Reader's Advisory

So this summer I am taking a class in Reader's Advisory, the art of where a patron and a librarian work together to find a good book that the patron will hopefully like to read. I call it an art because from just starting to read about it that what it seems to be, an art, not a science. I am a very fact based person, so personally I really just wanted a step by step guide to reader's advisory that would work every time. Perhaps like a dichotomous key that biologist use to identify species. The librarian could ask simple questions and then based on the patrons' answer ask one of two other questions and so for an so on until TA Dah! The perfect book or author is found. However from just starting to read about the reader's advisory process it is no where near that simple.

The textbook we are using is called Genreflecting: A Guide to Popular Reading Interests 6th Ed. By Diana Tixier Herald and I am overwhelmed by just what it contains. This text is 560 pages long and over 3/4 of it is just lists and bibliographies of books. Now those books are organized by genre and subgenre so that if a patron tells you a book they just read or a type of genre they like you can look it up here and find other books listed next to it that are similar. But I am still overwhelmed! How is a librarian to know all of these books, so that when a patron comes up to ask for a good book the librarian can mentally calculate based on the patron's answers to questions what books they would like?!?
The simple answer is that they can't. And I think this is the true secret to good librarianship: Know that you don't know everything, but know where to find anything. So a good reader's advisor doesn't have to have all the fiction books memorized by genre and plot type and whether or not the lead character is female. They can simply know how to find a novel that a patron has just read in Genreflecting (and have that book behind the reference desk) or know how to use fiction searching sites such as NoveList to type in key words that patrons use to describe their reading preferences. It is such a positive relief to me that librarians really don't have to know everything, we just need to know a few good sources to finding whatever we need. And thanks to the librarians who made those sources describing many of the fiction works all in one place!