Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

As I’ve said before in this space, I love the thematic format for book groups. It gives every reader room to choose for themselves and makes each meeting an adventure in discovering new titles. I like how I get to know my groupmates’ personalities by the book choices they make. Our staff group at Williamsburg [...]

October is National Reading Group Month. This program of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) was launched in 2007 “to promote reading groups and to celebrate the joy of shared reading.” Once again, Book Group Buzz  is thrilled to be chosen by the WNBA as a National Reading Group Month partner. Here’s the 2009 list of Great Group [...]

If you’re looking for something different for your book group, follow the Bernardsville Public Library’s Saturday Samplers on its blog.  This group aims to seek out interesting reads beyond the usual discussion fare. This Saturday, they’ll be talking about Robert Curson’s Crashing Through, the story of entrepreneur and Olympian Mike May, blind since age three, whose vision was restored by a [...]

Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal by Julie Metz is one of the nine titles selected by the Women’s National Book Association Reading Group Month committee as “Great Group Reads” for 2009. It’s a powerful memoir, unusually fiction-sounding given the nature of Metz’s story. (Husband dies, she then discovers that he was leading a [...]

If you’re building discussions around the “Great Group Reads”  selected by the Women’s National Book Association  Reading Group Month committee, here are some resources for The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte by Syrie James. The publisher’s site describes the book as “a powerfully compelling. intensely researched literary feat that blends historical fact and fiction to explore the passionate [...]

Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife was a favorite  book group choice, and her newest novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, should be popular as well.  It’s a ghost story involving twins who inherit a London flat which happens to be located next to the historic Highgate Cemetery. Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman praises Niffenegger’s “discerning eye and slyly gothic [...]

In the first three posts in this series, I looked at how to research author information, reviews, and publisher and book seller content, then use these resources in your book group. These basics of book research, however, are just the most obvious resources. A creative book grouper can find dozens of other items to enhance [...]

When I was young, my favorite book was The Guinness Book of World Records. I looked forward to the new edition every year, but my favorite entries were those that never changed. A look at literature suggests that I’m not the only one whose imagination was captured. We’ve already seen siamese twins Chang and Eng turned into [...]

My wife and I have a habit of watching all of the works of a particular actor or actress as a way to see films we have never viewed or to see again films we haven’t seen in awhile. We use the American Film Institute’s great lists as the basis for this slightly obsessive compulsion. [...]

Being the resident Jane Austen person at Booklist, I’m often asked to take on reviewer duties for the slew of Austen-based books (yes, I even reviewed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). The supply of fiction inspired in one way or another by Austen seems like a bottomless cup of tea.   So far, no other author has let loose the same impulse to retell and recycle, although [...]

It’s hard to say goodbye to a book group, even for a short time. But this month I was reminded that it’s harder to go out discussing a book that you feel a little too close to. I knew that September would be my last book group discussion before my maternity leave began, and was [...]

Despite CIA-level layers of secrecy and security, Oprah’s next book club pick has been leaked, according to an article in The Washington Post.  It’s Say You’re One of Them, by Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian-born priest who teaches in Zimbabwe.  The book, the author’s first,  is a collection of five stories set in five difference African [...]

The winners of the second annual Book Blogger Appreciation Week Awards were just announced.  There were nominations in 15 categories, including Best Reviews, Best KidLit Blog, and Most Chatty. In the Best Book Club Blog category, the winner is Books on the Nightstand. Other nominees were 5 Minutes for Books, APOOO Book Club, Book Club Girl, and Every Day [...]

Did you know that this is Book Blogger Appreciation Week? Neither did I, but when I found out I was prompted to pay an overdue visit to Book Club Girl, one of the nominees for Best Book Club Blog. Book Club Girl works in publishing, so she knows books, but she “vows to talk about books from all [...]

Can book groups find useful material on the websites of publishers and booksellers? It’s the essential modern dilemma: There’s good information to be mined, but to get it, you must run the gauntlet of sales come-ons, pop-up ads, and praise that borders on pandering. Is it worth the effort? The answer is yes, but focus [...]

This month our staff book discussion subject was “Bestsellers”. Being the book discussion leader, I decided to reach for a mega-book discussion title that I had not yet read: Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Let’s get the negative off my chest: I did not find the writing style of [...]

Quick! What were the last five books that your group read? Not even close, were you? I’ve been thinking about memories lately, as it seems more and more often, I have to rely on writing things down to save mine. I keep lists of what I’ve read and what I want to read. I use an [...]

When I chose Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes for a recent book discussion, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the discussion itself.  As I read the book, I sensed there would be a strong reaction to it — it was so different from any of the other books we”ve discussed in the group.  But [...]

If food is part of your book group meetings, you might want to get yourself a copy of Literary Feast: The Famous Authors Cookbook from the King County Library System Foundation. Around 90 writers (most of them from the Pacific Northwest) have contributed recipes. For a discussion of a book by Elizabeth Berg you could bake her [...]

Remember when tracking down book reviews was challenging? I can remember spending hours in my university library, slogging through references in Book Review Digest, then spooling through microfilms or paging through rebound journals, then struggling to line pages up in a photocopier. The Internet has made finding book reviews terribly easy. The magic words are simple keywords–the book [...]