In fall 1888, van Gogh and Gauguin painted together in Arles. For nine weeks, as Martin Gayford recounts in The Yellow House, the two artists learned from each other, referencing and reinterpreting both work and techniques. The results of their union included van Gogh's The Arlesienne and Gauguin's Night Café at Arles. While neither artist would have called it this, they were caught up in a Big Think, a time when the convergence of ideas and energy creates something new.

Readers' advisory (RA) librarians might not have a yellow house in Arles, but they're still striving together to reinterpret equally fundamental RA questions. Why does a reader enjoy one suggestion but not another? Why do the novels of Cormac McCarthy, for example, resonate with some but not all readers? The theory of appeal is one way RA librarians have sought to understand these differences in reader enjoyment. It has been a given in RA work.

Not any more. The concept of appeal is now undergoing what I call an RA Big Think. It's being changed and adapted by those who helped to create it and by a new group of librarians eager to help develop new thinking about how patrons react to, and interact with, what they read. There's a common thread in these new takes on defining and applying appeal: they come through listening to and analyzing reader reaction and conversation.

Appeal addresses the elements of books that readers respond to, the features that, as Nancy Pearl, of Book Lust fame, explains, “draw a reader into a book” and help shape a particular reading experience. Appeal terms are the tools, says Barry Trott, of Williamsburg Regional Library, VA, that readers' advisors use “to make connections among books that readers may not have thought of...to cross genres and to go between fiction and nonfiction and to link authors in novel and interesting ways.”

There are four traditional appeal concepts: pacing, character, story line, and frame. Pacing captures the way the reader moves through the story arc, in a rapid, high-octane manner, as in a Matthew Reilly adventure, or in a measured, reflective way, as with the short stories of Alice Munro. Character addresses the way the individuals in the story behave and relate, both to one another and with the reader. For example, contrast the layered complexity of the characters in Michael Cunningham's The Hours with the quirky dysfunctional relationships in the works of Anne Tyler. Story line and frame are less easily codified but generally address the construction of the story and its details and settings.

RA librarians use appeal to translate between readers and books, to make connections between readers and myriad other title possibilities based on the effects of the story. It is important to note that appeal is not about subject. “Appeal was a groundbreaking concept because it shifted the focus away from material to its experience,” says Duncan Smith, the creator of NoveList. The terms consider the unseen but deeply felt elements of the book and not its cataloged features. Ike Pulver, of Shaker Heights Public Library, OH, notes how wonderful it would be if we “could classify books—fiction, especially—by 'feeling' rather than by subject, or adjectivally (big, fast, exciting, intricate, thought-provoking) instead of nominally (horses, houses, ships, satellites, cheese).” Pulver refers to appeal as a “feeling taxonomy.”

Since 1989, when the idea was first introduced in Joyce Saricks and Nancy Brown's groundbreaking Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Library, appeal has remained a stable concept. Now, the appeal conversation is everywhere, from professional forums that explore RA topics to reader interaction through web sites, blogs, and tagging that let readers teach us what works and what doesn't.

As readers' advisors rethink appeal, four areas of change are emerging: refinements of how appeal assesses the reading experience using such terms as description, language, learning/experiencing, settings, and style; fine tuning of terms used to express the feelings a book evokes, such as affect, mood, and tone; new aspects related to story using the terms content, genre, subject, theme, and type; and design issues encompassing physical layout and format.

None of the new terms address the appeal mainstays of character or pacing, indicating that the RA community agrees on their usefulness and application. Instead, the Big Think is leading to a new consideration of frame, story line, and format.

The terms description, language, learning/experiencing, settings, style, affect, mood, and tone all spring from unpacking the term frame, which has always at least obliquely included these aspects. The Big Think is pushing for more precise wording. Frame, as a single term, is too reductive. When thinking about appeal, RA librarians are expanding the term to capture more of the experience of reading the book and the feelings a book evokes. Frame is being recast as an expression of the details and description of a book that contribute to the story's world building, such as the elements of medieval society in Tracy Chevalier's The Lady and the Unicorn.

The use of terms like content, genre, subject, theme, and type illustrates that RA librarians are also reworking the idea of story line. Georgine Olson, Fairbanks North Star Borough Public Library, AK, calls story line “twisty.” Pulver points out that “story line is another appeal factor that is really a conglomeration of multiple subappeals.” The effort to redefine story line in the appeal construct also has led to reconsiderations of subject and a radical rethinking of how it applies to the reading experience. This is new and boggy ground. After all, the paradigm shift of appeal aimed to move the consideration of a book away from its subjects and on to its experience. While that still holds, the RA community is creating a new approach that re-introduces the subjects of a narrative and is starting to see them as intertwined with appeal. Reading maps and nonfiction RA are examples of this intertwined approach (see box at right).

Design and format considerations are totally new to the appeal construct and reflect changes in how narratives are created. Is the story delivered via an audiobook, graphic format, in large print, as hypertext, or as a game? Does the book's construction matter, as with Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, where illustrations are key to the story? Does the audio narration alter the experience, as with Jodi Picoult's The Tenth Circle, where illustrations are lost, or enhance it, as with Simon Prebble's rendition of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, where the footnotes are intertwined with the reading? Teresa Jacobsen, Solano County Library, CA, notices that her readers often talk about what they want in terms of films and television shows, further revealing how format interacts with appeal. This new area of exploration will introduce more unique terms and ideas into the appeal discussion as we struggle to redefine the very idea of narrative at a time when story is increasingly format-dependent.

Not only is the Big Think redefining individual appeal terms, it is also pushing for changes in the way appeal is applied. Genres, once so neatly arranged into defined areas, are now exploding into cross-genre creations and newly formed microgenres, merging and shifting like bubbles in a lava lamp, forcing readers and librarians into new genre landscapes.

Saricks is using the broad and adaptive framework of appeal to reconsider both genre and appeal. She posits that genres work together in groupings of key appeal factors, thus allowing us to conceive of genre on an appeal meta level rather than on the micro, individual genre level. This new concept facilitates cross-genre reading, what Olson calls “genre slides.” It allows us to let go of the inside-the-genre-only thinking that compels us to consider thrillers, for example, as completely different from suspense, or sf as far removed from a literary novel. Saricks sees at least four different ways to group titles: adrenaline, intellect, emotion, and landscape (see “Appeal in Practice,” below).

The adrenaline group includes thrillers, adventures, suspense, and romantic suspense; the key appeal aspect they all share is pacing. Readers talk about the plot, scenes, action, and what the character did. The focus is on the movement of the story arc, the pace of the experience. In James Patterson's Step on a Crack, for example, readers are compelled by the story, escape into it, and are driven to keep reading—despite its fantastical premise.

The intellect group includes sf, literary fiction, mysteries, and psychological suspense. Here, the reader focuses on language, the internal life of the character, and the central question of “What if?” These are books of the mind: what you think about while reading is more central than what you feel. The interior focus of Julia Spencer-Fleming's Reverend Clare Fergusson series, for example, enables readers to puzzle along with Clare. While the plotting can be compelling, this internal focus entices readers.

Feeling books, or those in the emotion group, include romance, horror, gentle reads, chick lit, and women's lives and relationship stories. The focus is on feeling, tone, mood, character reactions and motivations, and setting. In Susan Elizabeth Phillips's Natural Born Charmer, readers navigate the story via the emotional connection among the characters. The ability to participate in the life of the characters is important to readers of these genres.

Landscape books have a driving sense of place, real or imaginary. They include Westerns, fantasy, and historical fiction. Here, reader reaction is driven by the detail involved in world building, as in Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, which vividly re-creates 19th-century China.

This reworking of appeal into meta groups provides what Saricks describes as “bigger boxes.” These boxes help RA librarians see the overarching connections among titles. Her approach allows us to think from the outside in, what Saricks calls “working backwards,” as we reference and reinterpret the fundamentals of appeal.

Pearl, who first suggested that language be part of our standard appeal vocabulary, is also rethinking appeal (see “Appeal in Practice,” p. 42) in an RA context. She envisions four doorways: story, setting, character, and language.

The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others' eyes. Readers who most appreciate skillful writing enter through the doorway of language.

The doorways often work in an Alice in Wonderland kind of sliding scale; while every book contains each doorway, one door grows taller and taller as an author writes and another door progressively shrinks. Some books have huge story doorways and tiny character doorways, or giant language doorways and small setting doorways. Pearl has found that sure bets with many readers have an equilibrium of doorway size; for hugely popular books like Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series, the story, character, setting, and language doorways are all large.

To Pearl, behavioral reading patterns are the clue to understand the doorways and translate what a reader wants. Readers who enter books through the door marked language tell us that they tend to read very slowly because they want to appreciate every word. Conversely, story-focused readers describe their reading as fast paced. People who open the doorway marked setting say they know that place as well as their own hometown. Those who talk to us about the characters naturally enter stories through that doorway.

This reimagining of appeal not only offers a method of seamlessly working with both fiction and nonfiction, it also provides an easy-to-understand image of reader response that directly correlates with what the reader tells us in conversation.

The deep and reflective involvement with the why of a reader and the how of the book continues to shape the RA landscape. NoveList's Smith describes this evolving process as “learning to speak reader” and calls readers' advisors “the Margaret Meads of the profession.”

There is much more exploration to come. The RA Big Think is just starting, and we have yet to agree on a vocabulary that really codifies RA work. More analysis of appeal will only happen in the field. That field is your library, and the study group is you and your reader. So the next time a patron asks you to suggest a book, do as Smith urges: “Put on your pith helmet, take out your notebook, and stalk the wild reader.” Your field notes can change how the profession views and adapts its fundamental work, and all of us, reader and librarian alike, will be enriched by your findings.