Author Interview and Giveaway: Rachelle Rogers Knight discusses Read, Remember, Recommend for Teens

I'm today's stop on Rachelle Rogers Knight's Traveling to Teens tour for her new reading journal, READ, REMEMBER, RECOMMEND FOR TEENS. I shared my impressions of the journal earlier today, and now I welcome Rachelle for an interview.

Your reading journal places a lot of focus on award winners. Do award lists help you yourself select what to read?
I am very picky about what I read, and because I have limited time to devote to reading I feel strongly about reading really 'good stuff'. I love the awards lists - because the highest literary critics and academics in the land have spent countless hours pouring over the latest books to find the "best". This saves the rest of us readers from having to pour over the same books - we get to go right to the cream of the crop and read the best.

Not only do I like the award lists, but I think the finalist lists for those same awards are equally if not more important as a source of reading recommendations. It is hard to conceive of just one 'best' and the finalist lists offer more of a great thing. When I go back over my reading, I have read more of the finalists than the actual winners in some cases.

What resources (other than awards lists) do you use to find book recommendations? Are book blogs important to you? What do you look for in a book blog?
I get recommendations from a myriad of sources including newspaper reviews, online reviews, magazine articles and book blogs. When choosing blogs for my own personal reading, I look for blogs with similar tastes to mine with quality reviews that don't give away too much of the story.

Now that you've been getting user feedback on the journal, is there anything you'd do differently in an updated edition?
I think we may try and increase the number of pages in some of the sections. This is more of a publishing concern, but it is something I will definitely chat with Sourcebooks (my publisher) about. It is a hard balance to include the lists I wanted to include as well as all of the other sections - but not make it too large.

You seem like a very organized person. Is there an any area of your life is chaotic at all?
I wish I could be as organized in every other part of my life as with my books.
My reading life is very important to me - my means of escape at the end of each day. I think it's the one area I feel I have complete control. When I created the fiction journal, it was just for me - I needed some way of keeping this very important pastime organizing, because I didn't want to waste a single, precious minute of my few hours of reading searching for a list or a good recommendation.

Thanks Rachelle! Rachelle has a giveaway of one copy of her journal especially for Presenting Lenore readers. Please follow this link to enter! I'm not sure if this is for international readers as well, but go ahead and enter. Giveaway closes on May 21, 2010.

Find out more about the book at http://www.bibliobabe.com/.