Request and poll aftermath (cute)

[mrissa]

First, I'm going to copy a request from a friend who is a librarian. This person has a patron who wants books (preferably good ones) with the following characteristics

Comments

[mrissa]

Well, what do you tell them? If this is a familiar question? Or are you saying there just isn't stuff to tell them?

I think part of the problem is that those of us who don't have the same limitations are not thinking of books that way. I can't tell you whether most of the books I've read recently contained the word "damn," for example. I feel sure that someone with this set of sensibilities would notice it strongly, but I just don't, and that makes it much harder to pick out what might lack it.

[mrissa]

Right, your job is to deal with the patrons, not to select the patrons you wish you could have. Which is why I posted this to try to help my friend out: he's doing his job, and it's a hard one, and driving people away from the library is likely not to help the things that he or I believe in related to his job.

I think that anyone who gets upset reading the generic warning labels is probably going to be best served by a sectarian institution rather than a secular public library. (Although there was sex, violence, romance, and swearing in my parents' church library.) But as you say, you want to keep your job.

[mamapduck]

There's been an upswing in Christian romances. While some people mock them, I read a couple and frankly, there's something charming about a romance in which people do not engage in premarital sex. They actually focus on... well, *romance* instead of lust. Sometimes I want a good love storey, not a literary booty call.