Cool reading, just in time for the holidays. . .

Want to read a little Danielle Steele? John Grisham? If you're looking forward to doing some light reading over the holiday break, the Library now has a collection of Bestsellers available for checkout. You will find this selection in the student lounge area of the library. That's the nice sitting lounge to the right of the main entrance to the library. We are featuring a selection of bestsellers in fiction as well as nonfiction. A small sampling of titles includes:

• Kinky Friedman's You can lead a politician to water, but you can't make him think: ten commandments for Texas politics.
• Orson Scott Card's Invasive Procedures.
• Bill Clinton's Giving: how each of us can change the world.
• Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays.
• Catherine Coulter's Point Blank.

The books were brought to the library on a book lease plan; generous gift donations made the collection possible. Members of the library staff chose the initial titles for the collection based on popularity, appeal to readers, and variety of genres. We invite the UT Tyler community to come browse the collection and check out the books. Please feel free to let us know what you read and like. You can do so by commenting here on the blog, using the AskALibrarian link on our webpage, or you can just speak to any library staff member when you visit. In addition, you can search for bestsellers using the library catalog. One way to do this is to open the catalog and set the "location" pulldown menu to "bestsellers." You can get the list of available titles that way. Some details on checking them out:

• Faculty, staff, and students can check them out for the regular three weeks period. There is only one renewal allowed.
• For faculty, these books are different from books in other collections that would be loaned for longer time. The bestsellers can only be checked out as indicated above for three weeks.
• Students: Please note that for the semester break, you can only check these items out if you are enrolled in the spring semester already.
• Courtesy card users can only check out items for one week. They have a limit of three items. This is the same policy as any other checkout. See our borrowing policies for details.
• These titles are not eligible for Interlibrary Loan (i.e. we will not send them out to other lenders).

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. By the way, I already checked a book out as well. I chose Stephen Colbert's I am America (and so can you!). I'll be sure to post my review on it when I finish. I would love to hear from readers out there what books they may be checking out, so feel free to drop me a line. You can also make suggestions for titles you think we should add to the collection. Happy reading.