moving to the dark side...

Join me over at my new blog location: reading360.
In 2014 I'll be writing about the A in STEAM in maker culture, creative bibliotherapy, and geocaching. 

Happy new year!

Alison

Making it in libraries today - part 1

Zinesters hard at work via Brokelyn

Should a movement built on creativity have a definitive construct and place? Is a makerspace bound by four walls and a 3D printer or is it present in the hearts and minds of a community?

I took a while to understand the point of adding makerspaces to libraries because I wasn't connecting with the concept in any way. I think a lot of library staff would feel the same if a 3D printer suddenly materialised and people went mad for making monochrome plastic phone cases. 

So I've been exploring papers and posts and discovered that makerspaces didn't originate in libraries ;) Is it a hackerspace, makerspace, TechShop or FabLab?

'Dale and MAKE Magazine registered makerspace.com and started using the term to refer to publicly-accessible places to design and create (often times in the context of creating spaces for children).'

I think the term 'makerspace' works well for its origins, but libraries are made for 'maker culture'. Katie Behrens  article hit the money for me: Library as Incubator Project wants you to look at programming as collection development.  
'What if the information most needed by a patron is not recorded information, but rather information contained in someone else’s head?'

Our library service's mission is to connect people with information, learning and lifestyle. Other library services may have a mission to connect people with books (or so it seems) which is perhaps why so many try to shout their relevance with 'we're more than just books!' For me, books and the physical library building are just two parts of the library service. We know that people learn in different ways, and learning by doing also constitutes an information exchange. 

When libraries use the term 'makerspace' the focus for me is on the wrong part of this borrowed phrase. As public libraries move to providing 'the tools to help patrons produce their own works of art or information and sometimes also collecting the results to share with other members of the community'  (A librarians' guide to makerspaces: 16 resources by Elyssa Kroski) the emphasis is on people and making. When Slatter and Howard ask in their study 'What are the issues and challenges of creating makerspaces within Australian public libraries?', 'within.. public libraries' suggests to me activities in a space in a physical building.  My emphasis is more; 'What are the issues and challenges of creating a maker culture in Australian public library services?' 

It's early early days, but something that can help is embedding maker culture in the Standards and Guidelines as we embed it in our library services. And we must make those connections for staff as well as for our community. 

Two great quotes that highlight the importance of instilling that culture of making: 'Maker culture' refers to the whole ethos and process of fiddling, tinkering, experimenting, failing, reworking, recycling, upcycling, hacking, and creating. Maker culture does not depend on a perfect setting or dedicated space. It’s a way of looking at the world, creatively testing the boundaries and playing with what you have. In the Library With a Lead Pipe

The future library will be about 'delight, surprise, engagement, serendipity, curiosity, and to fulfil that vision we need to keep these things in mind: delighting, surprising and engaging with our community; providing       serendipitous discovery of knowledge and culture; and encouraging curiosity... Libraries will be measured more by what they create and help others to create, not so much what they collect.' Mal Booth at UTS on Creative Futures

Do you picture a makerspace contained in a room, or do you see a shared culture in the hearts and minds of your people?

Local library makerspaces you should know about - Mill Park, Auckland, Moonee Ponds, Mackay, The Edge, Victoria Park ...

Katie Behren's post made the connection for me between library services and maker culture and Tania Barry alerted me to STEAM instead of STEM that all the 3D printer fans were raving about. In the next post I'll explore the 'A' and why I'm posting about maker culture in a reading blog. 

best reads of 2013

some of my best reads of 2013

I've read some great books this year; some recommended to me, others were random picks off the shelf. I've nearly reached my projected target of 50 books for the year, and am grateful for the tracking widget on Goodreads. 

There's a mix of short stories, memoirs, and fiction. Two of those pictured are from our reading maps programs. I met one of the authors (Fiona McIntosh) and I saw Anh Do's show at the theatre. One of the authors grew up in a place I used to live.

Last Drinks was the fourth book I read about the Fitzgerald Inquiry years in Queensland; two fiction and two nonfiction from different perspectives (journalist, honest cop, protester, crooked cop). I read them just after I'd stayed in a hotel in inner-Brisbane in an area represented in the books. Fabulous insight into recent history!

We're launching our library's Goodreads site with Great Summer Reads - featuring staff picks of 2013.
I would like to grow the program into a biannual showcase of staff recommendations for our community, perhaps in the future complementing the online presentation with a booktalk.

The best story came to us at the QPLA conference recently. A great librarian told us that she had implemented a program she'd read about on our project blog about staff recommendation displays, and that she had 100% staff involvement. The librarian who had guest blogged her program was also at the conference so we got the two together.
We're very keen on program sharing state-wide and nationally, and to see this in action was amazing. The two librarians work in libraries nearly 2000kms apart. You can re-read Chris' post  here  .
Chris has great statistics - Using this method we have loaned over 11,000 ‘staff picks’ in the last 12 months.

Mission accomplished

source: The Art of Brick

On Monday afternoon, Jo and I will present our paper at the QPLA conference, and then we will celebrate!
Thanks for working with me, Jo! Thank you very much :)

If you would like to discuss any of the issues we raise about readers' advisory, add your comment here or contact us.

What's the coolest way you know to get into reading?

22: Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine De Vigan

Nothing Holds Back the Night by Delphine De Vigan

Bloomsbury, London, August 2013.
Review published in The Townsville Eye, 9 November 2013.

‘What’s she done, what’s she done?’ Delphine De Vigan’s thoughtful exploration of her mother’s extraordinary life and death begins with this question on a Wednesday morning when she finds Lucile dead in her apartment. Lucile was a feted child model in 1950s Paris, third of nine children in a family that was at one time the subject of a television documentary showcasing the ‘perfect family’. Common sense tells us there is no such thing, and De Vigan does not don rose-coloured glasses for her mother’s story. She interviewed Lucile’s surviving brothers and sisters and listened to her grandfather’s taped history to make sense of the family, to discover how they shaped her mother’s life. De Vigan draws out stories of an overbearing patriarch, accidental deaths, acrimonious divorce, painful accusations, terminal cancer, and suicide. Lucile’s adult life was punctuated with delirium, despair and hospitalisation which had its inevitable impacts on Delphine and her sister Manon’s lives. Lucile was a singular woman; elusive, glamorous, a daughter, a sister, a mother. Nothing Holds Back the Night stands as
De Vigan’s tribute to Lucile.

Verdict: Tragic

Interview with Bill Liddelow

Does your library service invest time and training into developing staff knowledge about the collection, new titles, and selling points/appeal characteristics? Do your staff know what's in your collection development statement? Do they know what resources to use to build their knowledge? Do your staff just check-out books, or do they connect people with reading? After reading about Perth's Boffins Technical and Specialist Books in November's Books and Publishing, and their commitment to developing staff product knowledge for best-practice customer service, I approached owner Bill Liddelow to find out more.

Extract from the B & P article (Issue 3, 2013, page 15):
'Drivers of our business are product selection, product knowledge, high merchandising standards, a customer service and sales focus, attention to detail, and willingness to embrace new technology. Our staff meet 10 minutes before opening each weekday to share information and for training. I feel that this daily meeting is invaluable in setting priorities, in getting issues out in the open, in addressing skills and procedural deficiencies, and in binding us together as a team... We also have a 40 minute monthly meeting at which all staff present new product (usually about 30 of our most important books for the month) to each other... Each month we produce an internal newsletter featuring approximately 100 new titles that we want to get behind. We have a monthly product quiz for staff based on the titles in this newsletter...'

Alison: I am most interested in your monthly meetings where all staff present about new books to develop product knowledge and to learn the selling points. How did you develop staff ability to participate in this? 

Bill: When we recruit we look for people who have wide interests and who also like reading, and who are interested in helping people (the sales side). When we get people with this “fit”, they (pick) it up very quickly, following the example of the other staff.

Alison: Are staff given on-the-job time to develop their knowledge, or what processes do they use?

Bill: No, this is not really possible in a dynamic retail environment. They’re involved in the selection of titles they are to present, and they can take the books home.

Alison: Who compiles the monthly product quiz?

Bill: I do.

Alison: How do you believe the presentations at these meetings contribute to the quality of service you provide your customers?

Bill: They improve their knowledge by sharing the contents of the books, and they build their confidence by presenting to their peers. As a result, they can give better advice to customers, and can do so with greater confidence.

#mynextread

A recent #mynextread conversation including
feedback from a recommended author.

Following my earlier post on form-based readers advisory services and the great two day CODES Conversation which raised the use of social media in readers advisory service, I'm pleased to introduce Mary Barnett and Cathy Royal from Chattanooga Public Library as guest bloggers.

Mary and Cathy run #mynextread on Twitter and Facebook. This is their story.

We decided to launch the #mynextread social media promotion after hearing about Michigan’s Capital Area District Library’s BookSleuth idea.

The idea is fairly simply and really fun. We ask our patrons on Facebook and Twitter to tell us the titles of the last three books they’ve read so the #mynextread librarian can recommend the next book they might enjoy based on those previous selections.

We tweet and post the results back to each patron along with some info about the book or author and a link to the material in our catalog. The patron can then simply log on to their online library account with their library card, place the recommended title on hold and have it delivered to their nearest branch.

It’s alot of fun to read the responses to some of the suggested material. Most everyone is intrigued if not outright excited. Overall they seem really pleased to have a brand new book to look forward to, in most cases something they had not considered before the #mynextread librarian’s suggestion.

The “mynextread” librarian is actually Cathy Royal who works fulltime in tech services at the Chattanooga Public Library as the Popular Material Specialist. She is responsible for purchasing most of the material for the collection.

Prior to joining the library staff in 2001, Cathy worked in bookstores for 10 years and has decades of additional professional experience working in books, video rental and other assorted media. She was also a former contestant on Jeopardy!

Cathy says she loves the challenge of trying to find a title that seems to fit with what the reader has already read. She says she often relies on intuition.

“...and although my connections may look tenuous, I have occasionally minded my personal collection for ideas, I always double check to be sure our library owns what I have in mind.”

So far we have tried the promotion during the lunch hours of 11-1 on Fridays and Thursdays. We’re open to playing with time of day and day of week on this to fit the online habits of our audience. We’ve had anywhere from a dozen or more submissions, which keeps Cathy very busy, to just two or three. You have to be flexible when you try new things so you can adjust to how the public is or isn’t participating.

The best part is having an enthusiastic secret well-informed ‘weapon’ like Cathy Royal as the #mynextread librarian. She is an avid reader and book connoisseur and is totally into public engagement.

“I think #mynextread is like a mental obstacle course, or literary speed-Jeopardy, with something more important that money involved. Although I’m anonymous for now, my reputation and that of the Chattanooga Public Library is involved, and I want as many patrons as possible to enjoy this as much as I do.”
....

Mary Barnett, CPL Narrative Specialist / Content Marketing

Cathy Royal, CPL Popular Material Specialist

Librarians at festivals!

Nadia Patch in
Brisbane Writers Festival program 

Shoutout to a great readers advisor - Nadia Patch - who was recently on the program for Brisbane Writers Festival. 

Tell Me What To Read featured Nadia with Suzy Wilson, Felicity Vallence and Katherine Lyall-Watson who 'scoured the shelves for a no-fail selection of cracking reads'. I like this collaboration between library staff, bookstore staff, publishers and creators.

Jo Beazley and I interviewed Nadia, Reading Coordinator at Brisbane City Council Libraries, for our research project - she provided some early inspiration on training, collaboration and online content.

There are many literary festivals around the country - are other librarians involved in festival presentations? I know Vassiliki Veros and Ellen Forsyth (both NSW) have presented at GenreCon. I think it's a clever way to match our goals of raising the visibility of reading and of librarians as reading experts.

Form-based readers advisory service

Join the CODES RA Committee on 24 and 25 September for the discussion on form-based readers advisory service. Subscribe to the free, moderated discussion here. 

This CODES Conversation will cover 'all aspects of form-based RA, from practicalities such would form-based RA work well at your library, how long should forms be, and how to put together a team to respond, to more general questions focused on talking with readers and making suggestions that surprise and delight.'
Prep with the resource guide here 

Me Before You: recommended
to me this week by Jodie
after our conversation ranged
from The Lavender Keeper >
The Girl You Left Behind >
Me Before You.

Also, there's an ALA eCourse running over six weeks: Rethinking Readers Advisory - an Interactive Approach here.

What books have people recommended for you and did you enjoy them?

How does your library service recommend for people?

What training do staff have to offer this service?

How would reader services training benefit your library team?

Beyond The Lavender Keeper Reading Map

We did it! Jo and I continually advocate for (intra and interlibrary) collaboration and staff development in reader services as a result of our research project. To support Fiona McIntosh as touring author for Get Reading! to three Queensland libraries, five of us got together to create the Beyond The Lavender Keeper Reading Map. It's available online now through our libraries and on our blogs. View it online or download the pdf to print.
I think the Get Reading! guide online should have a link to Trove like we have the catalogue links so that people could see if their libraries have each book. 
You can download the first chapter of The Lavender Keeper to read via GR! 

Thanks so much Sally Pewhairangi (Waimakariri Libraries), Jo Beazley (Toowoomba Regional Libraries), Louise Pieper (Gold Coast Libraries) and Tina Cavanough (Moreton Bay Region Libraries). I enjoyed working with you all, and I hope your communities love the reading map!

We collaborated on Googledrive and email.

 I've also added the books to our library's GoodReads account so there is another way to  discover the titles. 

My favourite story so far was Kate Morton's The Secret Keeper. The quote I used perfectly encapsulated the story and the theme of betrayal for me: 'The pair of them huddled together and Dolly listened as Vivien said, 'Go to the railway station and buy yourself a ticket. Get on that train and ride it all the way to the end of the line. Don't look back.' '

I love these comments about our previous reading map:

(Cath Sheard) Wow! I love what you and Alison have created. It’s informative and visually exciting. 

(Paul Brown) ..There is even a Trans-Tasman partnership happening at the moment between a New Zealand and an Australian librarian in the construction of a highly visual and engaging Reading Map.

Are you one of the many who have enjoyed The Lavender Keeper and its sequel The French Promise? Are you inspired to go beyond these with our map? Happy reading!

21: Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe

Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe

University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2012

Short stories

Review published in ArtGaze Magazine online, September 2013

‘I am sorry that it hurt you. But even so, it was something I carried around with me. Something folded small that I could take out and look at whenever I wanted to.’
(p. 95)

Josephine Rowe is a young Melbourne writer whose work has been published in the prestigious Meanjin, Overland and The Best Australian Stories. Tarcutta Wake is a slim volume of 104 pages gracefully scattering vignettes of people’s lives across twenty-five stories, much as Esther does with Robin’s ashes in the title story. So many characters’ lives folded small – some explored in a paragraph, others in a handful of pages.

Rowe dignifies the composite parts of a person’s life. She draws out the parts to place before us as offerings. By savouring these stories, we might find ourselves reflected in them.  Are we too running away, moving house, farewelling a lover, doing something unexpected, grieving losses? Characters move on, leaving others behind, but Rowe’s dignity as a storyteller lifts us, like the neighbour’s singing –

‘in the mornings we would sometimes hear him singing, and his voice thrummed through all the busted hot water systems and dirty sheets and disconnection notices, through the discarded needles and the places where our bicycles used to be... his voice made these things better than they were.’ (p. 25)

The stories unfold to reveal a myriad of characters who observe life going on around them, placing the reader – as observer – unobtrusively on the edge of understanding. We sit on the bed in room 17 with Eli, the first narrator, and beside her in the car as she takes us on the run to Brisbane. Her mother is driving, leaving Dad and Victoria behind. We’re with Laith as he climbs out of the tank, and with him as he sees his son growing up in Facebook photos. We’re behind the camera that observes the ‘nicotine stains, scars, tattoos’ of participants’ hands in an art project. We meet the taxidermist’s wife, the distant lover, the elderly doorman who dances with all the girls like it was a ‘different time and place’, and an artist’s model. We don’t meet Sonja sitting alone in her apartment, or the singing man, or Thao, but we are told a little of their stories and know that they meant something to someone.

For such a small volume, its weight is something to be carried around with you. There are many readers who scorn short stories because they want the full meat of a novel - a saga and an adventure - they want to be told what happens. I think snapshots and the gathering of a few fine words can be as satisfying when presented by such a strong writer. It is then that your imagination takes flight.

Josephine’s online site:  josephinerowe.com

I'm planning a short short story reading challenge. Join me?

September - Get Reading! Australian

I love the anticipation leading up to September when we launch the national Get Reading! program!
The GR! team makes it very easy for us; they create the guide and send print copies to registered libraries and bookstores which will be snapped up quickly by keen readers. There is so much online http://www.getreading.com.au/ including

• the guide, 
• a newsletter, 
• first chapter downloads, and 
• an app (find your nearest bookstore and library)
• the hasthtag #getreadingAU at @getreadingAU

The list of Australian books that make the guide is released to the public on 1 September and not before. But as a registered library, our library recognises that to best promote the books to our community, we need staff to know what the titles are, and what the books are about. That's just good reader services practice. We:

• distributed the books to staff rooms with a comment sheet. We encourage staff to read the books or dip into them and share their thoughts. Some people have already read some of the books. Others will discover them for the first time. 
• registered for the GR! author touring program and have booked an author whose book was one of the most enjoyed books of 2012 
• have worked with four other librarians across Queensland and New Zealand to create a reading map that begins with the guest author's book. 
• include Get Reading! as a series heading in our catalogue to help people searching for the books (and have included a website link to the catalogue too).

To kick of this month of reading Australian stories, I've recently read Kate Morton's The Secret Keeper, and Josephine Rowe's Tarcutta Wake (review coming soon). I recommend both.

I'd like to see Get Reading! and Love2Read merge to become an almighty force for reading in this country. What does your library or bookstore do to get staff ready for Get Reading! month? I'm planning an article around this topic so all responses welcomed.

eBooks change everything

Woman using public wifi
to read outdoors
Image source: Brisbane Times

eBooks change everything. What are we doing to capture this massive market? I've thought for some time that we should be marketing in airports, at train stations, in public places. With ubiquitous free wifi we can get out of the library building and into the spaces where people are. If we say that eBooks are great for travellers, then we should place our product at their point of need. 

Stuck at the airport waiting for a flight? Download an eBook. 

Well over your 24kg bag limit and had to leave your novels at home? Download an eBook (or eMagazine).

Read this and be inspired to take action : Airport  libraries to the rescue.

Link to our project blog where we discussed doing bookclubs differently, including on a train ('Commuter bookclubs: a community on the train'). And while SLWA provides print books in laundries, we could do the same with eBooks and eMagazines for the people who are sitting there waiting for their whites to go into the final spin.

If any public libraries are getting their eBook marketing out there in innovative ways, I would love to hear your ideas.

Many kinds of readers

There are many kinds of readers, and we need to know how to help them all, even the haters.

Please include attribution to Laura E. Kelly with this graphic. (Click to view at original large size.)

Visit Laura-e-Kelly.com for more about books, reading, and authors.

Which book?

A lot of readers' advisory practice is geared toward the person-who-is-already-a-reader coming in to the library. Our role has been to respond to readers' questions of 'What do I read next?’. What is more challenging is to proactively strive toward achieving the goals set by National Year of Reading - addressing Australia's low literacy levels, and raising the status and visibility of reading.
Do we want people to be reading from our collections, or do we want them to be reading?
If RA is about finding the right book for your reader, then is it much narrower than reader services which is about achieving those NYR goals? Do we respond to media hype or do we build relationships with people in our communities?
Check out the links at the end to Auckland Libraries' programs.

An article on BookRiot today prompted me into this consideration of reader services being wider and deeper than I had originally thought.

'Not all people who read books are book people' by Sarah Rettger. 

What if we looked at our communities - not as members and non-members or potential members but as many different groups of people who we can reach in different ways. Yes, there was a rush on libraries and bookstores when Fifty Shades of Grey was published and promoted in the news. But then there was a lot of talk that the series got people 'back into reading'. So libraries ordered in dozens of copies and if they were quick enough librarians compiled read-alike lists to help those readers discover authors who wrote like E.L. James.
Did anyone ask the Fifty Shades readers what they wanted next?

Like Sarah Rettger said, 'Book people are making a mistake if we expect everyone to think about books the way we do. Those Category B customers? They don’t want to read a book. They want to read that book.'

Note - I too am using Fifty Shades as a generalisation for the purpose of illustration. 

Was any market research or evaluation done in libraries to see if the acquisition of twenty copies of this title led to a sustained increase in loans of similar titles? Or led to these borrowers increasing their borrowing? Maybe, rather than getting them 'back into reading', they're already readers of different formats and their focus was not the reading but the social side of the phenomenon. The London Fire Department could tell you.

Libraries that bought dozens of copies in the hope of somehow satisfying reader demand in that initial flashpoint period will still have missed the masses of people who bought the book at ever-decreasing prices at the bookstore or online. Instead of thinking that Category Bs are potential Category As, we need to raise the status of reading by recognising it as something that all people do to varying degrees. We need to find ways to reach people with reading in a way that is right for them. 

Two shining examples of libraries reaching people with reading come from Auckland Libraries.
For adults - Dark Night, also here  where Tosca Waera talks about one aim of the festival being to develop the libraries' relationship with its users.

For children - Mangere East's My Library Rules Bake Off Challenge. Brilliant stuff!

How do you connect people in your community with reading?

Booktalks and reading maps: Beyond Chocolat

QR Code link on back cover of
all books from Beyond Chocolat
(idea via The Swiss Army Librarian)

Sally Pewhairangi and I created a sumptuous reading map in May to support a booktalk program and future book discovery. That was such a positive experience we're doing it again.

Read about our Beyond Chocolat program at projectREADja  and here at Finding Heroes.

Fiona McIntosh, author of The Lavender Keeper and this year's must-read The French Promise, will be touring Queensland in September. Our reading map program is designed to extend the value of Fiona's visit for our communities. Her tour will be popular and we'll then have a lot of people keen to read The Lavender Keeper (if they haven't already), read her other books (we have 20 in the collection), and... then what? 

Invoking our developing contextual reader services knowledge, we're creating a way for people to get the best reading experience from TLK by following its tangent themes. 

The best thing about this new reading map though, is that we have three more librarians and libraries joining us in a collaboration.  That's five of us working together online, developing collection knowledge, creating resources for our communities to support their reading, and providing direct promotion for our collections (and getting to know each other better too).

If you've read The Lavender Keeper and have some ideas on which themes and books people would enjoy next, let me know! We could include your titles in the map.

Romance fiction genre challenge: 1

Romance fiction titles

I've been invited to join a romance fiction genre challenge, except it doesn't start until next year (I misread that part of the email..). So I'm just highlighting a few titles I've already read this year and starting to think about the challenge.

I have always enjoyed character driven stories, but it wasn't until I was challenged last year to read some Mills and Boon titles that I discovered romance fiction. I hadn't avoided them on purpose, just they hadn't come up in my unstructured book discovery methods before. 

So I read a few M & Bs, then I learned we had a local author of same (the lovely Barbara Hannay) so I read a few of hers and then went to her book launch of her first Penguin - Zoe's Muster. I started to be more attune to romance fiction conversations so that was how I was led to another Australian writer, Rachael Treasure. I discovered Nicholas Sparks' books from first seeing The Notebook on DVD.  His stories make me cry every time! 

So many people in our community loved The Lavender Keeper and were keen for its sequel The French Promise. When we booked Fiona McIntosh for a guest author visit I thought I'd read these popular titles. Loved TLK!  I did mention the unstructured book discovery... 

Important things to know about the romance genre - 'the focus of the story must be on the romantic relationship between the two main protagonists, and there must be a happily optimistic ending.' (Mosley & Charles, 2012)*

'Romantic elements' is the other style - when 'romance plays a significant part in the story, though it is not necessarily the central plot.' (RWA, 2012). **

So, next year the challenge begins...
Before then, check out the Australian Romance Readers Association http://www.australianromancereaders.com.au/index.html and a guide to the subgenres from the Romance Writers of Australia http://www.romanceaustralia.com/romgenres.html. 

* Mosley, S. & Charles, J. (15 February, 2012). Readers Advisory Rx Romance. Booklist Online. http://www.booklistonline.com/ProductInfo.aspx?pid=5336832

** Romance Writers of Australia. (2012). Romance genres. http://www.romanceaustralia.com/romgenres.html. 

I use GoodReads

Alison's bookshelf: read

Alison's favorite books »

10 deadly stories

In 2012 I participated in ALIA and TAFE NSW's Promote Client Access to Literature subject as part of National Year of Reading. One assessment was to create an annotated bibliography on a blog (or - a blog reading map) based on a UN calendar event - I chose the International Day of the World's Indigenous People. I highlighted 10 deadly stories from Indigenous people in Australia, New Zealand and the US in adult and young adult fiction, and creative nonfiction : http://10deadlystories.blogspot.com.au/.
I am grateful to Dr Anita Heiss for her Black Books list which was my starting point http://anitaheissblog.blogspot.com.au/2011/04/anitas-bbc-black-book-choice-reading.html.