Week 5

Assignment 1:
Fiction Affliction is fantastic!  It's a week-by-week listing of releases in those genres.  As interim SFF selector (Welcome back, Jackie!), it was incredibly helpful in buying May titles. There are short annotations for each title, so I have an idea what they each are about without being overwhelming.  It's on Tor's site, but it includes multiple publishers.

The Daily Beast is interesting to read, but it's not as directly applicable to my job.  It's got a lot of great stories that relate to books but provide more insight.  Stories like the one fact-checking Dan Brown's Inferno are interesting.  I like it as a reader, but I find it less useful as a librarian. 

Assignment 2:
For my job, I need to look at most of these sources.  I use Early Word every day, but I took a little time to explore anyway.  I'm glad I did.  I found a link to a breakdown of publisher imprints.  This is a small thing, but it's frustrating to try to look them up when I can't remember.  There they are with links to catalogs on Edelweiss.  Voila!  The list of publishers' library marketing reps is also really handy.  I'll keep that in mind too. 

Assignment 3:
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
This title is on one of the Huffington Post Best of 2013 list, and I just read it.  The publisher bills it as a combination of The Time Traveler's Wife and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but I don't think those are very good comparisons. The book follows a time-traveling serial killer who is on a collision course with the one victim who survived his attack.  It's a fast-paced thriller filled with grisly murders.  There just happens to be time travel.  Definitely not for the faint of heart.  Readers who like Chelsea Cain's Gretchen Lowell series or The Silence of the Lambs will want to check out this genre-bender.