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

If you lead a book group I’m sure you’ve heard something like this: “Why is everything we read so dark?”, or, ”I don’t want to be depressed, why don’t we read something fun?” Just as people complain about sadness in Oprah’s selections, readers have probably voiced similar thoughts in your group. While I think we can agree [...]

Among their best of 2010 coverage, NPR includes this article identifying five books as good book group choices. As usual, they’ve made some thoughtful selections. Peter Carey’s Parrot & Olivier in America would be interesting to read in combination with its inspiration, Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America, or perhaps Bernard Henri Levy’s nonfiction work, [...]

I will admit it.  I am poetry impaired. To challenge my shortcomings, I tackled the latest volume in the Best American Poetry series.  The rest of the poetry world can enlighten me, but one of the delightful discoveries I made for myself is that a lot of poetry (or at least a lot of poetry [...]

What makes us a reader? How do we raise a reader? How do we destroy a love of reading? If it is lost, how is it regained? I recently read Daniel Pennac’s Better Than Life. I bought it years ago and then was reminded again by David Wright about it and picked it up. It’s [...]

Christie Hodgen’s Elegies for the Brokenhearted has lots to offer for discussion.  There is her unusual story structure:  a life, told though deaths.  The novel is broken down into five long stories, all about people who have touched the life of the narrator, Mary.  As we move through the stories, Hodgen deftly weaves Mary’s  coming-of-age [...]

Today Oprah announced her latest book club selections–Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Speaking as an old-school English major, I’m glad to see some Victorian classics added to the mix.   Today was also the day Jonathan Franzen finally appeared on Oprah’s show to talk about his novel Freedom, which [...]

One of the things I do to shake up my book groups a little is select a young adult title. Aside from looking over the National Book Award winner and nominees in the Young People’s Literature category, I ask for suggestions from teen lit fans, and I check this blog, GreenBeanTeenQueen. Sarah is a Teen [...]

By this time, many Book Group Buzz readers have probably already read and discussed Jeannette Walls’ best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle.  But my library book group only recently tackled this well-written and extremely disturbing tale of a woman who miraculously survived terrifying childhood abuse; and we found plenty to talk about. Several participants wondered if Walls’ [...]

Julia Phillips’ book James Tiptree, Jr.: the Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon is a biography of a writer with a man’s name and man’s persona, who unbeknownst to her science fiction readers and editors, was actually a woman. Many readers will pass this book by because they assume it’s only of interest to fans of classic [...]

I will admit that I am never a big fan of other people handing me books and telling me to “read this.”  A review–fine.  Handing me the sacred object and all the guilt that comes with ignoring someone else’s investment–not fine. But when a Library Board member does it, I feel really, really, really guilty [...]

As Neil stated, it’s that time of year again. List making time. I like lists. I like making them. I like reading them. I like looking for the unusual items on lists I won’t find elsewhere. I find the year-end top 10, 20, 100, billion books of the closing year lists useful. This is book [...]

My first encounter with David Nicholls was with his 2004 book, A Question of Attraction. It’s a funny but somewhat inconsequential book about a socially awkward college student who falls for the glamor girl at university while failing to appreciate another girl on the Quiz Bowl team for whom he’s a better fit. While Attraction wouldn’t [...]