Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

A thirty-year-old Swiss author obsessed with finding prostitutes in Egypt goes on several uncomfortable searches through the sexually-repressed, Islamic city of Cairo in Florian Zeller’s short French novel, The Fascination of Evil, coming out in English translation next month from Pushkin Press. Martin Millet has been flown to Cairo to speak at a book fair, [...]

In the book groups I attend, we’ve developed such a routine that our members sit in the same chair at every meeting. Woe to the newbie who parks her carcass in a spot that’s TAKEN!
For the most part, I think these routines are a good thing: they show a level of familiarity and comfort with [...]

Next week my book group will be meeting to discuss The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett. After reading Bennett’s delightful, enchanting novella, I cannot help but wonder if such an entertaining confection of a story will be discussable.
What makes a book discussable has been pondered on this blog before. Often groups bemoan having to read [...]

For our monthly staff book discussion and reader’s advisory training we read Jodi Picoult’s Change of Heart.
Picoult has been incredibly popular recently in our library to the point where we made a special effort to get two fresh copies of all of her titles. I went out to the shelves just now and there is [...]

I want Ann Hodgman to attend my next book group.  In this week’s New Yorker, Hodgman has published a set of 12 questions that are suitable for any book club and any book, whether  you’ve read it or not.
Start attendees off with Question 2, asking if the book is fiction or nonfiction and requesting support [...]

If your group likes nonfiction, the experts at the extremely valuable Fiction_L have updated their list of nonfiction that reads like fiction.  Here’s a sampling of  2008/2009 titles.  The complete list, which you can find in the Fiction_L archives,  has two parts: 2003 and newer titles, and earlier titles. 
Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey through His Son’s Meth [...]

The Informers might be a little too much for a book club. It’s a new novel from Colombia by Juan Gabriel Vasquez coming out this August, and no one could say it was effortless reading. It takes a bit of work. The writing style is very elegant and complex, the sentences long, multiply-claused, Proustian affairs [...]

Random House UK has launched ReadersPlace, an “online book club community.”  In addition to a book of the month and a live chat with its author,  the site offers ways for book groups to network by creating profiles, reviewing and rating  titles, and posting pictures and videos of their discussions.  Not much here yet in the way of [...]

Our staff book group at Williamsburg Regional Library made biographies our theme this month. Reading on themes is perfect for a staff group, as it exposes us to a variety of different titles which we can then share with the public. Biographies work well in this format: It’s fascinating to get highlights of a dozen different lives [...]

The lunchtime book group, Downtowners, at The Kansas City Public Library, met recently to discuss Hellfire Canyon by Max McCoy. While the Spur Award-winning paperback prompted plenty of conversation, no six-guns were drawn between conversatin’ readers.
 
I started the discussion by asking attendees what they thought was meant by ‘western novel’ since none of them had [...]

 
Though when we think of summer and books the term “beach read” generally comes to mind,  New York magazine  recently proposed a mix of  nonfiction and “a few realistic novels” in “What to Read This Summer.”  Here are the suggestions:  
 
 
May
The Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky
Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
How to Sell by Clancy [...]

Check out the May 25 New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs column, “Book Club,”  by Ann Hodgman, providing discussion questions for book group members who have not read the book.

 
In fifty years of reading, I don’t remember ever encountering a book quite like The Photographer. Which is why I’m choosing it as the June book club selection for the University Book Store in Seattle.
 
It’s an oversize, gorgeously-colored, imitation graphic memoir of twenty-nine-year-old French photographer Didier Lefevre’s three-month journey on foot in 1986 from Peshawar [...]

 
 
Back on May 1st, I told the tale of how the young adult novel Jemmy by Jon Hassler was selected to be our Greendale Reads title.  We had 25 adults show up for a lively discussion on this title but we had to wait a few weeks to see how the young adults would handle [...]

Laila Lalami’s Secret Son is destined to become a book group mainstay.
It’s elegantly written, complex, told from multiple perspectives and captures the political corruption and the gulf between the haves and have-nots in contemporary Morocco.
Youssef El Mekki has lived with his mother in a one-room house in the slums of Casablanca all of his life. [...]

I want Stephen King to join my book group. At the very least,  I want him to assist in selections.  His short list of summer reading from the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly has more than a few gems suitable for summer discussions. Thoughtful and compelling titles that will generate conversation but keep that [...]

The latest endeavor of the Adult Reading Round Table (ARRT) here in Illinois is a quarterly literary fiction book discussion organized by two members of the Steering Committee for the enjoyment and enlightenment of any of ARRT’s 100+ members who may care to participate.  You guessed it   – I’m one of the two organizers, and I actually [...]

 
I swore I’d never read another ghost story. Since 9/11, actually, I notice that I only read realistic fiction. Fantasy no longer interests me. And I certainly don’t have time to be reading novels that are nearly 500 pages long. I don’t have time to plow through 400 pages and then discover myself facing a [...]

I’ve been staring at the empty white monitor so long that when I close my eyes, I still see the cursor blinking. I just caught myself making motorboat noises by running my finger over my lips. This is particularly unhygienic business when one has a spring cold, in particular a left nostril that seems newly attached to some deep [...]

 
 
Years (ok:  decades) ago I used to read a lot of science fiction.  I will never claim that I was all that enamored with the science, but I loved the fiction.  A good story must have an adventure mixed with a sense of wonder and let the science fall where it may, as far as [...]