Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Most book groups follow a model learned from high school classes or Oprah: a book is assigned, everyone reads it, and then it is (cue angelic choir) DISCUSSED. While this can be great, especially when discussion goes well and that rare thing we call DEPTH happens, a single book is not the only way to go. In fact, there [...]

BRIGHT OF THE SKY by Kay Kenyon  (Pyr, 2007, 9781591025412) One of the best things about our monthly staff readers’ advisory training is that we force ourselves to read outside our personal comfort zones.  The second coolest thing is that we spend the major portion of that training having a staff book discussion.  As a [...]

Since I will be traveling to London this week, I cannot help but think about the many British authors that I count among my favorites.  Chief among them is the great George Eliot. I love Eliot so much that I have to admit that I have been afraid to schedule any of her books for [...]

How many men do you know who end their day snuggling up in their favorite armchair with a good novel? I thought so. A couple of centuries ago, authors directly addressed the male reader. Friendly man-to-man asides throughout the narrative assumed the reader to be of the same sex. Women readers were, of course, allowed [...]

Recently I led a discussion of Jhumpa Lahiri’s powerful and involving novel, The Namesake, with a group of graduate library science students.  As it happened, all of the participants were female, and they were fairly unanimous in their lack of enthusiasm for the book’s protagonist, a young American male dealing with identity issues related to [...]

Okay, I admit it, I don’t belong to a book group. Maybe it’s because working at Booklist is like being in a book group 27/7. Since I can’t share any personal experiences, from time to time I’m going to be writing about what goes on in other groups–call them my book group surrogates. Jane Levine, my Steppenwolf [...]

Most book group facilitators don’t choose genre fiction for discussions and if they do, they lean towards mysteries or science fiction. Today, I want to show-and-tell a Western I think works well in a discussion. I don’t know about all Westerns, but I know about this one, The Last Cattle Drive by Robert Day. This [...]

Calling all book group people! (and you know who you are) We know you like to talk about books, but we want you to talk to us about your book group. Please help us get a picture of book groups across the country by participating in a short informal survey from the RUSA CODES Readers’ [...]

The librarians in my children’s department made reading resolutions this year and posted them on a bulletin board.  Mine was to read a chapter book with an animal main character each month.   The character must be a different kind of animal than any read about in the previous months.  So far, I’ve read about cats with [...]

 When I heard that a group of eight wealthy, married women in a prosperous North Seattle neighborhood were about to read for their book club Dave Eggers’ harrowing, gut-wrenching What is the What, I had misgivings. This wasn’t Anne Tyler or Amy Tan. This was a nearly 500-page saga about thousands of orphaned boys being [...]

I’m a groupie.  No, not that kind…I’m a book groupie. Right now, I’ve got the compulsion under control. I’m only doing three groups. If I’m sneaky and use some books in multiple groups, I can usually manage my schedule of groupie reading, review reading, and even the occasional (gasp!) non-required book that I pick out all for [...]

When my old Marlboro College roommate, Caitlin, and her husband Ashley last came to visit, we ended up sitting on the couch for an hour poring over the pages of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, tallying up our personal scores. We didn’t intend to geek out in this way. But when they [...]

Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966) The serendipity of discovering a book never ceases to amaze me.  All my life I have been networked to fans of crime fiction, but recently a man walked into my library who knew I had written Read ‘Em Their Writes.  He handed me this title [...]

How much imagination is allowed before a memoir turns into a novel? It’s a fine line between autobiography and autobiographical fiction. The year has started out with some fascinating riffs on realism, including two very unusual hybrid approaches to reality that make top-flight reading and would make fascinating group discussion pieces. Tetsuo Miura’s Shame in [...]

Book groups often complain that they don’t get to read anything funny.  And it is true that by and large the best books for discussion can be pretty bleak.  Also, people’s senses of humor can be so different.  I wanted to share a funny read that I felt had surprising depth and poignancy. In Jonathan [...]

Wondering how to give your book group some punch? One of my favorite book group sites, Book Club Girl, has just introduced a new five-part series called  “How to Make Your Book Club More Effective.”  The author is the blogger behind BookClubClassics, which offers book club kits containing discussion questions, author information, links, menu ideas, more.

The books that make for the most lively and interesting discussions aren’t necessarily the ones found on best books lists.   What books nurtured the best discussions in your book group in 2007?  You can share your favorites with other book groups in Reading Group Choices‘ annual survey. When you complete the survey, Reading Group Choices will enter your name in [...]

Those reading guides that publishers provide in the backs of trade paperbacks are an interesting lot of pages, aren’t they? If you read the guide, you run the risk of encountering some spoilers (“At what point did you realize that Hortense was completely crazy and pouring her heart out to a shrink instead of her diary?”) [...]

This week my book group discussed Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants.  I was excited to read it as I had been hearing good things and even noticed that Stephen King put Gruen’s book on his best of 2007 list (shameless EW plug).  Water for Elephants tells the story of Jacob Jankowski.  Jacob is studying veterinary science at [...]

One of my favorite literary subgenres has no name. Call them quirky Latino tour de forces. Call them short, dazzling Hispanic literary fiction. Whatever you want to call them, they’re realistic, usually written in the first person, usually about two hundred pages long, and make great discussion pieces for reading groups. Check out these narrative [...]