Citizen Reader is the website formerly known as Nonfiction Readers Anonymous. When not blogging as Citizen Reader, I am a mild-mannered freelance librarian and indexer known as Sarah Statz Cords. As a freelance librarian, I offer a training and webinar service known as YOUR Citizen Reader; please do consider that service (and my qualifications for it) if you are in need of nonfiction or readers' advisory training or workshops.
In the pursuit of fame and fortune I've written several reference books:
Public Speaking Handbook for Librarians and Information Professionals
The Real Story: A Guide to Nonfiction Reading Interests
The Inside Scoop: A Guide to Nonfiction Investigative Writing and Exposes
and
Now Read This III: A Guide to Mainstream Fiction (with Nancy Pearl)
None of them brought fame or fortune but they were a whole lot of fun to write. While working on them I read all the time and told people I had to for my work.
Because I love nonfiction and read almost exclusively nonfiction and think about the forms of nonfiction and why people read nonfiction almost constantly, and because I wrote the above books, I also have the fun job of being the series editor for the series of Real Stories books, published by Libraries Unlimited and ABC-CLIO. These books are readers' guides to all things nonfiction, and if you'd like to write such a guide or learn more about them, please do contact me. Pronto!
I also work as a freelance back-of-the-book indexer, but I feel my true vocation is, as noted above, reading (almost exclusively nonfiction, but just when you least expect it, I'll throw in a novel) and writing about nonfiction here, as your friendly Citizen Reader.
I do not accept books for review, I do not allow AdSense or any banner advertisements here. I do, in fact, link to Powell's independent bookstore, and I am a new member of their "Partner Program" (as of 8/2010), which means that if you follow book links from this site to Powell's and buy the book (or any books you shop for, after following any links from here), I get a small commission on the sale. I have done only this in an effort to try and at least recoup what I spend to host this site on a monthly basis. You can still feel reasonably secure that while you're here, I'm not trying to sell you anything--I'll link to Powell's whether I think a book is good or a stinker, and these links will not affect my policy of handing out bad reviews to shitty books that deserve them. I also pick on Jodi Picoult and Thomas Friedman fairly often on this blog and will NOT link to any of their Powell's pages, because, frankly, you have better places to spend your money than on their book travesties.
Please consider this my FTC disclaimer for all posts: Unless otherwise noted, all books I review have been obtained from my local public library.
Please direct any questions or comments to realstory@tds.net. And thanks for stopping in--as they say on the Red Green Show, we're all in this together.
