Week 8: Special Topics Paper
Biographical
Historical Fiction:
Which
Online Social Networking Reader-Sharing/Book Site is Preferred,
When
Recommending Books in This Genre?
Depending
on what a reader is looking for, a particular online reader’s advisory (RA)
service may or may not be able to assist. In addition to finding information in
RA services through the many online databases such as Reader’s Advisory Online,
Novelist, etc., one can also find information through literature reviews, book
award and prize lists, and social networking (SN) sites.
I
have found that I typically like Good
Reads, which is a Social Networking Reader-Sharing/Book site, so I thought
I would take a look at the many similar sites that Mary K. Chelton recommends
in her bibliography READERS ADVI SORY TOOL S FOR ADUL T READERS: A FIVE-YEAR RETROSPECTI VE SEL ECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, WITH A FEW
EARL
IER EXCEPTI ONS that was used as a resource for this class. I wanted to find out if one of the other
sites in her list, is actually better than Good
Reads.
I
like Good Reads because readers make
lists of whatever suits their interest, and then compile reading suggestions
from those. People can add to the list, rate books on the list, even rate the
list! In addition, the site works seamlessly with Facebook, Pinterest and some of the most popular SN sites that
exist. Just the ease of use alone, makes it a great tool. I have found these
lists on Good Reads very helpful:
much more helpful than the Read Alikes on Novelist,
when searching for what to read next. Novelist has a great way to find books-
if a similar book is in their database, and if you have access to their paid
subscription. However, I personally
still like Good Reads better.
Historical Fiction Genre
Preferences
Within
the genres we have studied in our class, I prefer historical fiction, but
mostly I like biographical historical fiction, so I thought I would take
this genre and search through Chelton’s recommendations to see if something
other than Good Reads works the best. My findings and suggestions follow below.
My reading preferences in general, are mostly geared to
non-fiction. Within non-fiction, I enjoy biographies and autobiographies the
most. Learning about the qualities of historical fiction as it relates to
non-fiction and biography has been very interesting to me. This course has
taught me how to distinguish the differences, and how biographical fiction can
be used for greater goals:
“As
most readers' advisors know, biographical fiction is a great gateway to
introduce fans of biography to historical fiction, and steer fiction readers to
the equally compelling stories found in biographies” [Stover]
In
our textbook, The Reader’s Advisory Guide
to Genre Fiction the author, Sariks explains Historical Fiction but points
out the biographical reader:
“other readers look for Historical novels that focus on characters and
their lives. These character-centered novels provide glimpses into the lived of
fictional and real people”
I
wanted to put all of this together somehow. How to help the mostly non-fiction
reader of biographies and the mostly fiction reader of Historical Fiction
locate meaningful reading that has mostly elements of truth, with some
entertainment value splashed in.
I
discovered that when searching for biographical historical fiction, most of the
time one can’t search for the person, it is the era they belong to that is key.
Once that is known, one must search within
that era. Some common category eras of historical fiction that are used when
searching the SN sites are:
Which Social Networking Sites Based
on Chelton’s List, Work Well for Biographical Historical Fiction Searches?
On
Chelton’s list she included another category: RA tools for Historical Fiction.
I did not find those recommendations very helpful as a searchable tool for
finding lists of recommendations. For example: Give me a list to search for
female monarchs of England. Some of the links on this list did not work, and
what I did find were more like literature review sites instead of a usable
database that I could query. So I moved on to her SN sites list.
I
did not include all of Chelton’s SN sites for my purposes here, but searched
through the ones I thought best applied to Historical Fiction. (She had one SN
listed with a genre of Crime, so that was not relevant here.) I was searching
for sites that I thought might provide me with lists. What kind of list?
For example: A list of all fiction books that have as the main character
Abraham Lincoln.
Most
of my search terms for this exercise were the following: biographical fiction,
biography, famous people, history, and then I plugged in famous people names.
If I didn’t get any results back, I
browsed the lists that were in the general
lists. These are the results that I received:
www.anobii.com.
I had to sign up for an account to be able to see the functionality of the
site. It allowed me to create an account with my Facebook account which I
really liked. Fast and easy account set-up. Right off the bat, I noticed it had
reader’s lists capacity, which I also really liked. However, what I discovered
is that not very many people are utilizing the site. Of their top reading
lists, many times less than 100 followers were following the top lists.
Compared to Good Reads, this is not very good. I decided to move on. Perhaps over time this site can build up a
bigger following.
http://www.bookjetty.com “BookJetty is a social utility that connects
you with your friends' bookshelves and checks books' availability in the
libraries.” [Chelton] Bookjetty required the user to sign up for an account
much like anobii via Facebook or other means. However, I was able to browse the
selections without signing up. The results of everything added in the past
month didn’t even mention the historical fiction genre. Therefore, I moved on
to the next choice.
http://www.bookswellread.com “The goal of BooksWellRead is to be the
online destination of choice for people who want to 'digest' what they read by
capturing their thoughts in writing. BooksWellRead has been designed to be
simple, fast, and easy to use.” [Chelton]. The link for this site took me to a
website in Chinese that was selling items other than books. Not useful.
http://www.eBooklists.pbwiki.com
“RA wiki being constructed by librarians who
were in graduate school together at Indiana University.” [Chelton] I liked the
construction of the Wiki. There were several categories to drill into for
Historical Fiction. However, upon drilling down, there was very little in the
way of content. Not recommended but could be used by librarians to build a
niche list.
www.librarything.com “Helps you create a library-quality catalog of
your books and connects you with people who read the same things.” [Chelton] I
like Library Thing, but not necessarily for its reading lists. One of their most popular lists is for
Historical Fiction. As far as biographical historical fiction, one has to drill
down through the many historical eras to locate people. I did find a really
good list of books related to characters in the Bible. (Historical
Fiction-Biblical Characters). However, for searches of more lesser-known
biographies, there was not much. Because
of the nonprofit low cost do-it-yourself nature of the site, when you get
results on a hit, the formatting for the results is very tedious and not very
pleasing to the eye. The site itself has probably more overall resources for
librarians in general, but it cannot compete with the aesthetics and more
robust application of Good Reads for
finding a reading list
http://www.revish.com “Revish is a place where people share their
reading experiences. You can use Revish to keep and share a list of books
you're reading, write reviews of books, find recommendations from other
readers, and a whole lot more.” [Chelton]. Well, “a whole lot more” meant
having to wade through testosterone, jewelry, and ‘building your muscles’ ads
that were actually listed as subjects (not ads) when I clicked through on
GROUPS>GENRES. I was kind of excited when I saw that there were 35 actual
groups in GENRES, but quickly disappointed when I realized there were probably
only a small handful of legitimate posts about books period. It reminded me of
the kind of formatting you might see on a poorly utilized category on Craigslist. The site did not look safe.
Not recommended.
http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/search “What Should I Read Next? Searchable database
of real readers’ favorite books (over 47,000 and growing) to suggest what you
could read next.” [Chelton] This is a fabulous site! It reminds me of the
travel sites like Priceline. The very first page asks you to enter the
title of a book you liked. As soon as I started typing Abraham Lincoln, tons of
results started appearing. Basically, any book in (what appears to be) a very
large database, starts appearing as you type. This is very easy to use and
intuitive. I will use this in my RA toolkit. Even though it doesn’t provide you
with a list of biographical topics, if you know the name of the person you want
to read about, this might be the best way to pull up everything that has been
written about that person. This might be
one of the most singular tools for the RA to have in her toolkit when she
doesn’t have a lot of time for further research. Quick, easy and highly
recommended for looking up biographical names.
http://whatsonmybookshelf.com/
“WhatsOnMyBookshelf, a book trading
community, allows members to exchange their books using a simple point system.
Users maintain their own profile page with friends, book inventory, and wish
lists. Our goal is to facilitate the trading of books in addition to connecting
people with similar reading interests. Sharing a book is the creation of a
common place for dialogue, friendships, and ideas. “[Chelton] Upon first
entering the site, I thought it looked a lot like Good Reads. It had a smart
looking interface and book images displayed. However, just like many of the
other sites, Historical Fiction was not even mentioned in a group or category,
except for Romantic Historical Fiction, which was not what I was looking for. I
would not recommend or use this site.
www.goodreads.com “Keeps track of what you’ve read and what your
friends are reading. Also on Facebook.” [Chelton] My favorite site going into
this research and this is still my favorite site after viewing all of the
others in Chelton’s list! When I search for History from the home page search,
and select LISTOPIA, I received results of 1,606 list results (not
books)! Entering Abraham Lincoln
resulted in 11 lists alone! Entering the
term biographical historical fiction returned 10 list results. Here is an
example of the type of lists and how they display:
Summary of Findings
I
don’t have all the time in the world, as do most people, to belong to a million
book clubs, subscribe to newsletters and to pour over lists and lists, or to
comb through every issue of literature reviews or through their sites. How
would I ever find time to read the actual book, or even find a book to suggest
to another person, if I have to do all of that just to locate what I am
interested in? I want something easy,
fun and interactive. For the purposes of
this paper, I found the two SN sites for RA that are useful to me were: Good Reads and What Should I read Next.com.
I
started this paper with the assumption that Good
Reads is the best SN site for RA. What I discovered is that I was correct,
it is by far the best site. It is a very robust application, with an incredible
amount of content that is actually used and interacted with by basically anyone
who reads anything.
I
realized in trying out these tools and the one’s that Chelton had listed as
basic Historical Fiction RA tools, that what I like to use are basically sites
or applications that utilize a robust
database. I don’t really like the
various list-servs, blog like sites, or primitive wiki’s that well-meaning
people are trying to build for these purposes. In some cases, I had to ask
myself if some of the people behind some of these sites, weren’t just
reinventing the wheel, so-to-speak?
A
few other discoveries I made: almost any reference to historical fiction is
done by historical era and not person, and many of the types of sites suggested
by Chelton, are probably for the benefit for librarian’s niches among
themselves, and even then, rarely include biographical historical fiction.
Good Reads,
just as I thought, has this market cornered, as far as I’m concerned --but a
close second behind it, with a different type of search function is What Should I read Next.com. I will definitely use both, and be assured
that I am using the best for recommendations in this genre!
References
Baker,
J. S., & Klaassen, A. (2015). The Readers' Advisory Guide to Historical
Fiction.
Chelton,
Mary K. READERS ADVI SORY TOOL S FOR ADUL T READERS: A FIVE-YEAR
RETROSPECTI VE SEL ECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, WITH A FEW EARL IER EXCEPTI ONS,
October 2008
Sariks, Joyce G. The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Genre
Fiction
Stover,
Kaite Mediatore. Story Book Lives: Biographical Fiction. April issue of RA News.
No comments:
Post a Comment