Librarians pick the potential sleepers. . .

For the last few years in our booth at OLA, my colleague and I have invited librarians to enter our Sleepers' Contest. We each pick five recent or upcoming books that aren't obvious bestsellers but books we believe have the potential to be sleeper hits. We ask the librarians to read a brief descriptive blurb, and then write on a ballot the titles of the three books they would most like to read themselves. We randomly pull entries out of the box and the winner gets the books they have picked.

Lahring and I always have fun tallying up the votes to see which books spark the most interest (and I'll admit to a friendly rivalry as to which of our picks comes out as number one) and I thought people might enjoy reading the results. Every year that we've held this contest all the books have received multiple votes and this year was no exception - so there is definitely something on this list to recommend to each of your different library patrons.

Before we get to the winners, here were the contenders:

Bits of Me Are Falling Apart: How We Get Older and Why by William Leith

Blood and Ice by Robert Masello

Blood Safari by Deon Meyer

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant

The Dark Volume by Gordon Dahlquist

The Local News by Miriam Gershow

The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man by Alfred Alcorn

The Missing by Tim Gautreaux

Nose Down, Eyes Up by Merrill Markoe

The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball

And congratulations to the top 3 vote-getters as chosen by the librarians:

The Missing by Tim Gautreaux (my pick! my pick!)

The Local News by Miriam Gershow

The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball

P.S. I thought Lahring was very sneaky to go for the heartstrings and put a dog novel on the list. I immediately countered with a book featuring an opinionated tortoise and I'm happy to report that while neither made it into the top three, the tortoise did beat the dog by one vote.