Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

How often have you come across a book that offers too much to discuss in an hour or an hour and a half (whatever the length of your discussion session)?  A book that completely overflows with interesting characters, incidents, and plot twists, as well as brilliant philosophical observations, thought-provoking insights, and just plain great writing?  Such a [...]

 It’s the time of year for bests, and Amazon has released its Best Books of 2008, consisting of the Top 100 Editors’ Picks and the Top 100 Customer Favorites.  The only title to show up among the first 10 picks on both lists is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, no doubt because of the Oprah connection. Here [...]

I had an English professor in college who told us there were four reasons for reading. Reading for information is self-explanatory, from history to how-to. Reading for the joys of literature – the art of character, plot, language. Distinct from that was reading to escape reality, from romantic time-filler to genre fantasy. The fourth reason [...]

Fa la la.
What’s a book group to do in December? Half your members won’t have time to read a book, and if you add to their task loads, many will ditch the group altogether, taking one of the other, less-demanding, holiday invitations they’ve received.
You can just pack up the group for a month and come back in January, [...]

Here’s an idea for a book group. Keir just sent me news about an original Web series to air on CBS.com called Novel Adventures. It’s centered around a group of friends who belong to a book club; but in each episode, instead of meeting to talk about the book, they go off (in Saturn cars, [...]

We hadn’t discussed a nonfiction book in a while, and because the first Tuesday of the month fell on Voting Day this year, I was a little nervous about what the turnout might be. It turns out, the book group was a welcome distraction; the room was packed and discussion was as lively as ever.
We [...]

The hardest book-of-the-month to choose for our book club and our bookstore always comes at the end of the year.
It can’t just be the best book. It needs to be short enough to read during the most socially-crowded month. It needs to be upbeat enough that it works with the holidays, not against them. [...]

I’m standing in line to vote at 5:30 am so I can be reasonably assured that I’ll get to work on time when it happens. It always happens when I have to wait for a while.
No one wants to talk any more about the issues. But they don’t want to stare into their quickly cooling [...]

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.
My library was recently awarded the We the People Created Equal Bookshelf under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association.  Amongst the 21 books that came to our library was both an English language and Spanish language version of the classic speculative fiction [...]

I’d never heard of him. Have you? Suddenly, out of nowhere, someone with the unlikely name of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio is the Nobel Prize-winner for Literature, top dog in the literary world of 2008, and nobody I know had ever heard that name before or read a single sentence by him.
  When the University [...]

This week I learned that the bookshop where I got my first job after college is closing. The Jeffery Amherst Bookshop will be closing its doors this year after its owners, Howard and Joy Gersten, approaching their 80s, finally retire.
The Jeffery Amherst Bookshop and College Store, situated on Pleasant Street, across from the lovely greenspace [...]