Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Here are two interesting book-group related items I’ve come across recently.
In 2003, the BBC had a Big Read program to identify the Britains’ best-loved books. The winner was The Lord of the Rings, but more to the point for book groups is  BBC Big Read book group guide.  Besides offering tips on how to organize and [...]

The Kansas City Star has developed an interesting twist on the community-wide book group. Since 2000, the Star’s FYI Book Club has been profiling books, interviewing authors, gathering diverse readers, hosting discussions and then reporting the process. It’s one of the most popular activities/features in the newspaper.
In 2003 I was invited to be one of [...]

Were you one of the many folks who loved the National Book Award-winner, Three Junes?   Sure, I read that one, too. It had some great scenes. I remember that the first June was a good story and a nice set-up. And the second June was the heart of the novel, and the part everyone loved, [...]

After finishing John Dufresne’s most recent novel, Requiem, Mass., I reflected on some of its parallels to one of his earlier novels, Love Warps the Mind a Little.  I suppose there aren’t so many similarities to speak of, although both novels are about writers.

I know some readers who are bothered by writers who continually write [...]

I just saw this Guardian article in which American comic book writer and editor Danny Fingeroth rates his top 10 graphic novels. Here are Fingeroth’s top 10:

Maus by Art Spiegelman
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
The Quitter by Harvey Pekar and Dean Haspiel
A Contract with God by Will Eisner
It’s a Good Life, if You Don’t Weaken by Seth
Stop Forgetting [...]

The announcement of the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn took me back to my college days, when reading his books seemed to be part of a student’s introduction to the wider world.  A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich still shows up on school reading lists, but I wonder how his longer novels such as The First [...]

The pile for September was twice as high as the pile for August, new fall releases of every color and style, thick and thin, from all over the world. The pile was actually too high. I was afraid my cat might accidentally knock it over, so now there are two piles for September. Well, that’s [...]

Films adapated from novels usually take lumps from bibliophiles. Sometimes this criticism is unfair. The book does come first and becomes fixed in a certain way in the mind of each reader, mental pictures that cannot be recreated for each of them by one film. The novel is often an internal medium that is difficult [...]