building your collections, suggesting display ideas, and piquing your own curiosity about the topics. But if you're not much in the habit of reading nonfiction, she offers "A Nonfiction Reading Plan: The Ten Books from Each Subject Area To Consider Reading."
And why should we go to all this trouble, shake up the way we've always done things? Because "Readers' advisory really should be about readers and their wide-ranging interests and not about the way we organize our collections."
'Nough said?
* * * * *
COOL QUOTE:
My recurring fantasy about libraries is that at night, after everyone goes home, , the books come to life and mingle in a fabulous cocktail party. Finally, the poor biographies, languishing in exile during the day, get to join their compatriots.
Neal Wyatt. The Readers Advisory Guide to Nonfiction. ALA 2007, p. 6
* * *
You are welcome to copy and forward any of my own articles (but not those by my guest writers) for noncommercial purposes as long as you credit ExLibris and cite the permanent URL for the article. Please do NOT copy and post my articles to your own web sites, however. Instead, please copy a brief excerpt and link to the URL for the remainder of the article.
Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/
Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2007.
[Publishers may license the content for a reasonable fee.]
