reviews.indd


virtually the only forum at all—for librar-
ians in the field. The network this fosters 
is of fundamental importance in my doing 
what I do. (Indeed, it’s why I’m writing this 
review.) Because the book was assembled 
from essentially anonymous opinions from 
a rather brief questionnaire, Reading and the 
Reference Librarian raises more questions 
than it answers, especially for librarians 
pondering professional development for 
themselves and their colleagues. 

It should go without saying that 
we all should spend free time reading, 
even when time is precious. When “so 
many books to read, so little time” forces 
choices, however; there are many more 
books worth reading than this one.— 
Gregory A. Finnegan, Harvard University. 

Magazines for Libraries: For the General 
Reader and School, Junior College, 
College, University, and Public Librar-
ies, 12 ed. Ed. Cheryl LaGuardia, with 
Bill Katz and Linda Sternberg Katz. 
New Providence, N.J.: Bowker, 2003. 
1,120p. $225 (ISBN 0835245411). 

Magazines for Libraries, now in its twelfth 
edition, continues to evolve in order to 
keep up with the massive changes in how 
serials are published. This print edition 
may be the last of its kind. The fi rst ques-
tion this reviewer had when examining 
the volume was, When will this resource 
move to a Web format? According to 
sources at Bowker, subsequent editions 
may indeed be redesigned in order to 
become Web based. Time will tell. 

Bowker conducted focus groups to find 
out what publishers and users needed 
and wanted from this publication. The 
twelfth edition includes new features that 
address a number of trends, including 
a listing of journal aggregators and the 
inclusion of abundant statistics that break 
down the contents in new and useful 
ways. Retained from earlier volumes is 
the listing of titles deleted since the last 

Book Reviews 569 

edition, and it continues to be useful. As 
in past editions, all previously published 
entries were reviewed thoroughly and 
revised, if necessary. 

However, I do have a few minor com-
plaints. The “How to Use This Book” 
pages are buried between the statistics and 
the abbreviations; it would be more useful 
up front, after the preface. Electronic-only 
publications are segregated at the end 
of each subject listing, even though in 
the preface it is acknowledged that “ the 
novelty of electronic journals has worn off, 
and they are now considered to be simply 
essential.” If this is so, then why not list 
the essential e-publications along with the 
print without segregating them, especially 
as so many of the print journals are also 
now available online (and when that is 
the case, it is duly noted)? This, of course, 
leads back to the compelling case for 
this reference work itself to become Web 
based because many print-only journals 
are rapidly adding an online component 
or else are ceasing in print altogether. A 
print reference work such as Magazines for 
Libraries, by its very nature, is out-of-date 
before even going to press. One last, small 
complaint is, Why are the publications 
listed under the topic of “Serials” separate 
from, rather than included with, Library 
and Information Science? It seems that 
subtopics within library and information 
science should be listed in a similar fash-
ion as they are for other broad subjects 
such as Business and Medicine. 

Cheryl LaGuardia and the many in-
dividuals (and it is nice to see the Katzes 
retaining a consulting role) that com-
prised the team of reviewers certainly 
had their work cut out for them and they 
completed their task admirably. This vol-
ume is most useful to reference staff who 
assist library users in the identifi cation of 
the best journals in a field and to collec-
tion development selectors, regardless 
of whether they are trying to justify the 



570 College & Research Libraries 

purchase of a new title or retention of an 
existing one. All types of libraries should 
consider including Magazine for Libraries 
as a core reference tool.—Eleanor I. Cook, 
Appalachian State University. 

Reading Sites: Social Difference and 
Reader Response. Eds. Patrocinio P. 
Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn. 
New York: MLA, 2004. 357p. $22 (ISBN 
0873529855). LC 2003-022482. 

The “reading sites” of this book’s title are 
not libraries but, rather, locations in the 
imaginary space populated by readers, 
texts, and authors where, at least in the 
view of reader-response theories of litera-
ture, the meaning of texts is constituted. 
For humanities librarians who studied lit-
erature in the 1970s and 1980s, the essays 
collected here will transport them back 
to the exciting debates and discoveries 
of their apprentice years, the theoretical 
breakthroughs of Iser, Jauss, Fish, Bleich, 
and Holland that shattered the classical 
view of the reader as the dispassionate 
receptacle of incontrovertible meanings 
placed in literary works by sagacious 
authors. Until then, literary education 
had been in the hands of positivists who 
approached the understanding of the 
literary work as if it were a problem in 
physics, a goal of elucidation and not of 
socially, historically aware debate. The 
student learned literary interpretation 
as a type of exegesis and accepted that 
his or her subjectivity fi gured “mainly 
as a source of error” (I. A. Richards) in 
the reading experience. Reader-response 
theory, by contrast, elevated the reader to 
a co-constituent of textual meaning—in 
its more extreme expressions, in fact, as 
the principal or sole producer of meaning. 
Reader-response “monists” argued that 
because the message of a literary work 
has no objective reality, it is produced 
entirely by the will and the intellect of the 
reading subject. 

November 2004 

For a reviewer in a library science jour-
nal, an examination of this work leads to 
several questions. First of all, what do the 
essays in this volume offer today’s selector 
of a library literature collection beyond, 
say, what an earlier collaboration of these 
same two editors, Gender and Reading: Es-
says on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, did in 
1986? And second, more relevant perhaps 
in a library science context, why even 
review this book here at all, rather than 
in a journal directed at readers in English 
departments? 

To answer the first question, both the 
38-page introduction that the editors pro-
vide and the highly diverse scope of this 
volume’s eleven essays document beyond 
a doubt that reader-response theory has 
moved significantly beyond its beginnings 
twenty and thirty years ago. The erstwhile 
theoretical construct of the monodimen-
sional reader has been diversifi ed, gen-
dered, racialized, and chronicized. Where 
early theorists such as Jauss looked at the 
“reader” in reader-response theory as a 
“generalized other,” the essays collected 
here seek out a far more personal other, 
rejecting “homogenization” of manifoldly 
disparate readers and attending to “the 
specificities of persons and situations … 
differentiated, among other things, by 
race, ethnicity, and class.” These specifici-
ties overlay and conflict with one another. 
If, for example, a white feminist might be 
inclined to reduce everything in a work of 
literature to issues of gender difference, 
for black feminists—such as Angelett a K 
M Gourdine, represented in this volume 
with an essay entitled “Colored Readings; 
or, Interpretation and the Raciogendered 
Body”—race melds complexly with gen-
der in the context of “multiple systems of 
social and cultural domination.” 

Even individual readers are revealed 
by these essays as internally conflicted, 
contradictory, often moody constructors 
of meaning—and this is where the book