Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Every once in a while a book comes along out of nowhere, grabs me by the eyeballs and drags me through it.
Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh was like that. The Chicago projects were not an interest. I’m not a sociologist. And suddenly I care passionately how crack operates in this neighborhood, [...]

One of the aspects of my job that I like the most is seeing what all the book groups in our system have chosen to read. I’m always amazed at how few titles are duplicated over a ten location system.
The KCPL Women Who Dare book group is only two years old, but they have grown [...]

First attempts at book group discussion can be awkward. Heck, if you’re like me, your hundredth book group can be awkward. When I was first getting started, I’d make comments that I thought were insightful, but the group would react as if I’d made armpit noises at the Mozart society or talked about my last [...]

Many of us who live in the Chicago suburban area weren’t surprised when the Nichols Library in Naperville was recently named a Five Star Library by Library Journal.  The library has been consistently voted No. 1 in DuPage County.  What has startled us, however, is the news that the library has decided to eliminate its [...]

The Reading Group Toolbox for the 2009 Seattle Reads featured title, My Jim by Nancy Rawles, is now available.
In the Toolbox you will find discussion questions for My Jim, discussion questions for Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which inspired My Jim, an essay on Twain’s controversial classic, as well as an author interview with [...]

So many of my friends raved about this book and I am so glad I picked it up. It truly swept me away into its world, and I didn’t want to let go at the end.
Miles O’Malley lives in Olympia, Washington and is an avid beachcomber—he spends hours, day and night, exploring the tide [...]

So it is spring and the award nominations are blossoming like the trees.  The latest to be announced are the Agatha Awards honoring the traditional mystery. 
So, what the heck is a traditional mystery?  According to the Agatha Awards Web site (http://www.malicedomestic.org/agathaawards.html), traditional mysteries are 
“books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie as well as [...]

The life-numbing poverty of Cuba never ceases to be appalling. Achy Obejas, who translated Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into Spanish, doesn’t flinch from recording her country’s misery in her deeply compassionate new novel, Ruins. She depicts an island world where a man’s pride and integrity are constantly tested, because anyone will do anything for [...]

No book of 2009 has been as stunning and exhilarating as Waltz with Bashir, and our book club will be reading it next month.
This is keeping in mind that two excellent new novels come out in March, and either one would make a fine March book club selection for University Book Store in Seattle.
Yoko [...]

My wife gave me an interesting gift for Christmas, and I thought you book discussion lovers might like to know about it.  It’s a collection of questions on little white cards, contained in an attractive lucite box.  This product is called Table Topics; Questions to Start Great Conversations, and it’s one of a series — this one being [...]

Do you listen to audiobooks?
I do.  In fact, I’m addicted to them.  I particularly listen to them in the car, whenever I’m driving somewhere.  I started doing it when I was still working and spent two hours every day commuting.  I’m retired now, but I can’t break the habit because I really enjoy listening to [...]

Chris Cleave’s Little Bee begins with a perfect first line:
“Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl.”
Thus begins the story of Little Bee, a Nigerian girl in a detention center in England who escaped Nigeria by the skin of her teeth after oil companies came in and slaughtered [...]

Waterland is one of my all-time favorite novels. And while I have enjoyed other novels by Graham Swift (Ever After was another good one), none have quite measured up to Waterland.
I had high hopes for Tomorrow. It reminded me of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, which in retrospect I liked more than I initially [...]

How do you discuss a book when it is not at all what the readers expected? This was the conundrum that faced the KCPL Downtowners book group at yesterday’s meeting. We gathered to talk about Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou and the book did not fail to meet expectations, but it didn’t meet [...]

It’s a young adult book, a work of science fiction, and the first book in a projected trilogy…but your book group, no matter what the age of your members, should give Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games a chance.
Don’t just take my word for it: The Hunger Games was the best received young adult work of 2008, making [...]

I am always looking for a fun activity to do with any number of book groups. They make great ice breakers for the attendees and also give me an idea of who my readers are. Those creative folks over at Tales from the Reading Room and Shelf Life have started a book ‘meme’. Certainly suitable [...]

  I’d heard so much about him, I decided he was overrated before I even read the first sentence. Then I read the first sentence. And the next, and the next. So this is Aleksandar Hemon.
  Well, it’s been a long time since I read anything with so many astonishing, brilliant moments. I’m halfway [...]

If anyone can explain Buddy to me, she can. 
  I’ve always been fascinated by her earlier book, Animals in Translation, and have often, during a slow moment at the bookstore, opened it at random just to prove to myself that every single page contains a startling insight. She’s never proved me wrong. Her rapport [...]

It was originally my intent to write extensively about the selections in my unified list of the best books of 2008, compiled from over 80 sources. But as I look through the list, even this book-crazy blogger is daunted. Over 1700 books were mentioned in these best-of-the-year lists. Since I don’t read exclusively from new books, I [...]

When Englishman Will Truesdale arrives in Hong Kong in 1941, he is swept up by Trudy Liang, a beautiful woman of Chinese-Portuguese background, who draws him into her world of parties and frivolity. As a Eurasian, Trudy straddles the world of the Chinese and the Europeans, and yet is not truly a part of either. [...]