This book offers an overview of the contributions of author Nora Roberts to the popular literary market. Nora Roberts's captivating biography and extensive canon are explored in this comprehensive reader's guide, including coverage on her early works, critical successes, trilogies and quartets, short stories and novellas, futuristic mysteries written as J.D. Robb, and titles under other pseudonyms. Reading Nora Roberts shows how this remarkable author expands the limits of the genres in which she writes, exploring feminist ideas, Celtic and Western settings, psychological and religious themes, and Gothic and supernatural elements. The book also highlights Roberts's willingness to have her characters face serious real-world issues, including sexism and racism, gun violence, abortion, suicide, corporate greed, and career burnout.

Drawing on extensive interviews with ninety-four women prisoners, Megan Sweeney examines how incarcerated women use available reading materials to come to terms with their pasts, negotiate their present experiences, and reach toward different futures. Foregrounding the voices of African American women, Sweeney analyzes how prisoners read three popular genres: narratives of victimization, urban crime fiction, and self-help books. She outlines the history of reading and education in U.S. prisons, highlighting how the increasing dehumanization of prisoners has resulted in diminished prison libraries and restricted opportunities for reading. Although penal officials have sometimes endorsed reading as a means to control prisoners, Sweeney illuminates the resourceful ways in which prisoners educate and empower themselves through reading. Given the scarcity of counseling and education in prisons, women use books to make meaning from their experiences, to gain guidance and support, to experiment with new ways of being, and to maintain connections with the world.

Shining a spotlight on everyday readers of the 21st century, Beth Driscoll explores how contemporary readers of Anglophone fiction interact with the book industry, digital environments, and each other. We live in an era when book clubs, bibliomemoirs, Bookstagram and BookTok are as valuable to some readers as solitary reading moments. The product of nearly two decades of qualitative research into readers and reading culture, What Readers Do examines reading through three dimensions - aesthetic conduct, moral conduct, and self-care – to show how readers intertwine private and social behaviors, and both reinforce and oppose the structures of capitalism. Analyzing reading as a post-digital practice that is a synthesis of both print and digital modes and on- and offline behaviors, Driscoll presents a methodology for studying readers that connects book history, literary studies, sociology, and actor-network theory. Arguing for the vitality, agency, and creativity of readers, this book sheds light on how we read now - and on how much more readers do than just read.

“A fascinating look into a world many of us never see, and a powerful story about one woman’s journey to find her own strength, with a clear message of the importance of books and information for all.” —Booklist (American Library Association), starred review Shortlisted for the 2020 Social Justice & Advocacy Book Award by In the Margins Book Awards. In December 2008, twentysomething Jill Grunenwald graduated with her master’s degree in library science, ready to start living her dream of becoming a librarian. But the economy had a different idea. As the Great Recession reared its ugly head, jobs were scarce. After some searching, however, Jill was lucky enough to snag one of the few librarian gigs left in her home state of Ohio. The catch? The job was behind bars as the prison librarian at a men’s minimum-security prison. Talk about baptism by fire. As an untested twentysomething woman, to say that the job was out of Jill’s comfort zone was an understatement. She was forced to adapt on the spot, speedily learning to take the metal detectors, hulking security guards, and colorful inmates in stride. Over the course of a little less than two years, Jill came to see past the bleak surroundings and the orange jumpsuits and recognize the humanity of the men stuck behind bars. They were just like every other library patron—persons who simply wanted to read, to be educated and entertained through the written word. By helping these inmates, Jill simultaneously began to recognize the humanity in everyone and to discover inner strength that she never knew she had. At turns poignant and hilarious, Reading behind Bars is a perfect read for fans of Orange is the New Black and Shakespeare Saved My Life.

With thousands of romance novels published each year, librarians—especially those unfamiliar with or indifferent to the genre—can benefit from this well-organized, reference that offers scores of appeals-based read-alike lists for some of the most popular, contemporary romance fiction. As romance publishing continues to flourish, readers and readers' advisors are faced with increasingly complex reading choices. This book helps adult and teen readers quickly find the books they love to read, identifies other titles with shared qualities for more reading suggestions, and provides librarians with carefully reviewed read-alike lists that they can use with confidence. Featuring romance novels published from 2000 to the present day, this useful guide offers you hundreds of reading suggestions covering a wide variety of themes from the most popular to the more obscure. Library professionals and romance fans C. L. Quillen and Ilene Lefkowitz use informal and sometimes whimsical terminology to create unique thematic lists that are targeted to the way romance readers think, offering such lively categories as "Rx for Love" and "Romancing the Stove." The authors organize the titles into five sections according to language, setting, character, story, and mood. Subgenres covered include historical, regency, paranormal, and romantic suspense, making it simple for you to find recommended titles appropriate for your readers' needs.

Popular romance fiction constitutes the largest segment of the global book market. Bringing together an international group of scholars, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction offers a ground-breaking exploration of this global genre and its remarkable readership. In recognition of the diversity of the form, the Companion provides a history of the genre, an overview of disciplinary approaches to studying romance fiction, and critical analyses of important subgenres, themes, and topics. It also highlights new and understudied avenues of inquiry for future research in this vibrant and still-emerging field. The first systematic, comprehensive resource on romance fiction, this Companion will be invaluable to students and scholars, and accessible to romance readers.

Most data scientists and engineers today rely on quality labeled data to train machine learning models. But building a training set manually is time-consuming and expensive, leaving many companies with unfinished ML projects. There's a more practical approach. In this book, Wee Hyong Tok, Amit Bahree, and Senja Filipi show you how to create products using weakly supervised learning models. You'll learn how to build natural language processing and computer vision projects using weakly labeled datasets from Snorkel, a spin-off from the Stanford AI Lab. Because so many companies have pursued ML projects that never go beyond their labs, this book also provides a guide on how to ship the deep learning models you build. Get up to speed on the field of weak supervision, including ways to use it as part of the data science process Use Snorkel AI for weak supervision and data programming Get code examples for using Snorkel to label text and image datasets Use a weakly labeled dataset for text and image classification Learn practical considerations for using Snorkel with large datasets and using Spark clusters to scale labeling

As the first encyclopedia solely devoted to the popular romance fiction genre, this resource provides a wealth of information on all aspects of the subject. Romance fiction accounts for a large share of book sales each year, and contrary to popular belief, not all of its readers are women: roughly 16 percent are men. This enormously popular genre continues to captivate people reading for pleasure, and it also commands a growing amount of academic interest. Included are alphabetically arranged reference entries on significant authors along with works, themes, and other topics. The articles are written by scholars, librarians, and industry professionals with a deep knowledge of the genre and so provide a thorough understanding of the subject. An index provides easy access to information within the entries, and bibliographies at the end of each entry, a general bibliography, and a suggested romance reading list allow for further study of the genre.

Inspiration can be a powerful tool for your mind. Inspiration can aid in you achieving what you wish to achieve in your life. This book includes daily doses of inspiration to help and inspire you. People, places, and things are described here to share the inspiration that can be discovered all around us. The 365 daily doses of inspiration can lead to inspiration and bright days for you!

This book showcases recent work about reading and books in sociology and the humanities across the globe. From different standpoints and within the broad perspectives within the cultural sociology of reading, the eighteen chapters examine a range of reading practices, genres, types of texts, and reading spaces. They cover the Anglophone area of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia; the transnational, multilingual space constituted by the readership of the Colombian novel One Hundred Years of Solitude; nineteenth-century Chile; twentieth-century Czech Republic; twentieth century Swahili readings in East Africa; contemporary Iran; and China during the cultural revolution and the post-Mao period. The chapters contribute to current debates about the valuation of literature and the role of cultural intermediaries; the iconic properties of textual objects and of the practice of reading itself; how reading supports personal, social and political reflection; bookstores as spaces for sociability and the interplay of high and commercial cultures; the political uses of reading for nation-building and propaganda, and the dangers and gratifications of reading under repression. In line with the cultural sociology of reading’s focus on meaning, materiality and emotion, this book explores the existential, ethical and political consequences of reading in specific locations and historical moments.