 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is a commission's weekly online event. We are called a webinar, a webcast, an online show. The word, I don't know, the terminology is up for debate. But whatever we are, we're here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record all of our shows. So you can always go to our website whenever you like and see the recordings of all of our shows going back to January 2009 when we first started Encompass Live. So we're in what that makes our seventh year. It's a long time. Eight. Whoa, really? That can't be right. Yeah, we're just starting our eighth year. Gosh. Oh, wow. OK, that's longer than I thought. And we're still going strong. Wow. We do make sure things here on the show, presentations, interviews, mini training sessions, training sessions, book review sessions. Basically anything library related, we're happy to have on the show, which is probably a reason of our longevity. You do something in the library, we'll share about it. And we bring in guest speakers sometimes, but we also sometimes have library commission staff. And that's what we have this morning. With me today is Debra Dracos and Susan Isley are both from the Library Commission. And our topic today is writing the range from your armchair, which just looking at the title, you might not know what that means, but it's book reviews, book discussion about Westerns. So we're continuing a theme started by our continuing education coordinator, Laura Johnson, who's now retired. Yes, she retired last month. She's left us. She retired last month. But she thought it was very important to talk about books every once in a while. And sometimes we've talked about specific genres. Sometimes we've just talked about, you know, hot reads, what's going on right now. But this particular time we chose to talk about Westerns. And I actually read the Westerns, which are not my usual genre. And Susan did research on what constitutes a Western and some of the resources that you can use to find some new ones. So. OK, I need to hang on. I might need to. There we go. Nice. OK, so. Normally, when you're talking with a patron about what they are looking for as far as reading goes, when you're doing your readers advisory interview, you ask about things like, well, what did you like in the book? Was it the setting? Was it the time period? What was the, you know, were there certain appeals? And sometimes people when they think Westerns think, well, Westerns are all the same. But actually, that's not true. It's like any other genre. There are different subcategories, basically. So for the setting, did you want to talk about? Well, it's interesting as you read information about the genre. You see some sort of what's what's the standard understanding, but then it always expands from there. So oftentimes articles will reference Westerns as being from after the Civil War until early 20th century. You have people who think that the frontier closed in 1890. So that's a cutoff that some people use. You also see people talking a lot about how the Western really started out the roots of the West were James Fenningmore Cooper and his leather stocking tales. And those, of course, start in upstate New York. And the frontier back then was anything West of. West of New York? West of New York, you know, anything West of the Appalachians. So, you know, you have Ohio, Kentucky back then, that was the frontier. So it really depends on what your patron is interested in. Do they really want what's their definition of the West? And is that the most important part of the book for them? Are they more interested in people going out into uncharted territory, or do they really want something set in Wyoming or Texas? So, you know, when you're looking for books for the patron, that makes a difference. You can often look for books set in particular states. If they're not particular, you can have Westerns that are set in Western Canada. You can have Westerns that are set in Alaska, Alaska, that crossover into Mexico, Arizona. Definitely, you know, West can be anything, probably West of Eastern Seaboard. So, again, you know, what is it about the setting? What is their definition of a Western setting that appeals to them? So that's open to interpretation. Right. And as far as the time goes, Susan mentioned, you know, the sort of after the Civil War, but you know, maybe cut off on the 1890s. The Western writers of America website, when they're handing out awards, actually defines their traditional or historical Westerns as anything that where the story takes place pre-1940, and then anything after 1940 is a contemporary Western story. So they do acknowledge the contemporary time period too. And there's actually another organization that is called Western Fictioneers. They're a professional writing group. They didn't establish themselves until 2010, that they offer something called a Peacemaker Award. And they're very specific about their time period. They will only, the only titles that are eligible for awards are those that are 50%, at least 50% of the story has to be set between 1830 and 1920. So that's their definition. And they do promote themselves as wanting to focus attention on what they call the traditional Western. And so they've got a very narrowly defined time period. So the appeal of a Western, I think... This is basically why do people like Westerns? What is it about the Western that they like? And lots of times it's the good always, the white hats always win, right? Go to a Western movie and the white hats always win. The good guy wins. There's some kind of justice usually at the end. Often the hero is somewhat of a loner, can be somewhat of a loner. They're struggling against something. And another person or against the nature, whatever's going on, sort of survivalist type thing. And sometimes, well, in a large number of them that I read too, it's, they're trying to bring in some kind of civilizing influence. But on the other hand, they still want to be independent. The independent rugged person who can make it on their own if they need to. Well, again, it really runs the gamut. I think with the traditional Western, you get lots of, when people are writing about the genre, they talk about some people like Westerns because they feel a real connection to the land. And so those people might really think of the Western as being set, they might think about where they grew up, their childhood, where they grown up in Wyoming or Montana or on a farm or in Texas. So for them, the appeal might be a certain type of landscape or way of life that they have some connection to. So it's a nostalgia for a past time. There's also sort of that, again, that nostalgic instinct where there's clear cut good guys and bad guys, men were men and women were women. You didn't really have a lot of ambiguity or exploration of, didn't really like question the boundaries as much. And so, you've got books that appeal to patrons who are looking for that type of material. I think once you get into more literary Westerns, you get, Deborah mentioned the lone hero, a lone in the wilderness, good guys, bad guys. I think sometimes in the literary Westerns, you get more of that sort of exploration, that existential angst or the moral ambiguity questioning those kinds of issues. And so those might appeal to people who aren't necessarily interested in Westerns per se, but are more interested in that sort of human condition. They're looking more for the character-driven plot as opposed to action or character-driven stories. Right, a Western that you might be able to interest one of those types of readers and might not be the same type of Western that you interest someone who has that more nostalgic. You know, viewpoint or that little bit more conservative or, you know, as far as crossovers, some of the material that I read talked about, you might even be able to interest people in what are considered gentle reads set in a Western setting. And again, it's sort of a nostalgic view of life. Yeah. And, you know, there are many romances that take place in the West. And some vendors are marking them as Western stories. Well, depending on your patron, they might not really be interested in that romantic twist to the story. They may be looking for something else. So, is there anything else we wanted to talk about here? Do you want to go to Novelist? Well, I think what we kind of wanted to do at this point before we started talking about specific books is jump to Novelist, which is a resource that we now have statewide access to in Nebraska. And talk a little bit about how you can use a resource like that to familiarize yourself with a genre like Westerns, how you can use that to connect your patrons to books they might be interested in. And the first thing I wanted to show you in Novelist is what they call a keeping up page for the Western genre. So, I'm going to just jump to that page here. And this page brings together many lists and articles that Novelist staff have compiled about the Westerns. And so, if you're trying to brush up on your knowledge of Westerns, this is a great place to start. It's also a great place to go if you're wanting to do some collection development or develop reading lists or book displays and you need some ideas. So, you'll always get background information on the genre. And you'll see, they're going to talk about classic Westerns versus modern Westerns. You've got reading lists that focus on particular archetypes in the genre. So, outlaws and gunslingers, Western short stories, and then there's a really fun list that lists titles that they consider weird Wild West stories. And so, that actually sort of blends with other genres like sometimes steampunk. There are some Westerns that have zombies in them, et cetera. So, you can really have a lot of fun with this genre in terms of bringing users that might not, readers that might not normally like Western genre as sort of into it. You can sort of, there's sort of a, some crossover potential here. I do want to just pull up a couple of these articles so you can see the type of material that you can get in Novelist. There are usually introductory articles on specific genres. And so, these answer the kinds of questions that Devran and I started up talking about what are Westerns, what happens, why do people like them. They'll always give you some key titles, some key authors, and some tips on helping Western fans. And this particular article does mention awards that are given specifically to Westerns. So, if you want to look at those award lists, that's a way then to get some ideas for titles to either add to your collection or recommend a catering. So, finding awards that are genre specific is a useful way to get title ideas. I also just want to show you a couple of these articles. They will talk about specific types of Westerns. And the nice thing about these articles is they will always have title suggestions within them. So, again, every page you go to, you'll get more and more title suggestions. So, you know, you can really get ideas for collection development for titleists that you might want to hand out to your patrons. If you scroll down, you'll have more title suggestions on this page. You'll even have a handout or a small poster that you can print out and put up to give your readers some ideas and titles they might be interested in, so they've got those pre-made. And then, they're also on the main novelist page. You've got recommended reading lists over on the left. And by default, we're looking at adult fiction, recommended reads lists, and you've got the Western category. So, you have everything from classic Westerns to the weird Wild West that I talked about. So, we'll just go ahead and pull up the weird Wild West. These are actually reading lists that you can print out and hand out to your patrons. I'm trying to see, I think, I don't remember which one of these is the zombie one, but one of these is the actual zombie one. So, you can, I'm gonna change how this is displayed, so we get a little brief description for each title. And then, if you were wanting to print that out, so you could hand it to patrons, have them look at it, and share with you what they might be interested in. You can have a nice clean print out to hand out to patrons who are interested in. Maybe Westerns with a twist. Also, to the right, you'll always have additional links to articles and title lists. And I believe, having trouble reading the text small, but if I'm remembering right, this particular article talks about Westerns written in the 50s and 60s, which is kind of considered the heyday. And they actually have a bookmark, a pre-made bookmark that you can print out that has titles and descriptions for your patrons. So again, another way to get some ideas of books is to promote to your patrons and a handout that you can give them to take home. So, tools like novelists are really helpful when you are working with genres, particularly those you're not comfortable with. I'm gonna just do one search before we get started talking about specific books. In this particular database, they do a lot with genre headings, and they have a genre heading that they don't, I would say that there are some books in here that would be of interest to people who are interested in Westerns, there's a few that don't have this genre heading associated with it, but by and large, the sort of universal genre heading they use for Westerns is Western stories. And there are other ways to actually do this genre search, but I'm just typing in the field code, G-N, capitalized, and then because my genre heading is more than one word, I do have to put quotation marks around it. So I just do a search for genre Western stories. I get over 6,000 titles. And I think it's interesting, the first one that comes up is something that would probably be considered pretty atypical. It's Seth McFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West, which of course was a movie. So that's gonna be not something that's of interest to people who are fans of traditional Westerns, but right away it's- It'll fit into that weird category, right? Because it's something- It shows you some of the variability in the collection. What I really wanna show you though is because 6,000 titles is too many to go through, it's really nice you've got these limit options over on the left. So I can pop this open and you can see other genres that are associated with the titles in this list. And so you can kind of look through these with your patron or based on what your patron said about the material they like, you can book. Are they interested in literary fiction? Books to Movies is a nice subcategory because that might help you with promoting material or capitalizing on current interest. I know right now in the theaters you've got Revenant and the hateful aid are in the theaters and so you've got people who are gonna be seeing those movies and you might be able to interest them in some similar Western stories. So that's a way to kind of drum up some leadership. Mystery stories, so there are books that are both Westerns and mystery stories. So if your patrons seems to be interested in that problem solving mystery, solving aspect of books, that would be a way to limit your search. You can also look at subject headings associated with Westerns and you've got everything from outlaws to ranch life, to ranchers, revenge, small town life. So again, based on what they're really interested in you can narrow that 6,000 plus search to something that meets their interests. So we just wanted to talk a little bit about that as a way to zero in on people's areas of interest before we turn it back to Debra and she's gonna talk about some specific titles that she's read and that to me get back there for you. Okay, and before I talk about specific books too I just wanted to, I threw in a few slides here to show what variety there is. A hero or actually any character in the story could be a cowhunter, a gunfighter, a mountain man, could be a law man of some sort, a prospector. There's just a variety. On the villain side, you'll notice that some of these headings are the same as the last one. They can be good guys or bad guys but here you also have your power hungry men who are out to grab the land or run off the sheepherders or whatever. In addition to those type of characters that your patrons might be looking for you also have the women, okay? So if we're talking traditional Western normally the women aren't the main characters but I found it amusing actually how many of the books that were written within the last few years that I read, one of the characters is an unfaithful life. It's just, okay, were they really that way back then or is this modern events being put into the past? But you had your heroes who revered their mothers or had a sister who needed to be avenged or wound up with a mentally unstable daughter or wife that a plot line went down that way. The Pretty School Marm, one of the very first popular Western Westerns was The Reginian written by Ellen Wister and it started the flood of Western books that were written and he wrote about Cowboy and The Pretty School Marm. Well that was rather a romanticized view of the West, okay? So the very first book that I am going to talk about is called Log of a Cowboy, a Narrative of the Old Trail Days by Andy Adams. This book has often been mistaken for a nonfiction work because he really was a cowboy and he did herd cattle from Texas up to Montana. He had experience in doing that but for this book he did actually fictionalize not only his experiences but experiences that other Cowboys told him about. He wrote it in response to The Reginian but unfortunately it is the only book he ever wrote. If someone is really interested in what was it really like at that time? What are some of the things that really happened when they were herding cattle? This is an excellent book. It's widely available in e-book format and you can still buy a copy of it to a paper copy of it also. I found it really interesting. You'll find in all the different westerns no matter when they were written that the authors often try to have the characters speak in the vernacular of that time and some do a better job than others. Since this one was written in 1903 by a gentleman who actually rode the range I think his is a pretty accurate portrayal of how people actually spoke at that time too. And for this particular book the action takes place on the trail from Mexico from that real grand area in Texas. They bring the herd of cattle across from Mexico and then drive it all the way to the Blackfoot Reservation up in Northwest Montana because the boss has a government contract to supply beef to the Indians. It'd be very interesting to compare that to the writing and like this is vernacular of other stories who are obviously someone who didn't actually experience it. Right. See how close they come. This is another story. The Flying New Ranch by B. M. Bauer that was actually written more contemporaneous to the time. It was written in 1914. Mrs. Bauer actually is a woman. She did write or publish using her initials because the publishers refused to allow their buyers, the readers to know that these books were written by a woman, heaven forbid. Anyway, scandalous, yes. Bauer did actually live on a ranch in Montana during the 1890s and into the early 1900s. She, when the first, she wrote short stories to begin with and sold them to the popular magazines. And then she did get a contract with a publisher to write full length stories. She did have a cowboy who lived on the ranch help her with her writing. He was also a writer, he was starting to write. And so she helped him and he helped her. He verified her facts basically on what life was really like for the cowboys. This book in particular is one of three that take place on the Flying New Ranch which is in Montana. It's, I would call, I thought folksy. It was my first thought when I read this book. It is generally covers day to day life on a ranch. The plot is that sheep ranchers moved in next door, bought up property and it's a battle between, okay, do we let you run your sheep that tear up the land muddy up our water into our water hole or not, okay. In novelists, I just wanted to point out, well, there are a couple of things I wanted to point out, but one of the things I wanted to point out, Susan pulled a list for me for each of these books and I thought folksy, they say it's a taste. And I thought that, yeah, I thought that sort of amusing, but I have to say, Mrs. Bauer says that the cowboys curse, but she doesn't say the actual words that they use. So I guess you would call it taste. She would go that far, yeah. It's time I could build, but with some limitation. Right, right, yes. It's right, so I like so. Yeah, okay, yep, yep. She definitely does. So again, if you really, if you wanna have a good, sort of an overview of what ranch life was like, written by a person who actually lived on a ranch back in the 1890s, early 1900s, and isn't looking for a lot of action, actually. This is a really good book. Okay, we're going to go back to the library here. Okay, next, oh, and I also wanted to say, for this particular book, the University of Nebraska Press has reprinted it, but it is also available as an e-book from several different publishers. So, okay, the next one that I wanna talk about, and I'm sort of stuck on Montana writers, because I know them a little bit better, because I lived in Montana for a while, and Dorothy M. Johnson wrote some really classic stories that were made into movies. The main one being the van who shot, and I'll say it the Hollywood way, Liberty Balance. I actually heard her on the Missoula radio station in the University of Montana radio station before she died back in the 80s, and she said, well, they never asked me, but that's not how he pronounces last name. So, they wrote this song and made this movie and said, Liberty Balance, but no, it was Liberty, the Lance. Somebody should remake it. Hollywood. Yeah, yeah. Johnson's works were more gritty, and actually, the man who shot Liberty Balance softened the story by quite a bit. So, if you want, if you have someone who wants a bit more gritty, good versus evil, somebody, a man who really regrets something he did and feels guilty for the rest of his life, that type of a story, I would suggest her works. There are actually, three of these are actually short stories, and one is a novella, and it is available in this combined format now for purchase, so. So, that's another type of story that your patrons might be looking for. Okay, if you remember Mrs. Bauer, she was really popular back in the early 1900s, and many Western writers actually were very influenced by her work, including TV Olsen, who was actually a theater, this is not another, initials hiding a woman, and I had read that he was really influenced by her, and then I read this book that he wrote called Kino, and I was sort of surprised, because while I call the Flying New Ranch folksy, this is very definitely gritty, and you have a main character who has had a very hard life, the man who raised him since he was two years old beat him regularly until Kino got old enough and big enough to fight back, but he's gotten a message from his foster father to come meet him in sort of a desert remote area to run a con with some other guys. They are actually going to, planning on stealing money from a cattle rancher, a powerful man in the area, who is actually stealing money from the government and the Indians because he's mining gold on reservation property, okay? But Kino still has a sense of right and wrong, and he fights in justice, I guess you would say, but it's just a very gritty life, okay? I found it, so comparing it to the Bauer book, I found it really interesting. Let me see what's there. Okay, so moving, oops, I hit it one too many times. Moving on, okay, Louis the Moor, very, very, very, very popular. So I debated about whether talking about him, but he remained popular, and a lot of current writers use the same basic themes and settings that Louis the Moor does. He did tend to write sort of what I would call family sagas. He had his Thackett series, for example, where he followed the, had a story about the father and then a number of the sons and then other things happened, et cetera. The one that I picked to talk about today called Thackett is about one of the sons named William Tell Thackett or Tell for Short, okay? He has been a roamer. He's at the beginning of the story, he was working as a cow puncher and he's ready to move on. His brothers have married and settled down and he's thinking about that too. He's been wandering around the West for a while now and he's sort of thinking about finding somebody, a woman, a good woman to marry and settling down on a ranch and having kids himself. But on his way to, from Montana or up north, to his brother's place down in Colorado, he happens to come across a gold mine. Lots of prospecting in some of these books. And some of the themes in this book are greed, of course. And I would say family loyalty, but also this is one where the main character is very independent and self-sufficient. At one point he gets caught in a cave, out in an uninhabited valley and there's a really big ice storm and then a snow storm on top of it. And he needs, he doesn't have enough food to last out the winter if he does get caught here and his horses, mules are sort of stuck. He can't get food to them. So he actually makes himself snowshoes so that he can move around. So very self-sufficient. It's very respectful of women and it's very quick read. And I think that's one thing that might appeal to traditional Western readers. The books often tend to be fairly short and if you're listening to the audio version, which I did several, for several of these titles, they take less than five hours, generally, somewhere between four and a half and five hours. Oops, and before I go there, I'm sorry, I was going to go to the, show you the novelist page just to show you that if you are looking for, looking for, if somebody does want a Louis Lamour type book, okay, in novelists, you do have the read-alikes. James Mitchner is another one that I think of as writing sort of like sagas. Wouldn't be short. Wouldn't be short. No. You understand what I like about that. Yeah, Louis Lamour. Yeah, Elton, gosh, Elmer Kelton, have a hard time with his name, is another one who's fairly popular, but wrote some years ago and is sort of the loner out on his own. William Johnstone, whom I'll talk about at one of his books. I think you hover over those in electric telly. Oh, sorry, let me just hover here a second. It will actually tell you what the similarities are. For example, Plot Driven, Western Stories, Outlaws, so you can kind of get a sense, is this the overlap in the area that is interesting, the patron? Right, yeah, and of course, tell has to battle outlaws who want to take his gold, the, yeah, that he found, so. So, yeah, we have a variety of read-alikes down here, but if they do want, if they wanted the family sagas, you can specify which parts they liked about this book and then do another search, too. So, yeah, there's some of that. The gunfights aren't actually, stand on the street and shoot them out, gunslinger type thing, but there are some fights, yeah. So, so that's that. Louis Lamour, okay, so then we go on to William Johnstone, and I decided to go ahead and talk about Johnstone because I think his writing is very similar to Louis Lamour and he is still writing, even though he is getting out there in years, he is still writing, and he sometimes writes with his nephew, J.A. Johnstone. He also follows what he calls a family, the Jensen family. They're actually three men that have sort of formed their own family. They're not biologically related, but this particular book, The Hard Ride to Hell, is longer than a Louis Lamour book, but that's because, and I have to admit, I didn't go back and look through other family Jensen books just to see if he follows the same format, but in this one, he gives each of the three men a story before they then come together to solve the big final problem. So it turns into a bit of a longer book. In this particular one, preacher is visiting an Indian chief that he knows and the Indian encampment is raided and the chief's daughter and grandson are kidnapped. So he sends for Matt and Smoke, the two boys, to come and help him. Well, Matt, sorry, Smoke is dealing with rustlers, so he has that to solve before he can head off to help the preacher and Matt is helping the station agent at another place to deal with some stagecoach robbers. So you have multiple different, yeah, there's always something going on. But again, you've got the men who roam, which basically, preacher is a mountain man, that's how he describes himself, that's how he's described in the book. Matt roams around doing jobs here and there in someplace else. He'll work as a cow puncher and sometimes he'll do something like help, stop, stage robbers. Smoke has a vow, he married a school teacher and has his own ranch. So there's a bit of a variety there. There is action in this story. So I think people would enjoy that one. Okay, for something just a little bit different, Blue-Eyed Devil by Robert E. Parker. Unfortunately, Parker has died, but the series is being continued by Robert Knot. In this one, there are two men. So I don't know that just say necessarily that one is the main character and the other one's a sidekick. Although one tends to speak for the other because one sort of doesn't talk a lot. Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. Sometimes in some books they're lawmen and sometimes they're pseudo-lawmen. They're fighting for the right thing when the local sheriff or whatever is not doing his job. So they switch back and forth. But when I read this one, which was written by Robert E. Parker, what really struck me was the dry humor in it. If you ever saw the movie Silverado, it reminded me of that one. A lot of stuff is sort of tongue-in-cheek, you know? But it's humorous. Most of it, usually the action takes place in a town where they're trying to solve some kind of problem. Whether you've got people who are taking advantage of other people or people who are trying to steal from other people or whatever's going on. So it's again a very quick read. I did look at one of the books that was written by Robert Knott and while the characters are still there, they're still doing the same types of things and there wasn't quite as much of the same humor. So that changes a little bit, but they're still off having adventures. And I think, sorry, looking at my notes here, I was going to go to the novelist. I lost my pointer there for a second. Here we go. Okay, on this particular one, they point to different books for read-alikes variety. It is very fast-paced. This one they say gritty and I would agree with that to an extent. It's not as gritty as quinoe, but it's more, they're more, they're hard men basically, okay? And yeah, it's witty. They say things that are humorous and yeah, this one had the police misconduct. So moving on. And if anyone has any titles or authors that they want to contribute as being similar or being that people might like for the same style, please feel free to send them in too, okay? And I, we'll get this right here sooner or later. One at a time. But the next title I was going to talk about is Tenbow by Matt Brown. We're back with the law-type character, but in this particular case, the main character is a private investigator. He did it one time. He worked very briefly for the US Marshals and he also worked as a detective for different banks and railroads. But at this time, he is working on his own as a private investigator. And he's been hired to find out who is killing ranchers in the Tenbow Valley of Wyoming. He does work as a track, as a tracker. He's trying to, he goes to the places where the shootings have occurred and he finds where the sniper basically because the killer is shooting over a very long distance where the sniper actually was while he, where he waited and then where he shot the person. And he tracks, he follows the forensic evidence, I guess you would say. So I found it interesting. He took on different characters at one point. He took on the character of a gambler and then he went out to a ranch and posed as a horse breaker. And he could fit into a variety of different fields. He could do different things while he was trying to gather this information. And he does solve at the end who the perpetrator was. And this is one of those books where the wife was unfaithful to the husband. That's part of the main plot line. I guess that's mostly what I was gonna say about this one. Okay, Rough Justice by Lyle Brand. This was written within the past couple years that this is actually number two in the Gideon Rider series. Gideon Rider has been hired by the Secret Service. Again, he was a US Marshal, but because of a scandal he got kicked out. This takes place just after the Civil War and the Secret Service in relation to the stories has just been established. Gideon is out in Texas and he has been assigned different jobs, problems that are going on that need to be solved. In the first book, he handles pirates and smugglers. In this particular book, Rough Justice, he is trying to find out what he can about the KRS, the Knights of the Rising Sun. Think Klu Klux Klan, basically. There is a contingent in Texas that doesn't want to accept that they lost, the South lost the Civil War, that the African-Americans are now not allowed to be held in slavery. They go after people who are trying to set up schools and help the freed men in Texas and Gideon is trying to find out who's the head of the organization in Texas and whether they are actually trying to raise up, put in motion a rebellion and send in motion another war, basically. So he has to handle those guys. The next one is Black Justice by Jason Elder. This is part of the Outcast series and again it's number two. This one's a little bit different in that there is a group of men that is traveling together towards California and along the way they keep running into incidents where they help out, okay? And they're called the Outcasts because for one reason or another, they can't go back home and other people don't really want them around, okay? Okay, so in this particular one, they've stopped in a town for a couple days to eat and replenish their supplies, et cetera, but they run into trouble. One of them is actually bitten by a snake, a rattlesnake, as he's trying to get away from the sheriff because he cuckolded the sheriff. That's why that guy doesn't like him, yeah. Yep, so he's hiding out and in the process of hiding out, he sees a murder occur for which a black man is arrested and tried and going to be hung, okay? But he doesn't want to go to the sheriff and say, hey, I saw this murder occur and I know that it wasn't done by this particular man. So the others in the group try to figure out who actually did murder the guy. And so it is mystery. Several of these you'll notice do have very much a mystery theme. Something occurs and someone is trying to figure out who did it, why did it happen, et cetera. So that's another book that has certain things to it. Let it bleed. I put this one in. I was trying to do something of a variety. This is part of a series, Gunsmith. His nickname is Gunsmith, his real name is Clint Adams. There are a number of books written about that J.R. Roberts has written about him. And in each one he has a different adventure. This particular series is a bit more graphic in its description of the interactions between men and men. It shows bumbling police and power hungry politicians. But as a twist, there's a journalist from Boston who's been following a serial killer across the country. And now this serial killer is an Abilene. So the journalist has talked the Gunsmith into partnering with him to try to track down this man who's been killing women everywhere he goes. When I read this, what I thought of in comparison is a TV series, okay? I should see, it does have the subject on the cover of the All Action Western series. Yeah, well, in this particular one was quite so much action, but the story moved along really fast because every chapter was only about two and a half pages long. So you jump from scene to scene to scene to scene, just like in a TV, you know, an episode of a TV series. What is the 397, is that how many are in the series? No, that's how many he has written, but I could not find that there are actually 397 that are particularly focused on the Gunsmith. So, yeah, that was a little strange. The other thing about this cover is none of the illustrations really portray exactly what happened to the story. So you can't go by the cover necessarily. It's a little license with their advertising there. Right, right. So far I've talked about mainly what are considered sort of traditional stories. They take place in the late 1800s. There usually is some kind of action, good trying to overcome evil. Some are gritty, some aren't, but they are more fictionalized characters, okay? So someone here did actually comment and say Gunsmith is very popular in her library. Yeah, so. Yeah, I imagine so. Whoops. On the other side of what I've been talking about are the more literary and what some people have defined, what the Western writers of America have defined as historical westerns, okay? Where in this particular title, The Last Kind Words Saloon, Lurie McMurtry does a fictionalized version of, sorry, I just lost the words on it, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday and the shootout at The Last Corral is at the very end, okay? Charles Goodnight, a famous cowboy down in Texas is in there. They bring in an English peer who plans on building this big castle down in the Southwest, which actually happens sometimes. So in your historical westerns, you have actual people who lived historical real people, historical real events and things of that nature, okay? Lurie McMurtry also writes at a different literary level, I guess you would say. But on the other hand, as Susan mentioned earlier, sometimes you've got those books where it's more, they're looking at the internal, sometimes internal angst of which way you go and on a particular issue and it's more character driven. There was action in this story, however, there is very, it's very gritty. Many of the characters are very dysfunctional. There's wife abuse. There's very graphic descriptions of torture by Indians. He doesn't totally stick to the facts. He imagines, yes, he takes literary license. He imagines what has happened between these characters before this shootout occurs. So some people really like that type of thing and others prefer not to. And I'm going to pop the novelist here for just a second if I can get my pointer in the right way. There we go. Okay. Oh, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show is involved in this story, too. Story line, so. So they have action packed, engaging, gritty. Characters are exaggerated, definitely. There's abusive men. There's alcoholics. You've got the British in the United States. You're different people. It's ranchers and all those types of things. So you've got both, you have a wide range to pick from. So we go back to the reader's advisory. We keep cycling back to that. What exactly are your patrons looking for? What is the appeal in the books that they really like? Just to wrap up, I did want to point out some of the Western writers who've recently won awards. Historic novels, we've got authors that I did not talk about, but they've written books recently that have been award worthy. You have contemporary. When we're talking contemporary, that just means post 1940. The story takes place post 1940, where these others take place before 1940, okay? So those are some authors that have won awards. And then we just wanted to talk for a minute about some other authors that maybe are writing contemporary books that take place in the contemporary time, but have Western settings and themes that are like the traditional Westerns. So of course, Craig Johnson, who writes about Walt Longmeyer, who's a sheriff in Wyoming. CJ Box, who's also, I don't know what's his name, Joe Pickett, who's, I just lost it, he's a game warden in Wyoming. J.A. Jance writes several different series that follow law people in the West. And of course, Tony Hillerman's classic, Jolie Porn and Jim Chee Books. Some other authors that you might not have heard of, Patrick McManus writes about Sheriff Bo Tully and his is Bartongan Cheek, we're wacky characters again. Keith McCafferty writes about... And then he writes the Sean Stranahan mystery series, which take place in Montana. Stranahan is an XPI and he's now a fishing guy, but he keeps getting involved in mysteries. But there's a lot of outdoors in it and Western themes. Michael McGarrity has actually written both a contemporary modern series and he's then went on to write a historical series. In the contemporary series, his main character is Kevin Kearney and he works, he's in New Mexico and over the series of 12 titles, he has worked for the State Patrol, he's been a sheriff, a police chief, he keeps moving around from one agency to another. But he does pull in a lot of historical information and works with the Native Americans in the area and that type of thing. His historical series actually follow Kevin Kearney's ancestors who moved to New Mexico. So, John Tolton writes a series about David Mapstone, who's a former county sheriff in Arizona. Peter Bowen writes a Gabriel Dupree series, which is again takes place in Montana and he's a cattle brand inspector and sometimes a sheriff's deputy. There are many out there, you can in novelist as Susan showed, you narrow down to the genre term of Western stories and add a state in, if people are looking for a particular state. They don't read something about their home state. Right. So, and I found that a lot of the books, I did talk about all of the books I read, but a lot of them that are traditional take place in Colorado, a lot based there too. So, go on to the last one. And I just put this slide together just sort of for the fun of it. Since I started working with novelist in July, as I go along and I'm looking for materials, I'm always taken by just the large number of terms that they have compiled to describe books to help librarians and readers identify what it is about books that appeal to them. And so, when I'm working on a project like this, when I'm looking at information about Westerns, as I go along, I just as a matter of course, kind of keep a running tab of terms that they use. So, genre terms that are associated with many of the mystery stories, locations, appeal terms, subject headings. And the nice thing about these is that, with a little background information on how to do searching in novelist, you can kind of start mixing in match at least on behalf of your patrons. So, Western stories, like I've said, and like Debra has said, that's sort of the overarching, the most likely genre term to use to get the most titles. But you can mix and match it with other genres, for instance. And I'll just point out, I do have a little screenshot of the keyword search screen in novelist. And the way you would do a search and target these terms is you've got the field label, which is a two character capitalized label. And I've got those codes behind each category. So genre is capital G, capital N. Location is capital S, capital D. So I can put down genre, and then adventure stories is a term that's used. And because it's more than one word, I do have to put it in location marks, then the capital and, and then I just plugged in the location, SD, the West is another terminology term that they use. So if what your patron really likes is the adventure aspect of Westerns and the setting of the West, you can try some searches like that and maybe identify titles that get lost in the shuffle if you've just done, you've put up all 6,000 Western stories. Or like we were saying, you can put SD and then your state name, if the patron really wants to read about things in a particular state. I really had to, I had a lot more subject terms written down than would fit on here. So that's just, just to give you an idea of, specific sort of character archetypes that are in these books. If somebody, for example, if somebody's seen Revenant and once other books that are kind of about mountain men, mountain men is a subject term that you can use. So it takes a little playing around with the database to get to the point where you can really use these tools, but it gives you a lot of power in terms of pulling out material. So I just kind of wanted to give you a sense of how much you have at your disposal when you have a resource like Novelist available to you. Did you guys want to show, you had brought up previously the Western Writers of America page? It's, I have to close some of these probably. There it is. Here you go. Yes. You can go into, if you want to, you can go, if you go into about the awards, you'll actually pull off a PDF document that gives a description for each of the different types of awards that they give, and then I'll just pop down to winners. And they list all of them all the way back to 1953. The categories that they give awards in have changed over the years, but this last year, as we said, they do give an award to a contemporary novel, which is the post of 1940. The historical is actually pre-1940, but has a historical person place or event in it. And then the traditional novel is pre-1940, but does not include historical people or events. Okay. And then they go on to others. They do talk about juvenile, which we have not talked about here today, but there are kids who like to read Westerns and lots of authors to choose from there. They do give to the first novel, and they do non-fiction awards, also biographies and that type of thing. So this is another source to find ideas of authors and titles. The other thing that I think is interesting here, if you're doing readers advisory in a particular genre, and you'll often find associations and organizations out there that promote that genre, and so their websites are really great resources for you as the librarian, and maybe for patrons who are real big fans of that genre. They might be interested in following that association as well. Many of these associations now are available. In this case, you'll notice along the left, they're available on Facebook and Twitter. There's apps that you can download. So again, depending on how plugged in your patron is to social media, you might be able to get them hooked up with some of these resources so they can do some of that research themselves and discover new authors. Right. And we know you can't buy everything. And you might have some patrons who read a great deal and are always in asking for more and more and more. There's always in a library loan. Yes, absolutely. But also a lot of Western books, not all of these authors unfortunately, but a lot of them are available through vendors like Overdrive and for those libraries who are part of the Nebraska Overdrive group, we do try to buy a variety of Western titles to put into the collection too. And not everybody wants the print version. A lot of patrons do want the audio version also. So we do put those into Overdrive also. And there's always online used booksellers. Right. I know a lot of people who are constantly buying used books through Amazon for pennies on the, you know. Yeah, for a lot of these that are written, a lot of your titles you mentioned have worked really old ones and they're probably not gonna, yeah, you gotta find them through your current. Right. Unless they've been reprinted. Right. Some works are reprinted often, but others, yeah. And they might be paperbacks and they might not be in the best condition, but that means they might be cheap. Yeah. They might get them a couple of bucks and so. One of them that I checked out from our local library here in Lincoln. That's an old edition. You can tell they're looking at it, yeah. It's 1970 and it's been rebound. Because I guess they decided it was a plastic and they wanted to keep it, you know. Now people were checking out the previous version before it got in the cover, yeah. Yeah. So. And despite what Harper Collins thinks, I bet you can check them out more than 26 times. Yeah. Yeah. So. Are there any questions? Any comments? No, except for the one about the gunsmith thing very popular at someone's library. Does anybody have any questions or comments about anything? I know before we do wrap up. Just realize we're sticking around over time. Yeah, we're a little over. That's okay. Everybody's still stuck around until the end here, so. Oh, okay. Well, if you have any suggestions, especially, and I'll say, especially those libraries in Nebraska, if you have suggestions for authors or titles, you know, things that your patrons are looking for that aren't currently in our shared overdrive collection, please do feel free to send in suggestions and we'll see if we can add those titles to the collection. And for those of you that are watching too, you noticed in the slides, there were the links to the novelist for some of the titles. If you're well in Nebraska or anywhere you have novelists, that will work. And we put up the slides we posted so you have access to that along with the recording afterwards, so you'll be able to see where, although you might be able to get more information about all those books. And if you don't have novelists, I don't know if you see what you guys have in your states that you can do something similar with. Sure, books in print and other. Goodreads. Yeah, goodreads, library thing. They might not. Yeah, they might not. They won't put in all of the appeals and things like that, but you can definitely search for Western stories. Oh, someone did just say we've got Western readers, so thanks for all the suggestions. Yes, so they definitely learned some new ones, probably that they hadn't done before. All right, well, it doesn't look like any other urgent questions have come in, so that's great. But thank you very much, Deborah and Susan. Like as we said, this is an infrequent series, we'll call it, of library commission staff sharing books that they've read or genres, and there'll be more coming up. As I said, we don't have an actual exact schedule of when, but when every few months we come up with an idea. It takes some time to get up to speed on some of these genres. It does, if you haven't read them, yeah. Previously, I think we've done really good, where we've found people on staff who read the certain area, certain genres, certain type of book, and then gather them together, but this is not always gonna happen like this one. This was brand new to both of you guys. But we learned a lot about it, so cool. All right, so thank you very much, Deborah and Susan, for sharing all that information. Listen, thank you everyone for attending. The show has been recorded as usual, and it will be here on our Encompass Live website, over here where we have our archived Encompass Live sessions, right beneath all our upcoming ones. It'll be posted here with the recording, the slides, and links to, well, I guess we have not blessed the Western Writers in America webpage, we'll have those links up there for you as well. Later today, I'll say, if I'm feeling ambitious, I gotta wait for everything to process and get everything posted and uploaded, but we'll get up there and you'll all get emails when it's ready to view. So I hope that'll wrap it up for today. I'll help you join us next week when, as I mentioned at the beginning, we are gradually moving the Library Commission to Windows 10, some of our computers, like the one we're using today, is in Windows 10. The computer in my office is not yet, so I'm bouncing back and forth, and I know lots of other people are doing the same thing, but next week we'll have our topic will be moving to Windows 10. Holly Wolt, who is one of our IT people here at the Library Commission, is gonna come and tell us what's going on with it, overview of it, and how you can use it at your library if you do need to move to Windows 10. So just to get an idea about what the heck is going on with this wonderful new version of Windows that some of us may have to use at some point. And also, sign up for any of our other topics. We've got our upcoming shows there. We've got more coming into the schedule. Lily posted as I get the full information from all of our presenters, so keep on our schedule there. Also, if you are a big Facebook user and Compass Live is on Facebook, if you go over there and like our page you'll get notifications of our shows here. As you see this morning, I posted a reminder to log in for our show. You can log in on the fly if you don't pre-register. And when our recordings are available, I post up here. So if you are big on Facebook, definitely give us a like over there. Other than that, that wraps it up for today. Thank you very much, everyone. I'll see you next week.