Within a couple of days, I had two people at our library, ask me to recommend a good read.  Not a rare thing in a public library, but on reflection and as I was reading Redefining Reader’s Advisory: Kissing Cousins in Library Journal (which by the way, is well worth a read), I realised that I had been receiving that question a lot more in recent times.

My usual process is to ask a few questions about the sort of things they like reading and if they have an author(s), they particularly enjoy. If they have the latter and its an author I haven’t read myself, I go to our reader’s advisor print bible “Who else writes like”, or refer our users to the wonderful Who Writes like, compiled by Eastern Regional Libraries or the UK What should I read next.

Reading Giovanni Battista Niccolini

Reading Giovanni Battista Niccolini, uploaded by takomabibelot to Flickr, 29th November 2006, Attribution 2.0 Generic

But it has challenged me again to develop my reader’s advising skills a little more personally, by dipping my toe into other genres. I was intially a big fantasy reader, but of the last ten years I have been into mysteries. So now its time to try some other stuff, just to make myself aware of what is going on outside those genres.

Interestingly, the book that I have chosen and a conversation I was privy to yesterday have helped steer this pondering. We had Australian urban fantasy author Keri Arthur in as a guest speaker and after hearing her talk I was inspired to read one of her books as a starting point. What also came out of her talk was that there are still a lot of fans of print books around – both authors and library users alike. (but that’s a topic for another blog post)

So how do you help your recreational readers find a good read?  Any favourite tools or training that helps you to help them?