Reference Homework

Bibliographic Sources

1. Who is the editor of School Library Journal?

The Editorial Director of School Library Journal is Rebecca T. Miller. I found this by going to slj.com and when I didn’t see a masthead on the About Us page, I looked for a column since many periodicals have a column by the editor and this is no exception.

“Rebecca T. Miller.” (2014). School Library Journal. Web. Retrieved from http://www.slj.com/author/rmiller/ on March 21, 2014.

2. I need a review of The Lightening Thief by Riordan.

I first searched Book Reviews Online and found 14 reviews for this novel and more for its other formats, e.g. audio book and graphic novel.

I also checked New Yorker and found they published a review as well:

Diones, Bruce. (2010). “Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief.” New Yorker 86.3: 14. Academic Search Premier. Web. 21 Mar. 2014.

I loved the ease of use of Book Reviews Online, but they don’t list reviews printed in newspapers and magazines, which can have value. This bibliography seemed accurate and worth returning to.

3. I need to find a library that holds the work Avvisi di Costantinopoli that was published in Venice in the 17th century.

I searched worldcat.org and found that Harvard University has Avvisi di Costantinopoli, which was published in 1684 in Venice. Even though I trust World Cat since our text and professor recommend it, I searched Harvard’s library and it is there, available for in library use.

4. I am looking for a copy of Pride and Prejudice in Romanian. Can you help me?

Using World Cat OCLC, I found that the following libraries have Jane Austen’s classic in Romanian.

I looked on AddALL.com, but there were no copies available in Romanian. Amazon.com has the Romanian Thesaurus Edition of Pride and Prejudice. Depending on my library’s policies, I might offer to acquire the book through Amazon. I tried Project Gutenburg Europe for a copy to download, but that site seems to be abandoned.

I trust World Cat OCLC, “a network leader,” because it’s widely used and recommended in our text and by several professors.

5. Is there really a publisher by the name of “Small Beer Press?”

First I searched Literary Marketplace’s database and found no listing of them. Then I searched Yahoo and did find Small Beer Press. They only accept paper manuscripts and queries and they promise to read all submissions, thus I think they’re a very small organization.
Small Beer Press: http://smallbeerpress.com/category/books/
Literary Marketplace: No listing. See link below:
http://www.literarymarketplace.com/lmp/us/publishersorglist.asp?Name=S&publicationid=1&xsectionid=1&whichpage=3&pagesize=50

6. I really liked Neil Gaiman’s ‘Good Omens. What other authors or titles might I like?

I used Novelist to find some books that this patron might like. Under similar authors, my search yielded nine titles. The first five are: Gil’s All Fright Diner by L. Martinez, Shades of Grey by J. Fforde, Sacre Bleu by C. Moore, Gravity’s Rainbow by T. Pynchon and four more. The Author Read-alikes included Michael Chabon, Steven Milhauser, Clive Barker, Charles DeLint, Stephen King and four more.

I like that each author or title is followed by a succinct explanation for the suggestion as well as the person who provided the suggestion. I consider this source reliable because my professor recommends it and both the UICU and Northbrook libraries subscribe to it.

Reader’s Online Advisory offered five authors that Gaiman fans might enjoy. To find title read-alikes, I had to click on Gaiman’s name and then the title. The sidebar didn’t offer this choice so at first I didn’t think Title read-alikes were availab.e
“Neil Gaiman or Good Omen Read-alikes.” (2014). Novelist. Web Retrieved March 24, 2014.
“Neil Gaiman or Good Omen Read-alikes.” Web Retrieved March 26, 2014.

7. Does the 11th edition of the Guide to Reference Books recommend the Bopp & Smith text used in this class? Speculate as to why or why not.
It lists this book, but doesn’t recommend our text but it does list it. I thought I’d see if it recommends other reference texts and I found the page (see next page). My best guess is that as a text, this isn’t a book that a library would seek to acquire for its collection or that some of the contributors may be editors for this guide.

My favorite source this week was Novelist because I could spend all day reviewing the various recommendations. It is easy to use and intriguing. I thought the Literary Marketplace had a poor, outdated web design also it didn’t yield Small Beer Press.

 

Peony in Love

Lisa See’s novel Peony in Love is rather odd because about a quarter of the way into the story the protagonist dies. I wondered what was going on and how the story would continue and then I learned that most of the story is the story of a ghost, a hungry ghost.

Young Peony is the daughter of a well to do nobleman, who apparently loves his daughter and encourages her to become literate. Like all females, Peony’s forbidden to interact or even seen males outside her family. She’s eagerly preparing for her arranged marriage when her father hosts a multi-night performance of a Chinese Opera The Peony Pavilion. The women can watch from behind a screen separated from the men in the audience. The first night Peony slips out of the women’s area and encounters Ren, a dashing young man. They talk. They gaze lovingly into each others eyes. They pledge to see each other the next night.

Now Peony’s done for. She can only dream of Ren and after her second rendezvous becomes love sick. She won’t eat or sleep fearing that she’ll never be able to be with her true love. The doctor can do nothing and she wastes away, not knowing till after her family dresses her emaciated body in her wedding clothes and abandons her outside the family compound to waste a way and die outside, that her arranged husband was Ren. Custom demanded that the young girl die outside the family home to avoid bringing bad luck to the family. Sorrow and confusion result in Peony’s funeral tablet not getting properly dotted with ink so she’s left as a hungry ghost, doomed to wander the earth without peace.

Thus begins Peony’s haunting of Ren and his subsequent wives. Readers learn of the imaginative and rich beliefs the Chinese held about ghosts, how they must be fed and treated, how they can insinuate themselves into the lives of the living despite the clever crooked bridges that keep them out.

Readers also learn about the history of women writers during the thirty years when the Manchus defeated the Ming dynasty. It was a time of chaos and one good thing, perhaps the only one, was that during this upheaval men were so distracted by the political and social upheaval, women were allowed to venture outside, explore their surroundings, gather, discuss and write. Many women, whose ghosts Peony meets, were successful, published authors.

While there were times when I found it hard to care about the “life” of a ghost or what would happen to her ancestral tablet, I do applaud See’s creativity. I was able to keep reading, though I wasn’t as concerned with the ghost heroine as I had been with See’s flesh and blood ones. Still I recommend this novel, which makes the history of China come alive, to any lovers of the genre.

 

From The Writer’s Almanac

It’s the birthday of the writer who said, “My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate.” Thornton Wilder (books by this author), born in Madison, Wisconsin (1897). His father was a diplomat, so Wilder and his four brothers and sisters moved back and forth between Asia and the United States. His parents were supportive, but sometimes overbearing. They dictated what Wilder did with his time, and made him work on farms in the summer so that he would be more well-rounded. They decided where he would go to college: to Oberlin, in Ohio, and then to Yale.

After some time in Rome, Wilder got a job teaching French at a boys’ boarding school. In 1926, Wilder spent the summer at MacDowell Colony, a writers’ retreat in New Hampshire, and he started work on his second novel. It was set in the Spanish colonial era of the 18th century — the story of a bridge that collapses in Lima, Peru, while five people are crossing it. The collapse is witnessed by a Franciscan friar, who becomes obsessed by the tragedy and tries to figure out why those five people had to die. Wilder finished it less than a year later and sent it off to his publisher, who almost turned it down, complaining that it was written “for a small over-cultivated circle of readers.” But when The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) was published, it was an immediate success. It won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize, and by that time, it had sold nearly 300,000 copies and been through 17 printings.

Wilder earned enough from The Bridge of San Luis Rey to quit his job and build a house for himself, his parents, and his sisters in Hamden, Connecticut. He called it “the house the bridge built.” That house was his official residence for the rest of his life.

In 1962, Wilder was 65 years old, a famous writer. He was best known for his plays, like his Pulitzer-winning Our Town (1938) and The Matchmaker (1955), which was adapted into the musicalHello, Dolly!. He had not written a novel for almost 20 years. He was tired of being in the limelight, and he wanted to escape his comfortable life in Connecticut, so Wilder got in his Thunderbird convertible and headed southwest. The car broke down just outside of Douglas, Arizona, a town on the Mexican border, and that’s where Wilder stayed for a year and a half. He was happy to be somewhere where nobody knew much about him or his writing. He rented an apartment with one bed for himself and one for all his papers. During the days he wrote, read, and took walks, and in the evenings he hung around the bar asking questions — so many questions that everyone called him “Doc” or “Professor.” When he left Douglas at the end of 1963, he had a good start on a novel. In 1967 he published it as The Eighth Day, and it won a National Book Award.

He said, “There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.”

And: “The test of an adventure is that when you’re in the middle of it, you say to yourself, ‘Oh, now I’ve got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.’ And the sign that something’s wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.”

 

From the Writer’s Almanac

It’s the birthday of of writer Émile Zola (books by this author), born in Paris in 1840. His father was an Italian engineer, and he died when Émile was seven, leaving the family to get by on a small pension. Émile’s mother hoped he would become a lawyer, but he failed the qualifying examination, and so he took a series of clerical jobs. He also wrote literary and art reviews for newspapers.

In his early career, Zola generally followed the Romantic Movement in literature, but he later began a writing style he dubbed naturalism, for which he is best known. He defined naturalism as “nature seen through a temperament” and was inspired by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1839) to apply scientific principles of observation to the craft of fiction. Between 1871 and 1893, he wrote a 20-novel series called Les Rougon-Macquart about different members of the same fictional family during France’s Second Empire. He wrote of this project: “I want to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world.” The most famous books from the cycle are The Drunkard (1877), Nana (1880), and Germinal (1885).

He was also involved in the famous Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongfully accused of passing military secrets to Germany and imprisoned on Devil’s Island. Evidence later came out that strongly implicated another man, but the evidence was suppressed to protect the original verdict. Zola published an open letter on January 13, 1898, entitled J’Accuse…!, on the front page of Paris daily L’Aurore. In it he accused the French army of obstruction of justice and anti-Semitism. He was convicted of criminal libel on February 7, but fled to England before he could be imprisoned, wearing only the clothes on his back. The following year, the government offered him a pardon, which he accepted, even though doing so implied that he was guilty. He was finally exonerated of all charges in 1906, four years after his accidental death of carbon monoxide poisoning from a stopped-up chimney.

I want to read Émile Zola’s A Lady’s Paradise.