An epistolary novel is written as a series of letters between characters. Occasionally diary entries or “newspaper” articles can also be included. This allows a story to develop with multiple points of view. The reader usually has to “read between the lines” to discover the true story.

One of my favorite epistolary novels is Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, in which the inhabitants of a small island off North Carolina successively stop using individual letters of the alphabet in their writing. They do it for a reason (which you’ll discover if you read it) and the results are quite entertaining.

In the Griffin and Sabine series by Nick Bantock, the author includes many actual letters to take out of envelopes on the page. It really makes you feel like a voyeur reading someone else’s letters. The illustrations are absolutely beautiful, too.

Life on the Refrigerator Door by Alice Kuipers is a quick and sad book consisting of short notes between a mother and her teenage daughter left stuck to the refrigerator. How can a whole story be told in notes that say things like “Michael called for you twice. He sounds nice. Mom?” It’s possible and poignant.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein is another example, as well as Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Walflower. The GuernseyLiterary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer is a recent addition to the genre that has received much acclaim.

You can find an epistolary novel for anyone - mystery readers (try Minette Walters’ The Shape of Snakes,) romance readers (Griffin and Sabine,) or historic fiction lovers (The Egyptologist.) Click here for many more examples and start reading!

Have you had a chance to check out the library’s Bookletters service? Under the green Great Reads tab, you’ll find the link for Bookletters. These are great newsletters about books in the GCPL system. They include reviews, book cover images and links to request the book from GCPL. Each bookletter has a different topic, so you don’t need to hear about books in which you aren’t interested.There are lists for the romance reader, lists about parenting and pregnancy, preview newsletters that tell you about books coming out soon, and lists for homeschoolers, cooks and gardeners! You’ll never run out of things to read! Most lists are published once a month.

If you’d like to subscribe, follow these directions. Click here to take you to the Bookletters page. Take a look at all the offerings, then click the box next to the one(s) you’d like to get in your email inbox. You can choose as many as you like. At the very  bottom of the page (it’s long!) type in your email address, then click the Subscribe button. You should start receiving the newest editions. As we do with your name and address, the library will not share your email address with anyone.

Enjoy!

Looking for a good book? Quite a few notable organizations publish lists of “books of the year.” Click on the links for some of these, and choose one or two  to request from the library.

The New York Times has published a list of the 100 Notable Books of 2008.

Amazon.com has a couple of lists: one of editor’s picks, one of best sellers, even one of the best book covers of the year.  Check out this page for all the lists in one place.

Here are Publisher’s Weekly’s favorites.

National Public Radio has a number of best books lists in various categories. Best Foreign Fiction. Best Gift Books. Top Five Crime and Mystery Novels. The 10 Best Cookbooks. They’ll be adding more throughout the season. Click here for a list of the lists!

Last week we took a look at the Novelist reading advice tool, now I want to talk about another online tool. Books and Authors is similar to Novelist in that you can easily find thousands of books to read just by clicking around. You get to it the same way you get to Novelist: point at the purple Find Answers tab, choose Research Databases, then choose Literary Sources and finally click on Books and Authors.

Books and Authors is a little more polished and modern looking than Novelist, and there are a few really neat options. You can choose to create an account and keep track of lists of books you’d like to read, authors you enjoy and even write reviews of books you’ve read and save them for access later. You can also use the browse function and browse through hundreds of thousands of titles, clicking on those that pique your fancy.

Like Novelist, there are lists of award winners and expert-created booklists. One really neat feature is the Recommended Similar Reads list for most novels. Let’s say that I really enjoyed the book The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. If I search that title and open the screen about it, I find a list of 15 other books I may alos enjoy. Turns out, I’ve read 8 of the recommended books, and I did enjoy them! They aren’t all exactly alike - The Historian is about an academic’s search for Dracula, while the recommended The Egyptologist is about intrigue and murder surrounding an archeological dig in Egypt - but all share some similarities. You can also use the Read-A-Like Wizard to specify what exactly it is you enjoyed about a particular book and find some similar reads.

Spend some time with the Books and Authors database and I guarantee you’ll find something new and interesting to read. Give us a call at the Reference Desk if you have troubles using it and we’ll try to help you out as much as we can.

If you’ve ever finished a book and thought, “Wow, I’d like to read another book like this” or “I’ve read all this author’s books, but I want more,” if you’ve ever come into the library and been overwhelmed by the incredible number of unread books, if you’ve ever wished you could find a novel about a specific subject, the library has a couple of resources to help you.

The first is a database called Novelist. Novelist is a website that you can access with your library card from home or at the library. It has reading advice, author profiles and bibliographies and reading lists. I think it is fun to explore through the website, following various links. Whenever I start playing with Novelist, I come away with a huge number of new reading possibilities.

To get started, go to the library’s homepage, and point at the purple FIND ANSWERS tab across the top. When you point at this tab, a menu will drop down; you should click RESEARCH DATABASES.  When the new page loads, you click where you are: IN LIBRARY or HOME. You’ll then get a list of categories. The library offers many different home-accessible products, for our purposes today, choose LITERARY SOURCES. You’ll get a list of the resources we offer with their descriptions. Click NOVELIST. At home, you may have to type in your library card number or your zip code. You’ll get a screen telling you what to do next. Once you do that, you’re in! It sounds like a lot of work, but, trust me, it’s worth it if you’d like help figuring out what to read next.

Now, you should be in Novelist. Give us a call (937-878-9383 option 3) if you are having problems.

The very first thing you should notice is the search bar. You can just go ahead and get started using it if you like. Try typing in the name of a book you enjoyed or an author you like (last name first) Anything that is written in underlined blue letters is a link. Why don’t you just start clicking away? I typed in one of my favorite books, I, Claudius, and a couple of screens later I found out that it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1934. I was able to browse the list of other winners, and I saw quite a few books that I’ve already read and enjoyed (The Prestige by Christopher Priest (which won in 1995,) The Road (won in 2006,) Saturday (won in 2005)) so I might pick a few more to request and read.

I’m not going to spend too much time describing what is available, since it can be fun to discover some things on your own. I will tell you, though, that on the right hand side of the home page is a link to a nice tour of the site that you can watch.  Here’s a link to a QuickStart Guide, also. Remember, you can click absolutely any link (blue underlined font) and explore some more.

Novelist is particularly nice if you are reading a series and you want to know what the next book (or the first book) is. To get a list of a series of books in order, type in the title of one of the books. Let’s say you read The Cat Who Played Brahms. If you type in that title, you’ll see in the record that shows up, SERIES, VOLUME: The Cat Who mysteries, 5. Go ahead and click The Cat Who mysteries (because it is blue and underlined), and voila! a list of all the Cat Who mysteries, in order, many with descriptions of their plots! How neat is that? You can print out the list and keep track of the ones you’ve read. You can use the list to look up the next ones you need in the library catalog and place requests on them. It is just so incredibly convenient!