It’s been a long time but I better try and get back into the swing of trying to resurrect my weekly blog about work. It goes without saying that the phones have been busy as usual. A high percentage of the calls have been about not receiving their books, the books have been particularly slow in reaching the readers or in some cases just don’t seem to have reached their destination at all. There must be a black hole somewhere in the postal service full of our Talking Books. Production Department have reported no problems with the burners and we haven’t yet had any more red-faced emails from Royal Mail who recently decided to return our post back to us instead of sending it out to the customers, obviously didn’t understand the concept that they need to look at the different addresses on the CDs instead of the return to sender address!
We had our stock familiarisation meeting last week with the theme being the vague read something you’ve been meaning to read or something you would not normally read. Luckily, this bought a good sample of books to talk about it such as Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex which turned out to be more readable than previously thought, Emma Donoghue’s Room where they didn’t like the subject matter and cracking reviews for Jonathan Barnes’s The Somnambulist and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. My two offerings were Andrea Levy’s The Long Song which has been on my pile of must reads and didn’t disappoint and one of the Jack Sheffield Teacher series which I would not normally have read and was as I envisaged – cosy reading and Sunday tea-time fare. I’m surprised this hasn’t been picked up for a TV series – someone is going to tell me now that they have!
Book selection starts again in earnest this month so I managed to spend some time looking through The Booksellers to catch up with the news. Some good new releases coming through which will attract a lot of customers including titles from J.K. Rowling, Kate Morton, Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingsolver. We’re already getting customer interest for Bradley Wiggins and Claire Balding autobiographies. The two non-fiction books that stood out for me and I think will appeal to a lot of our customers are Clare Mullroy’s The Spy Who Loved and Catherine Bailey’s The Secret Room.
Requests for 50 Shades Darker keep coming in and we’ve now have a record of over 150 requests. I think our customers will be pleased to see the Erotica titles in the bestseller charts though when trying to pick one for book selection, the reviews were quite poor, particularly Eighty Days Yellow. In the end, I went for Porta De Costa’s In Too Deep, I think the Librarian receiving the erotic notes and what happens afterwards did it for me! Talking about bad reviews, it’s worth going on Amazon and reading the reviews for 50 Shades of Grey, Oh my with lots of eye rolling and lip biting, they’re more entertaining than the book itself!
Tuesday 18 September 2012
Wednesday 5 September 2012
Catch up about all things except work - August 2012
I'm having huge difficulties in getting my thoughts together after a huge break from my blog (made worse that I've just lost an hour's work already and I'm not sure what I've pressed). Also slightly worrying that I'm feeling more inspired to write about non-work related things rather than work.
Firstly, after a month off from formula one, the Spa Grand Prix lived up to expectations and my crystal ball was right that the 2 worst drivers Grosjean won't make it to a lap and Maldanado will crash/incur some kind of penalty and the world's most boring driver (yes I'm criticising a fellow Brit) Di Resta will eek out a point without bothering to overtake anybody and letting quite a few cars overtake him. Yes, I know he gets the car home in one piece but so can Joe Bloggs get their car from one place to another in one piece. Take your rosy-tinted glasses off BBC!
The start of the football season has been an anti-climax for the ever-frustrated Stags fan. I was expecting better things with lots of interesting new signings with footballers that had good reputations of being able to play football, I was going to think that Paul Cox had had lessons from Billy Dryden, Steve Parkin and Keith Curle over the summer and they had all shown him how you can get your team to play good football. Unfortunately Paul continues to study the John Beck manual of football - pinching players from the local rugby team, intimidating the opposition and stopping them playing and missing the middle of the pitch out in play (at least most of the pitch will still be in pristine condition at the end of the season as it doesn't get touched) though even worse this year, he's forgotten 2 crucial elements - to win, teams have to score goals and stop other teams from scoring. Hopefully he'll continue in this vein and get the sack soon. I can't even make any Lincoln jokes at the moment.
What else can I talk about before I have to think about work? I managed to catch some of the Reading/Leeds Festival last week. Favourite parts - Crystal Castles, Sbtrkt and before I get accused of being a dance freak - Mark Lannegan Band, At the Drive-In and Black Keys. Least favourite - toss up between The Vaccines and Florence and the Machine (just plainly awful), also quite a few non-descript indie-bands which all sound the same.
It feels like an end of an era as probably our most well known reader to all of the RNIB passed away last week. He used to ring up most days so it's like losing an old friend. It was sad that he spent his last weeks in hospital and none of us had a chance to speak to him there; I think his closest friends in his latter years were the RNIB Library Staff and Customer Services.
50 Shades of Grey has divided the readers, although achieving the largest waiting list for a book by reaching 126 requests, some have eagerly phoned back and made enquiries about the rest of the trilogy, others have been just as quick to say no more. One lady thought it was called 50 Shades of Green and it was going to be a nice family story set in Ireland. Couldn't get further from the truth! I think the best positive comment was from one customer who was just pleased to be able to get hold of this book in an accessible format and being able to join in the conversations with their friends and family. A nice example of social inclusion!
Firstly, after a month off from formula one, the Spa Grand Prix lived up to expectations and my crystal ball was right that the 2 worst drivers Grosjean won't make it to a lap and Maldanado will crash/incur some kind of penalty and the world's most boring driver (yes I'm criticising a fellow Brit) Di Resta will eek out a point without bothering to overtake anybody and letting quite a few cars overtake him. Yes, I know he gets the car home in one piece but so can Joe Bloggs get their car from one place to another in one piece. Take your rosy-tinted glasses off BBC!
The start of the football season has been an anti-climax for the ever-frustrated Stags fan. I was expecting better things with lots of interesting new signings with footballers that had good reputations of being able to play football, I was going to think that Paul Cox had had lessons from Billy Dryden, Steve Parkin and Keith Curle over the summer and they had all shown him how you can get your team to play good football. Unfortunately Paul continues to study the John Beck manual of football - pinching players from the local rugby team, intimidating the opposition and stopping them playing and missing the middle of the pitch out in play (at least most of the pitch will still be in pristine condition at the end of the season as it doesn't get touched) though even worse this year, he's forgotten 2 crucial elements - to win, teams have to score goals and stop other teams from scoring. Hopefully he'll continue in this vein and get the sack soon. I can't even make any Lincoln jokes at the moment.
What else can I talk about before I have to think about work? I managed to catch some of the Reading/Leeds Festival last week. Favourite parts - Crystal Castles, Sbtrkt and before I get accused of being a dance freak - Mark Lannegan Band, At the Drive-In and Black Keys. Least favourite - toss up between The Vaccines and Florence and the Machine (just plainly awful), also quite a few non-descript indie-bands which all sound the same.
It feels like an end of an era as probably our most well known reader to all of the RNIB passed away last week. He used to ring up most days so it's like losing an old friend. It was sad that he spent his last weeks in hospital and none of us had a chance to speak to him there; I think his closest friends in his latter years were the RNIB Library Staff and Customer Services.
50 Shades of Grey has divided the readers, although achieving the largest waiting list for a book by reaching 126 requests, some have eagerly phoned back and made enquiries about the rest of the trilogy, others have been just as quick to say no more. One lady thought it was called 50 Shades of Green and it was going to be a nice family story set in Ireland. Couldn't get further from the truth! I think the best positive comment was from one customer who was just pleased to be able to get hold of this book in an accessible format and being able to join in the conversations with their friends and family. A nice example of social inclusion!
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