21st Century Literature discussion

This article about Ursula K. LeGuin was in the NY Times today -- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/boo.... I subscribe to The Library of America offerings (I have them all) and was quite please to receive the first volume of Le Guin's work last month. Reading the article reminded me of some of our discussions on what books are literary and whether books that fall in a specific genre can be considered literary.

Before this gets fired up again, I'm going to post to some links where the whole "literary versus genre" thing has been discussed before. A lot.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I did not intend to restart that conversation! I was just pleased to see Le Guin getting recognized! The LOA has published books by other authors that write in a genre but whose body of work is noteworthy, e.g., Elmore Leonard & Ross Macdonald.

Note that Goodreads seems to have two sites for Ursula K. LeGuin and Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm going to ask the librarians to collapse them. (The list of publications was too short when I checked the one @1, besides it didn't have her photo, which seemed highly unlikely to me.)

Oh, I know you weren't trying to fan the flames, Linda, but I thought I'd throw some water down just in case. Thanks for posting the article, I love LeGuin.

Lily, I have come across authors under slightly different names before as well. How do you contact the librarians to get them merged?

Whitney wrote: "Lily, I have come across authors under slightly different names before as well. How do you contact the librarians to get them merged? ..."

There are four sort of Goodreads background groups where I find it useful to keep a membership, even though I don't visit them often:

https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/220 GR Librarians
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/1 GR Feedback
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... Mod Support
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/185 Name of that book?

The first one, the Goodreads Librarians Group, is the one I use to report problems like missing books, authors that need merging, missing or incorrect author names. I don't try to be a librarian -- I'm not interested in learning what they have to know. But for most of the problems I encounter, I make a new entry under "Book Issues" (but not GR author profiles needing merging -- that may be okay, it may be specialized, I'm not sure). I select for an email response so I can return readily and see how it was handled. The response is usually terse, but I do generally respond with a short "Thanks." The librarians do a lot of good work for all of us.

Thx for asking, Whitney!

(Incidentally, this is one [rare] time that I'm needing to follow-up a second time. Usually a request to combine leads to a redirect to the "correct" name, since the other(s) may already be embedded in Goodreads text. That didn't happen today. Will see if my response takes care of it or if I may need to re-post or whether the nature of combine 'fixes' has changed. This is an example of why I don't want to be a librarian myself -- all those little rules matter.)

In my experience the Librarians are very helpful - I have reported a few issues with page counts and missing covers and they normally get fixed very quickly, whereas reporting bugs to the Feedback group very rarely achieves anything.

Hugh wrote: "In my experience the Librarians are very helpful - I have reported a few issues with page counts and missing covers and they normally get fixed very quickly, whereas reporting bugs to the Feedback ..."

Agree completely, Hugh! Feedback is, for me, not a place to get things done, but occasionally to see about what colleagues are frustrated! :-(

Thanks!