Using our Library Voices
Using our Library Voices
Reading Room Radio: Finding your next read
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A group of us recommenders gathered together to talk about how we find reads, and it may not be where you expected.
There are a lot of resources in this podcast, but here are some mentions:
National Park after Dark Podcast Bookshelf
American Library Association Books and Media Awards
Texas Library Association Reading Lists
Reddit: Books That Feel Like This
Created by the Podcast Team at the Harris County Public Library.
www.hcpl.net
Podcast Team Members include: Beth Krippel, John Harbaugh, Mary Mink, Dylan Smith, Sadina Shawver, Alinda Mac, John Schaffer, Jennifer Finch, Katelyn Helberg, Darcy Casavant, Darla Pruitt and Nancy Hu
Welcome to Harris County Public Library's Reading Room Radio, where your To Be Red Pile gets a little more exciting one micro podcast at a time.
SPEAKER_00Hello, I am Mr. Kelly from the Parker Williams Public Library branch. I primarily look for science fiction, uh romance, romantic, and any good books from any genre uh that something from library school has taught me is to try to appreciate more outside of my niche genre.
SPEAKER_03And with me I have I'm Miss Amanda from Barbara Bush. And right now I'm totally going into my niche stuff, to be honest. It's mostly paranormal, uh queer romance and with a little bit of um true crime uh in there as well.
SPEAKER_00Excellent. And can we hear from Sadina?
SPEAKER_04Yes, I am Sadina and I prefer horror. I am currently um sticking to novellas because they're easier to get through. I'm in a bit of a reader's block, um, trying to get past that as I hyperfixate on other things. I used to love sci-fi a lot. I don't seem to be drawn toward it as much. I really, really like nonfiction. Um, everything from books that focus on one topic like salt or cod or butter, uh just really weird, obscure historical micro histories. And there's a book, I forget what it's called, but it's essentially about them missing people in national parks. So if it's creepy, I'm probably gonna read it.
SPEAKER_00Wow, those sound very niche. I love it. Uh and lastly, with us, we have Nikki with us.
SPEAKER_02I am a little all over the place, I guess you could say. If it's YA, I'm gonna read it. It doesn't matter what genre it is. If it has especially if it has like a cover that's amazing. Yes, I am one of those that judges by a cover and I don't care. Um, I love them. I love YA of all genres, but for the most part, when I read outside of YA, like in uh juvenile fiction or adult, I try to go towards anything creepy, anything horror-wise, paranormal-wise. Just lately, I've been really into historical fiction that is about an actual person. The facts and stuff around around it might be, you know, the fictional part, but the person is an actual person. There's one coming out, I believe, next week about Frida Kahlo that I'm really excited about. I think it's called uh Frida's Cook. So I've been reading a little bit of everything. I'm mostly into adult horror, adult historical fiction, and of course, romance. My preferred subgenre of romance though is rom-coms. I yes, I am one of those illustrated cover girlies. I will read all of those as well.
SPEAKER_00That's hilarious. I defer any uh questions on how to find new books for YA or uh rom com or romanticy to Nikki. She is so far ahead of me in terms of reading by sheer numbers alone. I I read about 40 or 50 books a year, and I know Nikki reads hundreds of books a year, so I always go to ask her about any of these uh niche subgenres. But I am going to now tell you about the 13 ways that I find new books, and hopefully you can find new books as well. So, number one is Goodreads, reader created lists. I usually will start with a book that I have really enjoyed, like a Jules Verne book or an Orson Scott Card or an Arthur C. Clark like sci-fi book, and I'll go and look on Goodreads and see what other lists readers have added it to and look for something that has good reviews. Number two, I um uh I get on Reddit a little bit every now and then. It can get a little crazy on there, but my favorites of Reddits that are helpful for finding books. Uh, one is called Books That Feel Like This, and they're just like people post a couple photos. One on there that I really enjoyed uh was called The Hike by Drew McGary. Someone posted some very trippy, like 70s kind of acid trip art on there, and people kept recommending The Hike by Drew McGarry. And so I read that and it was fantastic. That's a great book. Yeah, it's really fun. I'm reading his third book right now uh called Point B about teleporting. Number three is another subreddit, are science fiction. They are just hardcore about everything science fiction from books to movies and video games as well. And then number four is Top Character Tropes, another subreddit where people will post like Top Character Trope, angry millennial guy gets uh mad at a a barista pronouncing things incorrectly, and it gets very niche and ridiculous. And then people in the comments will say, Here are all the movies and TV shows and books that feature this trope. That's been helpful to find other Stranger Things type books for me because I got heavy into Stranger Things, and then I I went down the Stephen King route and all these other book genres as well. Number five, of course, using Libby, putting in that library card in action, sorting by genre, looking for what's available right now. I found a really weird science fiction romance that starred an alien that looked like a bale of uh hay, like a tumbleweed. It ended up being a really fun romance at the end. I did not expect that. Speaking of romance, number five is a website called romance.io, where you can sort by the spiciness level that you want in a book. Whether you want just Amish love or you want the spiciest above uh 50 shades of gray, 51 shades of gray level books. I like to use romance.io. Number six, I believe, is HCPL staff generated lists. So if you go on hcpl.net, scroll to the bottom, look for staff generated lists. I have found a couple interesting books there. One that I used to go on a ton more is Instagram book reviews. One of the book reviewers I followed on there was named Book Reviews Kill, and he became an author himself after years of reviewing all of these books, and I really enjoyed his premiere novel. Let's see, I think this is number eight or nine, just word of mouth, mostly from coworkers. That's one of the ways I got into some of the Audible productions where they have a full cast and a full ensemble orchestra, and it really brings it to life for these long drives home. I mentioned Audible. I don't like spending a ton on audiobooks, so it's very rare. It's just for the high production ones. I also like to follow authors on Goodreads and on Amazon, so I get alerted whenever they introduce a sequel to their series or they're bringing out something else new. And that's also how I stay on top of the latest kids' books that are coming out from favorite authors as well. Since I'm a children's librarian, I gotta stay on top of that. And then lastly, just whatever new books I find out at half-price books that I haven't seen before. Something that is surprising and doesn't come up in all the best of sci-fi or best of romance books on any other list. And those are my ways that I find a bunch of new books, new titles, new authors, and I'd love to hear about how Amanda finds their favorite books.
SPEAKER_03So, in order to add to my TBR, probably the biggest uh source I use is Book Riot. They have a lot of individual or individualized server lists that you can follow. Um one of my favorites is uh our queerish shells. Because as I mentioned before, I'm I'm really into uh queer romance, specifically paranormal. Uh, and I just got into uh a paranormal slash true crime queer romance as well. Then the next book comes out literally in a few days, and I'm just like sitting here going, can't wait for it. And then I also use Bookstagram and Book Talk, but I'm very picky about who I follow. And when I first got onto it, you know, during the pandemic, you know, I was following every everybody and everything. It's like, oh yeah, tell me about all the books, you know, and and I over the years I've narrowed that down to maybe five or six specific people. And so I I usually will see whenever they add like a new story or something and say, hey, this is my my latest read, and I get updates that way. I also get updates through author newsletters. I do most of my reading on my Kindle or the Kindle app. And they always have a ways to contact the author, a ways to stay uh up to date with you know what the author is doing in like a list of uh if you liked this book, you might like this one, or here's the next one in this series, and it's an active link with within the ebook. So I always go, if I liked it enough, I always go and I sign up for their stuff, and then of course, you know, follow them on socials and such. After that, probably the the best way that I look for new things to read, and then as Kelly was mentioning, staying on top of children's NYA books as part of our profession is uh newsletters uh directly from publishers, random house, penguin, and smaller independent ones like black rabbit, things like that. I'm really into kids' nonfiction, and so I I always like to stay updated on the newest ones of that. Luckily, Harris County Public Libraries is able to purchase a lot of really good high-quality children's uh nonfiction. And so as I see it come in, I'm like, oh, okay, I'll have to I'll have to make sure that I look for that whenever the new books come in and we have to scan them and look through them. And I get excited about, oh, that's going to be here in just a few months. Okay. Those are my tips. And then I will send it on to Ms. Adina.
SPEAKER_04So I I actually don't use a lot of resources to discover books because I Amanda actually knows this. She works in my department. I tend to buck against uh things that algorithms or even people that think that they know me best and try to recommend things. And you should read this. Um, just because you you said that, I'm not gonna. Exactly. I am very stubborn, my best friend of most of my life. And the moment she recommends something, I'm like, you don't know me.
SPEAKER_00I've had the same issue with my girlfriend. I'm right there with you.
SPEAKER_04It's uh I'm not sure why, but I really do like obscure things. The more obscure, the more um unusual. I'm probably gonna read it. As far as nonfiction, I like to find books that it actually started off with the required reading at Bel Air High School. It was The History of the World in Six Glasses, which was yeah, about beers and alcohols and other various tea, coffee, the six most popular digested drinks in the world. And they did a micro history of the world through those six glasses, which was really fascinating. Very cool. And then that set me down a rabbit hole of books on I think the next one I read was COD. And then I read butter because I had seen a movie about butter. And then there's an entire series of art history books on the development of pigment. And so I read and blew through all those. They were fascinating. Jewelry books. I was a history major in both undergrad and grad school, so this is why I am very niche on these topics. But I also really like books on neuroscience. There's a lot of mental health issues in my family history. And so I read a lot of books that are why we snap, understanding rage and the psychological disorders therein. There's a book called Paranoid. But when it does come to being influenced, I follow Mother Horror on Instagram. Um, her name is Sadie Hartman. She has a great recommendation list in that she'll pick kind of a weird horror genre. There's one called Bog Life, and she just recommends a bunch of books about like bog witches or bog demons or bog creatures or whatever, and you can kind of like move your way through that list. Sometimes in the month, she'll talk about women's horror and recommend books that are just centered on women's horror. That could be women's body horror to do with pregnancy or childbirth, or it could do with, you know, the social aspects of women's horror. Adventure horror is also really fun, kind of crosses over into my passion for nonfiction and national parks, disappearances, the kind of like supernatural, paranormal aspect of disappearances and things like that. I'm very much a spooky girl. I love a good scary story. And I have started reading a lot of books on biology, but specifically wildlife biology because of a new podcast I picked up. Um and I get, oh, maybe I am influenced by um podcasts. Uh, there's a couple of nonfiction podcasts I listen to, and one is National Park After Dark, and they will recommend a lot of survival stories. There's a great one written about a doomed trip in the North Pole and the one sole survivor and how she survived an indigenous woman, and fascinating. And then Tooth and Claw is the wildlife biology one I listened to, and reading some of those books, like the um Savo Brother Lions that terrorized a group of men building a railroad extension in Africa was really fascinating. So those are where I get my recommendations, all very niche and a little weird, Nikki.
SPEAKER_02Okay, mine again are very, very broad. I am very much a pop culture girly. So if I see something on TV that I really liked, I'm immediately gonna go and try to find a book that pairs well with it. I'm gonna think about a book that I've already read and then try Goodreads and see where other lists it's on and see if I can find something from there. And then I'll probably make my own book list from that. And that could be for music, that could be for a TV show, a movie for my profession. I buy the young adult fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, and then juvenile fiction, which is like middle grade. So I read over and read through a lot of award lists, and that could be for Texas award list, ALA award list. If I see that it won an award for something, I'm immediately going to go back, look at the rest of the list, look at the honors, anything else that might be on that list, and I want to read those as well. I guess you could say I have FOMO like really, really bad. I have to know why everyone else is reading it, basically. Shameless plug here. I'm also like a micro super micro influencer, I guess you could say. When I say super micro, I mean like really. I have like 2K followers on Bookstagram, almost 5K on Book Talk, and I talk about books that I love, but for the most part, when I recommend something, you always get a ton back. In the comments, they tell you, Oh, have you read this one? I see that you like X. Well, here's XYZ and a bunch of other ones. So I get a lot of recommendations from there as well. Also, dealing with my profession again, I get to go through the books that come out at least three months in advance because I buy them and we have to stay ahead of time. So when I see those lists or when I'm buying the books, I'm always like, oh, let me bookmark this one or let me add this one to my TBR. It's really kind of like cheating because I get to see them earlier than everyone. And of course, being in my profession and then the micro influencer that I am, I get a lot from publishers. They either send it to me or they'll send me a link to something for an arc, or they'll send me their email list, or if it's something that they think that I'll like, they'll also send it to me.
SPEAKER_00I have also tried out NetGally for like early releases and arcs for books that are gonna come out soon. Uh, and I think anyone can sign up for that. Um they just waterstones is another good one. Waterstones, cool. So I'm learning Oh, Idlewise.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Idlewise. Oh man, these are great resources. Thank you guys. So I'm learning I need to start a book talk in order to get even better recommendations. That's what it sounds like.
SPEAKER_04I think that Nikki's the luckiest of us all um getting that kind of insight because she's in purchasing. At my last library, we purchased for our department as well. And man, getting to see all the previews, the publisher um previews and stuff, that that TBR grows exponentially. I don't know how you do it, Nikki.
SPEAKER_02It's scary because my eyes are like, you know, the saying your eyes are bigger than your stomach. Like that's basically what it is.
SPEAKER_01I had a follow-up question for everybody, but it was inspired by something Amanda said about her like highly curated social media. She's you know, paired back a lot and is very selective about the book implements that she follows. And so I'm curious for Amanda to answer everybody because there might be different anticipates there are different issues. I'm not on TikTok, but I'm assuming it works the same way as Instagram. You follow who you follow, but then it serves you all kinds of other content that it thinks you're gonna like too. You scroll right past it or do you pay attention to it?
SPEAKER_03I'll give it a chance. It'll say, you know, suggested for you, or based on so-and-so, you might like this. I'll I'll look and see. Um, I can usually tell within a few seconds if it's something that I'm actually gonna be interested in or not. I can definitely tell pretty quickly when it's not something I'm gonna be interested in, and I just keep on scrolling. I would say most of the time it's fairly helpful. It's it's at least not, you know, out of left field most of the time, especially on Instagram. Like um, I specifically follow uh Rachel Reeds. She's a uh middle school librarian and textiles and tomes. She is an awesome library advocate. She mostly recommends nonfiction and then just kind of children's books in general.
SPEAKER_00I personally have been moving further away from social media, from Instagram, TikTok, even Reddit, because I just kept getting too jealous of everybody. So yeah, I know. So now if I see something pop up on multiple places, uh, I still take it with a grain of salt and see if it looks interesting to me. But yeah, I don't really follow anyone in particular anymore. And um, if it it shows up from someone that I have followed in the past, I'm definitely more interested than otherwise, but not married to it.
SPEAKER_04I I also don't really follow a lot of um social media. I'm on TikTok and I'm on Instagram, but not really I'm a lurker. Anytime anything comes across book talk, I'm not actually very interested in it. Very rarely does my algorithm actually feed me something I'm genuinely interested in. I'd say in all the years I've been on TikTok, I've had one time it's influenced me to consume media, and that was recently with the show The Pit. I I also have found that anytime something is widely praised, um I think that my experiences working in retail at Borders and a book being really popular but never available kind of like still works against the algorithm, maybe in my head. Just stubborn.
SPEAKER_02For me, I guess I'm a little like Amanda. I tend to push for those books that that feature a marginalized voice, whether it's queer or ethnicity or even socioeconomically diverse. Anything diverse, I'm more inclined to read it. So I would say if it features a marginalized voice, then yeah, I would I would more than likely at least try it, pick it up. However, if not, if I can't tell that it's diverse in any way, then I'll probably um scroll on past it. I guess the author and the main character um and what the book is about would be where I draw the line. So I would look at it, probably write the recommendation down, and then look more into it afterwards.
SPEAKER_00It sounds like uh Sedina and I are very reluctant to be influenced by people. And I I think that comes from my ADHD because I have a lot of issues with authority trying to control me and influence me. Um so that's more of a personal thing. It's not necessarily a mark against uh the algorithm or how uh how good it is at predicting what else I'll enjoy. But that said, I wish Goodreads or Story Graph had a good uh recommendation engine so I could find more good books. But until then, we have all these great resources that people can check out.