Readers’ advisory services available on library website
By Shannon Haddock, Library Specialist – Fiction Department
Shannon Haddock, Library Specialist, Fiction Department, Hoover Public Library
I know there are readers who have sat back after finishing the latest installment of their favorite series or the most current title by a treasured author and wondered, “What next?”
Whether you are listening to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series and want something equally fast-paced and distinctly voiced (try Nothing Short of Dying by Erik Storey) or looking for a particular 17th Century historical fiction book set in Holland (might it be Girl With the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier?), the Hoover Library now has a 24/7 option for you to put to good use.
On our website, www.hooverlibrary.org, follow the front page button marked “Find a New Book” and you will enter the world of NoveList. This resource, supplied by local company EBSCO, is a reader/listener advisory gold mine. NoveList can be used to find fiction or nonfiction titles, children’s through adult books, along with audiobooks. It easily provides “read-alikes” for series, authors and individual titles.
If you just finished Fredrik Bachman’s humorous A Man Called Ove and loved the quirky characters, NoveList will produce a list of books with equally idiosyncratic protagonists (try This is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison). Parents will love the help in selecting board books for their young ones and new adult readers will be encouraged with the wide world of options outside their most favored author.
Don’t get in a reading rut! Break the chains of habit and discover a treasure trove of wonderful new titles! If you are serious about following your favorite books, you can also sign up for monthly e-newsletters via our NextReads service. Beside the “Find a New Book” button on our website’s front page, there is a link to “NextReads.” The choices are varied and eclectic. If you’d like to keep abreast of the best of travel writing, you may select “Armchair Travel.” There is also an e-newsletter for The New York Times best-seller list for fiction and nonfiction. “Tween Reads” and “Hoover Library’s New eBooks” are just two other examples. You won’t be inundated with emails, just a targeted review of the best of the best, chosen for you by librarians with your interests in mind.
But don’t forget to come by the library – our librarians still love face-to-face interactions and want to hear how our reading suggestions are received!
