One of my favorite stories is in Linda Greenlaw's The Lobster Chronicles. In it, she relates how her family, living on an island, kept careful watch on her mum's pile of books, because when the pile got low it was time to head for the mainland! Thanks be for the good folk who dedicate their professional talents to the likes of the Fiction Core Collection, formerly the Fiction Catalog. If you don't know what you want to read next, this could keep you busy for years! More than 11,300 titles are included, with excerpts from book reviewing sources such as the New York Times, Library Journal, Booklist, The New Yorker and more. The editors are from large public libraries, including Enoch Pratt, Seattle Public and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, so certainly appropriate expertise was at work here.
Because cataloguing fiction is a relatively recent practice (Wilson et al., 2000), anything that helps the reader or collection developer find core fiction titles is helpful. The title/subject index to this 1,300‐page book is almost 300 pages. The easy subjects are the geographical, the physical, and the concrete things like child abuse, brothers, wolves, and robots. The harder books that the Fiction Core Collection helps locate are fictional accounts of the abstract: things like identity, humor, and bereavement.
It brought a smile to my face to see some old classics, such as the Georgette Heyer Regency romances and the wonderful mysteries by Dame Ngaio Marsh. The classics such as Dickens, Tolstoy, and Hawthorne are well represented. All of my favorite mystery writers are present and most of my favorite titles are there.
There are, however, disappointments. I was a little surprised that neither of the great novels about the explosion that wiped out a third of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917 (Barometer Rising and Burden of Desire) were included. Burden of Desire is at more than 1,000 libraries, more than some other titles included, and it is a great yarn. There is no description of the process used to determine inclusion, and no process would have been completely up to the very difficult task. There are also, as there are bound to be, mistakes. An atmospheric legal story set in Toronto is indexed under Mysteries – England instead of Mysteries – Canada. Developing a core collection is by nature a subjective process, and the librarian can always consult other sources such as the Reader's Advisor Online (review forthcoming), Librarything (RR 2007/357), and the multitude of booklists that proliferate everywhere. It is, however, useful to have a baseline kind of tool to study your library's fiction collection and this seems like a good one.
The diverse needs of the reading public are going to be determined by the locale, of course, but studying different diverse audiences, I found some gaps. I studied “best books lists” from a multitude of sources, studying books of interest to GLBT, Hispanic, African‐American, and Jewish readers and found gaps. Librarians using this tool might want to consult bibliographic essays focusing on the minorities in their particular reading public and others to have a well rounded collection.
The cost of it might be prohibitive for some libraries, but every library could use this to find possible additions – some new items and also, perhaps, a way to check on some classics that may have disappeared over the years and never have been replaced. Recommended.
