Sunday, February 15, 2009

Good Reads on Good Reads

I'm passing along the recent invitation from the Web Team to participate on Good Reads, the online book-based social networking site. You can take part in a couple of ways!

You can create your own account, and start building your library with books you've read, are reading, and want to read. You can use tags to create "shelves" to sort out your books--by genre, by who recommended it to you, by whether or not you own it, any categories you want. You can add stars and reviews to the books in your collection. You can comment on your friends' updates and they can comment on yours!

Then you can choose to "friend" the ALD Good Reads account. When you do this, all of your updates about books you've added or reviewed are posted on the ALD Friend page. Anyone can click on the ALD Good Reads page and see your updates...ta dah...online readers' advisory!

The other way to participate is to log into the ALD Good Reads account directly. (Check StaffNet for the username and password, or email me.) You can add books you've read to the ALD shelves. Anyone who is a friend of ALD Good Reads will then get those books and reviews as updates on their own Good Reads pages!

Lastly, there's a challenge for you to accept! Broaden your reading by creating some "outside the box" categories for yourself for 2009. Here's my challenge as an example: I'm trying to read at least one new author in several different genres. Some of the genres will be easy, because I really enjoy them, like Romance, or Historical Fiction. Other genres will be harder for me because I don't prefer to read them, like Chick Lit or Thriller/Suspense. But that's the whole point of the challenge, to make sure I'm reading widely so I can do a good job on the RA desk.

What categories would help you broaden your children's literature reading?

2 comments:

Betsy said...

I "should" read more sci-fi, both adult and juvenile. So hard when there is so much stuff that I really want to read. I liked "Feed", but that was a dystopia, not too heavy on the scientific terms. Ender's Game is still popular, but I've read some of the sequels and the scientific time and space travel concepts were pretty advanced. Not really for kids.

Alyson said...

I've really been enjoying GoodReads. On other social networking sites you have more issues with mixing up you personal and professional life, but I don't find that on GoodReads. I only add books that I would recommend whether to patrons, co-workers or friends.