Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

I am often asked where I come up with the titles for my reviews and for my book discussion picks.  This gets especially intense when people want to know where I find “good” crime and mystery fiction titles to discuss.  That question is usually followed with a statement dismissing crime and mystery fiction as a [...]

Here they are!
Fiction:
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)
Nonfiction:
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
(W.W. Norton & Company)
Jane [...]

 
Teen novels can be bleak and deal with very complex, heavy issues. Often that’s what teens are looking for–a reflection of the real, adult issues that many of them face.
This week I read two popular teen novels for an upcoming training with our Teen Librarians. I read a fair amount of teen fiction, but [...]

  For once the Booker judges got it right! We’re all shouting for joy at University Book Store. I’ve read The White Tiger twice. It’s my favorite novel of 2008, and has just been announced as the winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize.
  The author is 34-year-old Aravind Adiga, a former correspondent in [...]

From Madrid, a night train (called, ominously, The Lusitania) will take you west over the border into Lisbon. You can even take this journey in the pages of two books: The Night Train to Lisbon is an enjoyable romantic spy tale by Emily Grayson and also a philosophical meditation by Pascal Mercier.
Lisbon is the final stop [...]

 
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun:  a Memoir of Africa by Peter Godwin  (Little Brown, 2006)  (ALA Notable Book, 2008)
I lost my father in 2006 and there are times where I find myself thinking about him.  Part of the reason is that I am turning into him and worry constantly about how not to be [...]

Many children’s book groups try to stay topical, for example, this month many children’s book groups I know are doing scary books for Halloween or books featuring class elections in honor of the upcoming presidential election. 
I think this article and web slide show recommending children’s books about hard times may be a great way to [...]

  Dunshee House is hosting a discussion of six gay novels. The conversation will last for twenty-five nights. We’re inviting the city of Seattle.
That’s how we’re designing the promotional postcard to launch the new Dunshee House book club beginning in January. Those postcards are going to be everywhere – libraries and health care facilities and counseling [...]

Book group leaders, have you tried discussing The Time Traveler’s Wife?  This intriguing 2003 novel by Audrey Niffenegger isn’t primarily science fiction, as some readers conclude, just from glancing at the title.  It’s really a beautifully written love story dressed in the trappings of science fiction (time travel, specifically), but my instinct is that it [...]

 
Having just written a post stating that few of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio’s books are available in English, I visited Norah Rawlinson’s Give ‘e What They Want and learned that, in fact,  five titles are available in  translation in the U.S. The five are The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts, The Prospector, Wandering Star,   Onitsha,  [...]

There was talk (perhaps wishful) around the Booklist office that this year’s Nobel Prize might go to Margaret Atwood or Philip Roth. Instead it went to a French writer that none of us has read, or even heard of.  Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, 68, was cited by the Swedish academy as  an “author of new departures, [...]

Speaking of the right book at the right time, I was fortunate enough to stumble across the French bestseller, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, in a bookstore, and pick it up by virtue of its title and its publisher, Europa Editions.
But what really grabbed me, when I turned it over in my [...]

When I assemble my book group reading lists each year, there are invariably books on the list that I have already read. I pretty much always reread them when the time comes, but every once in a while I cheat–I skim, I read old notes, or rely on memory. I even admitted to my group [...]

Welcome back to the literary homage to my honeymoon in Spain and Portugal. Last week, we looked at books set in and related to Barcelona. This week, it’s on to the capital, Madrid, but let’s start with a few books that apply to all of Spain.
Giles Tremlett is a British journalist who has lived in [...]

 
How to identify those next books that your book group will want to talk about? One great source is IndieBound (previously Book Sense), which describes itself as “a socially conscious movement in support of independent businesses and shopping locally, starting with indie bookstores.” The Indie Next List, published monthly, is based on favorite handsells–those books that booksellers [...]

I’ve been peeling off stickers. Lots of stickers. Forty-five of them to be exact, one by one, shiny silver and slightly bigger than a quarter. They’re fiercely determined to stick to the covers of my new releases, all announcing the same thing, “Compliments of the Publisher.” No book leaves the showroom of the Pacific Northwest [...]

I take a lot of guff for extolling the virtues of Entertainment Weekly as a readers’ advisory tool when I conduct workshops. I always said that my dream job is to work for them. They have intelligent and insightful things to say about books, particularly books that aren’t getting enough attention.
EW has employed one of [...]

It happens. A book you’re dying to read turns out to be less than you expected. That’s just part of reading – that’s just part of life – but it’s still a comedown. So my second guilty pleasure of the week turned out to be not so much of a pleasure, after all.
  Rutu Modan [...]

The Circular Staircase by Mary Robert Rinehart (Bobbs-Merrill, 1908)
Back on September 7th, Ted Balcom asked “Do We Neglect Authors Once They’re Dead and Gone?”
I am about to venture off to Bouchercon: the World Mystery Convention in Baltimore.  A brilliant friend of mine named Roger Sobin decided it would be fun to do a panel in which the [...]

Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff is Chicago Public Library’s One Book, One Chicago pick for fall, 2008.  CPL has made some  interesting community read choices; fiction  selections have included a mix of classics (Pride and Prejudice,  To Kill a Mockingbird) and some titles that haven’t been discussed to death, like The Ox-Bow Incident and The Long Goodbye.  They’ve [...]