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Way back on December 22, 2008, I posted a column on The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett.  Hammett is one of the newer additions to The Big Read but the title selected for that enterprise is The Maltese Falcon.  My local mystery fiction book discussion group had me do my PowerPoint on the history of [...]

The list of 100 Notable Books has arrived at the New York Times website. It won’t appear in print until next weekend, December 6th. As usual, you’ll find very little genre fiction and the nonfiction is mostly confined to biography, history, and political works, but if you accept those limitations, it’s always an interesting list. The annual [...]

One of my groups goes out to eat after each meeting. We have to vacate our library meeting room by 9 p.m. It makes for a late meal, but by continuing at the restaurant, we turn a rushed evening into a leisurely event. This practice has three major side benefits. First, if off-topic conversations start during the [...]

I was recently browsing through the new Libraries Unlimited catalog and came across an announcement for an upcoming book that sounds like it would interest many Buzz readers.  It’s called Reading Women: A Book Club Guide for Women’s Fiction, and it will be published in January. The publisher states that “the popularity of romance fiction has [...]

“Are we led to dislike these characters or feel compassion toward them?” This is a question I came across in some book discussion material I found on the Internet, and it has stayed with me as I have continued to read books for discussion programs and prepare for the meetings.  It has always seemed to [...]

Rebecca’s entry on book chats is timely for me as our most recent mystery and crime fiction book discussion changed its normal format for this month. Normally, we all read the same book and operate as a typical one group, one book, discussion.  This month we changed two aspects of our normal procedure. First, we [...]

I’ve been thinking about memoirs again while reading Rosalind Reisner’s new book, Read On… Life Stories. It’s a superb addition to the Read On… series, providing annotated lists of books selected from the best of memoir and biography, with each list focusing on a particular storyline, character type, setting, writing and language style, or mood. Reisner’s book [...]

True life adventure stories are popular selections for book groups and usually get selected as “guy reader” bait. These adrenaline-rush narrative quests appeal to some male readers for the action and to some women readers for the soul-searching introspection. Last week I led a book group for Kansas City’s Junior League. They had chosen A [...]

Those of us who can’t get enough Jane Austen in whatever form can look forward to a new production of Emma on Masterpiece Theatre. The three-part adaptation starts on January 24.

Over at Points of Reference, Jessica is getting ready to start a mystery book group at her public library in January. She’s going to be using Read ‘em Their Writes as a source and is wondering if there are any other good selections tools out there. Funny you should ask, Jess. I recently put together [...]

Book a meeting room. Book a meeting room for successive months. Have a positive self help kind of attitude that says “I know lots of people are going to enjoy attending my short story reading group, so I’m going to book the room for the same time each month for an entire year, right out [...]

Even if you haven’t read books by Cory Doctorow, you probably know the name. His blogs, essays, and opinions seem to be everywhere, particularly in regards to digital culture, intellectual property, or technology. Doctorow almost always has an opinion, and whether or not one agrees with him, (like me, you’ll probably find yourself siding with him on [...]

Book Group Buzz has a new blogger, Rebecca Vnuk. Among her other achievements, Rebecca is the author of two readers’ advisory nonfiction titles for Libraries Unlimited/Greenwood Press, Read On…Women’s Fiction, and Women’s Fiction Authors: A Research Guide.  She was named Library Journal‘s Fiction Reviewer of the Year in 2008. The rest of us Book Group Buzzers are thrilled to [...]

One of the things I like to do with my book discussion group is reserve the last meeting of the year for our annual “Book Chat”.  This is an unstructured discussion that is open to anyone, where the participants come ready to talk about their favortite books of the year.  There are many pluses to [...]

I’ve been browsing my way through Sarah Johnson’s Historical Fiction II: A Guide to the Genre, one of the latest entries in the Genreflecting Advisory series from Libraries Unlimited. These big books are a browser’s paradise and ought to become familiar reference tools for in-the-know book group leaders as they seek out good group selections. [...]

I just walked out of our monthly staff readers advisory session. Our category this month was Historicals and our choice was the very challenging novel by Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange (Morrow, 2001). I love this type of novel. Its structure is such that you jump from the present into the past. Veiled [...]

My wife and I have been reading Shadowlands aloud the last few nights. Many of you know this work from the film featuring Anthony Hopkins and Deborah Winger, but William Nicholson’s play is about events late in the life of C. S. Lewis. Lewis never liked “Clive Staples.” When he lost a beloved dog as a boy, he [...]

I facilitate three book groups, but I’m also a facilitator for hire, except I don’t charge for it. Occasionally I’m participating in as many as six or seven book groups in a month. The groups are all different, but they share some similarities. They are all made up of women, they want to read a [...]

A few days ago, I put forth my miserly opinion that Christmas literature, for the most part, is ho, ho, horrible. I even asked you to convince me otherwise, and in response, fair readers, not one of you was stirring, not even a mouse. But I know book groups, and you will not yield to [...]

Christmas goods have replaced the Halloween gear in the stores, and so I suppose the season is officially upon us. I feel compelled to issue a word of warning. You’re going to be very tempted in December to assign holiday theme reading to your book group: a nice little book in the spirit of the season. [...]