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

Looking for a challenging book for your next discussion?  Try Alice McDermott’s Child of My Heart.  It’s not a new book (published in 2002) nor is it a long one (242 pages), but its themes of childhood and death are timeless, and there’s something to talk about on almost every page, when you consider the exquisite [...]

So, I just got back from a rather whirlwind tour through London.  With an infant in tow, no less.  Well, I meant to take notes on what people were reading in the Tube (one of my favorite things to do while on vacation), but I had another brilliant idea. I had noticed these stickers on [...]

How do you choose a book if your group has 5000 members? Some brainy folks are attempting to answer this question for the third time on the University of Washington campus, as the little team of faculty members and librarians on the committee to choose the incoming freshman class’s Common Book for 2008 begin searching [...]

In my last post, I wrote about why you should consider book group formats that go beyond the tradition of discussing a single book. In this post, I want to address how you can discuss multiple books. There are many different ways to do it. Consider trying these approaches as an experiment in one of [...]

  The Long Embrace:  Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman (Pantheon, 978-0-375-42351-2) For book groups looking to discuss a work of non-fiction, this title might work.  The reason why I say might is that I am not sure what weight Raymond Chandler carries in the world anymore. When I was a [...]

The last three novels I’ve read weren’t novels. Let me re-phrase that. The last three books I read were not novels, but I read them as though they were novels, and with good reason. They look like novels, they unfold in chapters, they have a narrator, characters, plots, surprises, dramatic trajectory, good writing, insights. I [...]

I am a member of the Art Institute of Chicago.  This week I received the latest issue of the member magazine, and I was intrigued to learn that the Art Institute is establishing its own book club, Reading Between the Lions.  (For those of you who haven’t visited this wonderful museum, you should know that [...]