San Antonio College Library

After retiring from teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favourites, young adult fiction, canonical works she didn't like, guilty pleasures. On Rereading records the surprising, fascinating results of her personal experiment and raises a number of intriguing questions.

Provides a road map for adult readers who want to gain enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading, discussing how different genres should be read to get the most out of them.

This literary biography introduces a Churchill we have not known before. Author Jonathan Rose explores in tandem Churchill's careers as statesman and author, revealing the profound influence of literature and theater on Churchill's personal, carefully composed grand story and on the decisions he made throughout his political life. Rose analyzes Churchill's writings and their reception (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 and was a best-selling...

This survey helps YA librarians who want to freshen up their readers advisory skills, teachers who use novels in the classroom, and adult services librarians who increasingly find themselves addressing the queries of teen patrons.

"Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Fueled by Oprah's Book Club, Miramax film adaptations, superstore bookshops, and new technologies such as the Kindle digital...

In a prolific life of singular literary achievement, Larry McMurtry has succeeded in a variety of genres: in coming-of-age novels like The Last Picture Show; in collections of essays like In a Narrow Grave; and in the reinvention of the Western on a grand scale in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove. Now, in Books: A Memoir, McMurtry writes about his endless passion for books: as a boy growing up in a largely "bookless" world; as a young...

The author analyzes how the reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin, changed over its first fifty years. It was extremely popular when it came out, fueling the abolitionist cause. After the war, however, views on the novel began to change, and by the 1890s and the Jim Crow era, it was regarded differently. Illustrations and abridged versions of the text began to change in ways that de-emphasized the intelligence, literacy, and empathetic qualities of the black...

"Despite dire predictions in the late twentieth century that public libraries would not survive the turn of the millennium, their numbers have only increased. Two of three Americans frequent a public library at least once a year, and nearly that many are registered borrowers. Although library authorities have argued that the public library functions primarily as a civic institution necessary for maintaining democracy, generations of library patrons...