Well it's week 2 of my week at work blog, (though a week late!) and the phones have been intensive, with the cold weather and Christmas holidays looming, the winter readers have arrived en masse. Fortunately for me it's been a 4 day week so some respite. It was my son's 13th birthday so in amongst the mass Christmas card writing and wrapping presents, I've had a sleepover and birthday food to contend with. I'm a "domestic ungoddess" where cooking and housework is concerned, that's why I'm better off at work! As usual disaster struck and I forgot to separate my egg yolks in my ice cream, my home made pizza ended up in a sea of liquid, my chocolate icing swam off my cake and my crumble topping swapped places with my rhubharb! The boys didn't kill each other and ate the food though so I call that a success.
We're mastering the world of the F1 computer game where it's a miracle if anybody finishs a lap yet alone a race and we haven't moved above 24th. The good thing is that we all like taking it in turns to be Vettel so it's sweet revenge to see him last, unable to stay on the track and black flagged in most of the races.
Back to work matters, top topics this week still seem to be mass ordering from New Books and sorting themselves extra books for Christmas. I've been making sure that I've asked each reader if they need extra books over the holidays and it's surprising how many readers hadn't realised about the extra books and it's like Christmas has come early for some of them!
I've also spent abit of time catching up with the customer requests and it's always interesting to see which titles come up each month. We get approximately 150-200 requests a month and while some titles are pretty obscure, out-of-print or very expensive to purchase, there has been some real gems that have slipped through the net over the years. I guess this isn't so surprising given the small allocation we have each month (currently 41 new titles and 16 imports) with customer requests taking a good proportion of these once we start including missing series, retranscription requests and collection development into account. It's not an easy job as we are catering for a diverse taste, for example, this month's requests that have hit the magic "3" requests have ranged from Susan Boyle's autobiography to Jan Morris's Britannica Pax Trilogy and Dawn French's A Tiny Bit Marvellous to Melvyn Bragg's Credo.
We can always tell which books are being heavily plugged, particularly Radio 4, requests for Claire Tomalin's biography on Dickens keeps cropping up all over the place. Other books that recently caught the readers' imagination were Vasily Grossman's Love and Fate and Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes.
I also spent some time going through a batch of recent booksellers and Saturday Guardian's to get a nice long list of suggestions for future Talking Books. It's one of those jobs where I don't mind doing in the evenings and as well as keeping abrest of what's happening in the book world, there's some good articles about public libraries with current issues being library closures and libraries lending e-books.
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