#librarian book recommendations

[in-the-stacks]

Presenting The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai and translated by James Kirkwood . Reviewed by The Next Read Detective for In the Stacks.

https://www.inthestacks.tv/2024/08/the-next-read-detective-the-kamogawa-food-detectives

[fangtastic-vampyra]

buying books & reading books..two different hobbies.

[gwen-tolios]

[kevkebus-subh]

[darkacademianew]

Mood

[jrosesposts]

Oh to have a bookshelf ladder like Belle <3

[booksinmythorax]

So you're an adult who wants to start reading for fun, but you don't know where to start

I'm a librarian, and I hear at least once a week from people who sheepishly tell me that they'd love to start reading for fun (for the first time or after a long break). Here's my best advice broken down into bullet points, but start here: there is no shame in being a beginner.

-Think about what you do enjoy and start from there. So you're not a book person. Do you like movies? Television? Podcasts? Music? Tabletop games? Video games? What other media do you like and what does it have in common? Make a little list and Venn diagram that shit.

Maybe you're into stories about fucked-up families (Sharp Objects, Succession) or found families (lots of realplay TTRPG podcasts, Leverage, Avatar: The Last Airbender) or fucked-up found families (various Batman media, Steven Universe, The Good Place). Maybe you mainly watch or listen to stuff for the romance (Taylor Swift music, The Best Man, Heartstopper) or the sci-fi horror (The Magnus Archives, M3gan, Nope) or the romantic sci-fi horror (Welcome to Night Vale). And hey, maybe you're not a fictional media person at all. What do you like? What do you want to know about? World history? True crime? Home improvement? Birdwatching? Gardening? Various animals and their behavior? Human psychology? Cooking? If it's a thing, there are books about it. Start there.

Think about why you started to dislike reading. Did an adult snatch a book you thought looked cool out of your hands and say "Don't read that, it's below your reading level/above your reading level/a comic, not a real book"? Did school give you an endless parade of miserable, bleak books and tell you they were universal stories about the human condition? Or did it maybe only give you stories with saccharine, unearned happy endings, or only show you stories about straight cis wealthy abled white kids, or keep you from reading entire books at all in favor of endlessly dissecting tiny passages out of context? (For some vindication, check out "How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading" by John Holt.) Did you have an older sibling or a friend who was better at reading? Did adults put you in competition with that other kid and make you feel like shit about it? Were you in a situation where you were good at reading in one language, or even more than one, but required to read in another that you were still learning? Did this make you feel like you were "behind schedule" or like you shouldn't read at all? Or was reading just harder for you than it seemed for other people? Did reading give you headaches? Did the letters or numbers seem to float around on the page? Was it hard for you to focus for long enough to get through a whole book? Did you need to learn to read differently than the kids around you could? Did adults punish you for this instead of helping you? (Look, I'm not a doctor, but if any of these apply to you, consider going to an optometrist, a psychologist, and/or a psychiatrist to talk about these things if they're persistent and interfere with your life.) Or maybe you're burned out on reading. Maybe you did an advanced degree in literature or writing or history or some other reading-heavy discipline and you're just tired. Maybe your professors or classmates got snobby about what constituted "literary" works and their good opinion didn't line up with what you actually enjoy. You get to be sad and angry about these things, if they happened to you. They're also clues to how to move forward if you'd like to read more, or enjoy reading more.

Give yourself permission to read whatever you want, in whatever way you want. Wanna start with young adult books? Middle grade books? Awesome. Many of them have stories that are sophisticated and complex. Starting with re-reading the first books you enjoyed reading could help jog your memory about why you initially found it fun. Hell, even picture books are a good start. Have you read a picture book lately? Those things are getting cooler every day. Comics and graphic novels? Those count as reading. Many of them are published for adults, though again, the ones published for a middle-grade or young adult audience are often complex and moving. If you're an anime fan, give manga a shot. The source material for many anime go deeper into the characters and stories, especially now that anime seasons are often truncated to 12 episodes for entire series. (The right-to-left thing is easier to get used to than you think, too.) Romance novels and mystery thrillers and science fiction and fantasy? Those count as reading. Many of the things you might have liked about the books you read as a child or a teenager are present in adult "genre" fiction, and many of the things you might despise about adult "literary" fiction (god, I hate that word, but that's another post) may be absent from those titles. E-books and audiobooks definitely count as reading, and they're often more accessible than paper books for some people. Anybody who tries to genre- or format-shame you is a dick and not worth talking to.

Go to your local library. All right, shameless self-promotion here, I'll admit it. But I promise you, if you walk into a library and say "I'm an adult, I stopped reading a while ago, and I'd like to start back up again but I need suggestions," you will make someone's day. I get asked for my opinion about books approximately once a month. I get asked how to use the printer approximately eighty-five times a day. I love helping with the printer and I'm saying that unironically, but my colleagues and I absolutely adore "readers' advisory" questions. If you come with the answers to the above questions about your preferred genres, formats, and reasons you'd like to read, it'll help the process, but most of us are trained to ask follow-up questions to get you the best possible book match. Do not apologize. You are not bothering us. It is literally part of our job. We want people to know that reading is fun, and you are a people.

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

Do you know anywhere I can read about parchment practices of the middle ages?

raymond clemens + timothy graham's introduction to manuscript studies starts with a section about writing supports that covers parchment manufacture and other writing surfaces before going on to talk more about how manuscripts and books were constructed and assembled

the irish hand by t. o'neill is a nice introduction to irish manuscripts but to be honest it's more focused on specific books rather than their production and on writing systems more widely. it's a nice one for seeing glimpses of marginalia and notes written inside books though

here's a blog post about decorating flaws in parchment to make them part of the page. the BL has a number of posts on their conservation blog about working with medieval parchment and the various preservation challenges it can pose. this is however mostly looking at them from a modern conservation perspective rather than a medieval creative perspective

here's a useful overview of parchment with close-up pictures. the other pages on this site look like a good place to start with learning about making and using manuscripts in general.

unfortunately this is primarily not a topic i learned from books/written sources so my reading recommendations are a bit thin on the ground

[seras-elessar]

Where to start with Han Kang

Han Kang (한강) received the 2024 Nobel Prize for literature and people have asked me, a librarian, where to start.

Start with Human Acts (2014, 소년이 온다) it's a deeply moving portrayal of a massacre and its aftermath during the Gwangju (광주광역시) uprising in 1980, following both the living and the dead. It's poetic and gripping, very intimate in its portrayal.

Then see what else is translated to your language or available at your library. Examples under the cut.

(Also if your library doesn't have any of these titles, please put in a request with a librarian. We like those!)

I've heard great things about We do not part (2021, 작별하지 않는다) but I haven't had a chance to read it yet. Greek Lessons (2011, 희랍어 시간) and The White Book (2016, 흰) have also reviewed well.

Her most popular work, The Vegetarian (2007, 채식주의자) is not one I recommend in general because it can be a very difficult read. It's one I've held in my hands and thought "no, not now" many times. According to friends who read it it's visceral, violent, angry and disgusting, all in as positive of a meaning as possible. They loved it but maintains that it was a difficult book to read.

The English translation of her work has been criticised for Europeanisation of the text, in that the tone and style is so different that it could be a different work entirely. While I think the translation transforms the work in all cases they can be to a less or more extent. This criticism is nothing to brush away though, as it's not just grammatically it seems to have failed. According to critics a lot of US American prejudices about Korean people snuck their way in. As for now I and many others have to read Han Kang in the English translation, or a translation from English to our language. I look forward to the Swedish translation from the original Korean.

[antique-symbolism]

Fellow TUC fans: how and when did you first find the series?

[in-the-stacks]

Presenting That Night in the Library by Eva Jurczyk. Reviewed by The Next Read Detective for In the Stacks.

https://www.inthestacks.tv/2024/09/the-next-read-detective-that-night-in-the-library

[tinynavajoreads]

Hi!

Asking because you’re a librarian: I read 1491 and liked it; what other nonfiction books would you recommend on precolonial Indigenous civilizations in the Americas, especially on civilizations other than the famous (Aztec, Mayan, Inca) ones? I was especially interested in the parts on Amazonian civilizations.

Hello! I'm hopefully living up to my librarian title with these titles!

Indians Before Columbus; Twenty Thousand Years of North American History Revealed by Archeology by Paul S. Martin

Fair Gods and Stone Faces by Constance Irwin

America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock

The First Americans: The Pleistocene Colonization of the New World edited by Nina G. Jablonski

Daily Life in Pre-Columbian Native America by Clarissa W. Confer

This is only a handful of what I was able to find, but there is plenty more if you'd like those as well. Hope you find something you like in this list and happy reading!

[intothestacks]

Adventures in Librarian-ing

Today I read Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress by Christine Baldacchino to a class of Grade 2s.

It's a story about a boy who likes to wear dresses and the prejudice he faces about his interest.

An excerpt from storytime:

Me: They're not being very kind, are they?

Grade 2s: Noooo!

Girl: They're being very rude and mean!

Other Girl: Anyone can wear whatever they want! *classmates murmur in agreement*

Boy: And if girls can wear pants then boys can wear dresses! It's only fair! >:(

Me: Plus, in some cultures what we would consider dresses are considered boy clothes. Though is there really such a thing as boy clothes and girl clothes if everyone should be able to wear whatever they want?

Grade 2s: Nooo! They're just clothes!

[swaglet]

considering the state of US education in recent years, and the fact that a considerable amount of this site's userbase is like 20 or younger fresh oit of the system, it's completely understandable that almost everyone on here is a fucking moron who has developed no critical thinking skills whatsoever & probably doesn't even know how to use context clues. bomb the country NOW what are they doing to our youth

[get-good-tardigradez]

Thinking about the time a dude came to the library and said he’d gotten into reading and had finished one book and wanted a recommendation for another so I put a reservation on A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara for him and then resigned before I witnessed the outcome of this decision 💀

[asexualbookbird]

wish you could sort books on goodreads/storygraph by where the author lives how else am i supposed to find A Book With A Local Connection