Week Twelve Prompt Response

Author: Evette Dionne

Title: Weightless

Genre: Nonfiction (essay collection)

Publication Date: 2022

Number of Pages: 245

Geographical Setting: New York City

Time Period: Present Day

1. Where is the book on the narrative continuum?

Highly narrative (reads like fiction)

2. What is the subject of the book?

Weightless explores the intersection of the fat, Black, and chronically ill experience, through the lens of the highs and lows of Dionne's life.

3. What type of book is it?

This book is a collection of essays on different topics. The essays include tidbits from Dionne's personal life that highlight her persuasive argument.

4. Articulate appeal:

• Pacing: The pacing is leisurely and reflective. There are moments of tension, but we know at the onset that Evette is at a greater place of acceptance with her body and life than at the lowest times of her life.
• Characters: The book is autobiographical and follows Evette's journey with chronic illness and fatness, interlaced with her Black identity. Evette manages several chronic conditions, including mental illness (especially agoraphobia), heart failure, and pulmonary hypertension. Evette is able to reflect on her perspective at different times of her life with clarity and stark honesty. She does now shy away from condemning her past actions as self-destructive, harmful to others, or weak. Evette's supportive family also play a role, as do various boyfriends, though they serve more as representatives of the effect of Evette's mindset on others and as stand-ins for society than actual charactesr with arcs.
• How does the story feel? The story feels as if you are reading journal entries.
• What is the intent of the author? Dionne's intent is to share her lived experience and to build community with readers like herself. The book can also function as a long persuasive argument that fatness is not a morally corrupt state of being, but rather a neutral fact of life that deserves accommodation. Dionne argues that fatness should not be overly medicalized, and that doctors should not default to diagnosing a patient with simply "fat" and not further investigate their health conditions.
• Does the language matter? The langauge matters less than the emotional resonancy of the material. Dionne's prose is not overly poetic, but it does strike a chord narratively.
• Is the setting important and well described? The setting is sparesely described and is perhaps beyond tertiary to the overall structure of the book. Dionne's interactions with others take center stage, and whether she is talking to another disengaged boyfriend on a city street, in a park, or in a club is irrelevant.
• Are there details and, if so, of what? Dionne shares lot of medical details about her various chronic illnesses. These serve to illustrate that Dionne's primary heath problem is not her weight, but rather the illnesses she was predisposed to and got by seemingly random chance. Dionne also shares startlingly emotional and thought patterns that would potentially isolate her from the body positive movement, but she does so with honesty and bravery.
• Are there sufficient charts and other graphic materials? There are no graphs, but the book didn't need them.
• Does the book stress moments of learning, understanding, or experience? This book stresses understanding and experience. Dionne grows to accept herself and her place in society, but also elicits a call to action to challenge the status quo of white supremacy, capitalism, and the thin ideal. 

5. Why would a reader enjoy this book (rank appeal)?

1. Body positivity
2. Black lived experience
3. Social commentary

References: 

Dionne, E. (2022). Weightless. New York: HarperCollins.

Nonfiction: The Right to Be Cold by Sheila Watt-Cloutier

 

Author: Sheila Watt-Cloutier

Title: The Right to Be Cold

Genre: Nonfiction (memoir)

Publication Date: 2015

Number of Pages: 337

Geographical Setting: Canada, both in villages like Kuujjuaq and in the southern cities

Time Period: 1953-2015 

Summary: Sheila Watt-Cloutier tells her life's story as an Inuit woman driven to preserve the traditional lifestyle she had as a child. Watt-Cloutier opens her memoir with vignettes from her childhood, ranging from traveling by dog sled to being sent to a residential school in Churchill. Watt-Cloutier is separated from her childhood home of Kuujuaq for a time, and upon her return discovers countless detrimental changes to her village. The dog sled teams have been replaced by snow mobiles, alcoholism, violence, and disease plague her beloved village. Watt-Cloutier changes the trajectory of her life to be one of cultural renaissance, leading many initiatives to safeguard the way of life of the circumpolar Indigenous peoples. 

Watt-Cloutier tackles every topic with nuance and integrity, opening the door for multiple interpretations of events. She discusses how her white-passing appearance perhaps enabled her to be a more palatable voice for her people to the white power majority, but how this also at times affected her self-perception of her identity. Another such example is Watt-Cloutier's shunning by environmental NGOs like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, even though all three had the goal of stopping climate change. Watt-Cloutier attributed this to the popular movements against hunting of Arctic wildlife, which was at odds with her people's subsistence hunting relationship with their land. Other divisive topics she tackles are the white father who abandoned her family, intra-community debates on how to adapt to a changing world, education, and drug abuse.

Subject Headings (per Novelist):

• Climate change
• Environmental protection
• Environmentalists
• Inuit women
• Watt-Cloutier, Sheila
• Weather

Nonfiction Appeals:

Characterization - "Nonfiction characters tend either to be quickly defined and remain relatively constant or to be slowly revealed as they develop over the life of the story" (Wyatt, 2007).

    Watt-Cloutier comes into her own as a politician and change-maker throughout the book. She initially is somewhat adrift in terms of what she envisions her life's mission to be; at first, she dreams of becoming a doctor, but her grades don't allow it. She tries her hand in education but faces too much friction with her co-workers. Eventually, several chance meetings allow her an avenue into politics, where she quickly becomes globally recognized. An introvert at heart, being thrust into the spotlight is hard for Watt-Cloutier, and she faces several personal tragedies as she grows older. Several family members die in quick succession, and her marriage falls apart. Nonetheless, Watt-Cloutier describes herself as having found clarity and resonance in the work she does. 

Story Line and Subject - "Story line provides a place in the appeal construct to consider how the subject is approached" (Wyatt, 2007).

    As Watt-Cloutier realizes the depth of the suffering ravaging her childhood home, the reader comes to this conclusion alongside her. It hits with the needed impact to provide the emotional connection needed to invest in Watt-Cloutier's viewpoint and ideology. When she learns of a new way that climate change has impacted her people, we as readers are devastated alongside her. This is reflective in a meta way of Watt-Cloutier's strategy of appealing the political elite of the globe to understand the human cost of climate change felt foremost and strongest by Indigenous communities.

Detail - "Details are the canvas on which the book is set; they bring out a richness in the book and create a backdrop to the reading experience" (Wyatt, 2007).

    This book is laden with details both cultural and personal. Many words in Watt-Cloutier's native Inuktitut language are introduced and then used in place of the English the rest of the text is written in. Watt-Cloutier includes information about other Indigenous human rights movements happening concurrently with her tenure in office, such as those by Amazonian Indigenous populations and by Samoans. This adds to the feel of this being a a truly global movement that Watt-Cloutier was a part of, and adds to the gravitational feel of the book. It made it feel like a revolution. Which, of course, is exactly how Watt-Cloutier aimed to frame it.

Three terms that best describe this book:

• Memoir
• Cultural history
• Emotional

Nonfiction Read-alikes:

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013) Braiding sweetgrass. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Common appeals: Indigenous knowledge, environmentalism, human interactions with the environment

The Archipelago of Hope by Gleb Raygorodetsky

Raygorodetsky, G. (2017). The archipelago of hope. New York: Pegasus Books.

Common appeals: Indigenous knowledge, Canadian literature, climate change

Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen

Hansen, J. (2020). Storms of my grandchildren. New York: Bloomsbury.

Common appeals: Climate change, environmentalism, call to action

Fiction Read-alikes:

Yellow Earth by John Sayles

Sayles, J. (2020). Yellow earth. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Common appeals: Community activism, Indigenous land, pollution

The Book of Rain by Thomas Wharton

Wharton, T. (2023). The book of rain. Toronto: Random House Canada.

Common appeals: Pollution, Canadian literature, humans and nature

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Powers, R. (2018) The overstory. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Common appeals: Environmentalism, humans and nature, women activists

References 

Watt-Cloutier, S. (2015). The right to be cold. Toronto: Penguin Canada Books.

Wyatt, N. (2007). The readers' advisory guide to nonfiction. American Library Association.

Week Eleven Prompt Response

Audiobooks and ebooks are really important for broader accessibility. Being able to listen to a book, while of course being convenient on long drives or otherwise on the go, is also amazing for those with low vision. Some of the most avid users of ebooks at my previous branch were senior patrons who needed the flexibility to make the text larger. My library system has a robust collection of ebooks and eaudiobooks on Libby and Hoopla; unfortunately, I feel like we struggle to entice patrons with no natural interest in this medium to give it a try, and I put in a lot of collection development requests for physical copies of books we have digitally. 

I think print books have a kind of hidden appeal factor we don't often talk about; the physical appearance of the book. Books with sprayed edges are super popular right now (see A Fate Inked in Blood, Gothikana, or Sanctuary of the Shadow). The font choice, cover design, and intangible feel of the book can lead someone to pick it up and take it home. Ebooks sacrifice this appeal to gain flexibility. Some patrons in our service area own property locally but travel a lot or move to Florida during the winter, and they will use our Libby from afar while they are out of town. 

The effectiveness of a narrator in an audiobook cannot be overemphasized in terms of appeal. Many of my coworkers have been reading the A Court of Thorns and Roses series. One coworker listened to the dramatized audiobook for all the books, and found herself not enjoying one of the main characters because she found that narrator annoying, and it affected her overall enjoyment of the books. Additionally, I have seen some people in my romantasy Facebook group discussing deleting certain audiobook downloads from their devices without ever listening to them because the narrator was found out to be predatory towards his fans. (Imagine being that author and having someone so beyond your control negatively impact your work!). 

Overall, ebooks and audiobooks are an essential, valued form of reading and storytelling that make reading accessible to more people. Some purists will argue that the only reading that counts is reading a print book, but I couldn't disagree more. 

Book Club Experience

This semester I attended my library system's book club "Books on Tap." This is a more informal book club kind of similar Professor Cataldi's Stout Stories as the meetings take place at restaurants and have a focus on being able to drink recreationally while discussing books. Unlike Stout Stories, Books on Tap does not require or even ask patrons to read a specific book before attending. Rather, patrons (and the librarians who attend) are given a question pertaining to reading to discuss. Librarians bring ARCs that have been sent to the library for patrons to optionally take home. Books on Tap is advertised on my library's website, Facebook, and also via a Facebook group and email mailing list.

When I attended Books on Tap, I invited my best friend. I helped the librarians who regularly run Books on Tap set up, as I was also there to learn how to moderate the club should there ever be an emergency. Those librarians had already arranged with the restaurant for us to have a table in the back of the room, cut off from the main dining area by a partial wall. We spread the ARCs that Collection Development had given us around the table for patrons to look at and choose from when they arrived. Patrons were allowed to take multiple ARCs as we receive so many it is, quite candidly, a great way for us as a library to get use out of the ARCs and also not to accumulate too many. 

Patrons started to arrive. Eventually, the table was completely full. There were probably around 15 patrons, plus myself and the two librarians who usually run Books on Tap. There was a staff member there who was attending as a patron to socialize. All were women. One of the regular librarians gave a small introduction welcoming everyone to Books on Tap and sharing this week's question: "What are your reading goals for the year?" This question was discussed briefly, then patrons quickly transitioned to talking amongst themselves and with staff about what they were reading, ordering food and drinks, and welcoming someone to the group that hadn't attended before.

I talked at length with my best friend and the staff member who had attended on a social level about the book I was currently reading, The Only Good Indians, as she had also read it. I asked those sitting near me if they had to give birth to animal that was not a human, what would it be? (This was because of a plot point in The Only Good Indians and succeeded in amusing those who had read the book, but those who hadn't, like my best friend, were just grossed out. Whoops!). I also talked with those near me about reading preferences, the ARCs that had been brought, and about other things going on in the city. My best friend realized someone in the club knew her mother, and it became a moment of "oh you know this person? So do I!" for all of my best friend's family friends.

Books on Tap had a warm atmosphere and, in many ways, is most aptly characterized as a social club bolstered by a shared love for reading by the participants. I intend this to be read as glowing praise! We are experiencing an epidemic of loneliness in our society and an influx of artificial, stilted connections with others. Ironically, as I'm writing this post, I recall a TikTok I saw this month posted by the user @starsandthecosmos. I could not find the original post as this user posts multiple times a day. Regardless, this user discussed the epidemic of loneliness in our society and how clubs and social gatherings advertising "come here and make friends!" can often fall short of meeting that goal. They framed this as a heightening of expectations and an increased chance for participants to feel like they "failed" if they don't walk away from the experience feeling like they made authentic connections. Rather, an event advertising an activity or shared interest, like Books on Tap, is more successful at creating genuine connections between community members since there is that foundation of shared interest. 

I hope my personal schedule lightens up a bit so I can attend Books on Tap again soon!

Special Topics Paper Summary

I wrote my special topics paper about book influencers. More specifically, I discussed BookTok, since it is undoubtedly the most powerful. I approached the topic from the perspective of a reader and as a wannabe author. I established in my first section that BookTok is a powerful force coveted by publishing houses, but that they are unable to truly replicate. I accredited this to the inability of those trying to sell a product to replicate a user's genuine joy regarding that product. Someone gushing about their favorite book is going to describe it sloppily and not use the "proper terms"; but that makes their review all the more appealing to a layperson. As a librarian, I love Kirkus, but I get book recommendations for books I truly want to read from my friends or those with similar taste to me, not from faceless reviewers I don't actually know. Even if I only "know" these influencers in a parasocial sense.

In my second section I discussed some of the divisions within the BookTok community. For instance, its detractors will try to argue that if someone reads hundreds of books a year and does not remember the fine details, that book either can't have been all that great, or the reader in question is not truly absorbing the content of the book. Personally, I don't think everyone has to read highbrow literary fiction all the time, or come away from each reading experience ready to write a five paragraph essay. I do believe diversity in thought and in voice is important, but I don't think all our recreational time should be spent enriching ourselves. Sometimes I think reading for pleasure is needed and acceptable. Constant self-improvement feels capitalist in a way I don't want it to.

In my third section, I talked about how authors feel pressured to have a presence on BookTok because of its power to catapult an author's career into the stratosphere. In lots of my online writers' groups, people complain about the "unearned" success of authors like Colleen Hoover, Sarah J. Maas, and Tessa Bailey, because these unpublished authors feel their books are better than these famous women's. (Yes, I do find these viewpoints often coming from men critical of romance as a genre, but I did not directly touch on that in my paper as it was anecdotal at best). To that end, I encouraged prospective debut authors not to put all their eggs into one basket and to instead send out lots of ARCs to generate genuine enthusiasm and love for their books.