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

On occasion it can be rather depressing to think that we are making no progress in solving any problems in society.  For me as a reader, this was driven home when I realized that A Clockwork Orange was written in 1962.  The same terrible issues raised when Anthony Burgess wrote this novel could be debated [...]

The Known World is the first (and so far, only) novel by Edward P. Jones.  It was published in 2003 and received high praise from many critics.  It then went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize.  But is it a good book [...]

I’ve continued to update my 2010 Megalist, my annual compilation of best-of-the-year lists. This week’s additions included some big players, such as the New York Times and The New Yorker. The 2010 Megalist is up to 60 sources, with more to come, and can be downloaded from my other blogging home, Blogging for a Good [...]

At a recent meeting of the Adult Reading Round Table book discussion group, one of the members mentioned that she can only select titles for her seniors book club that are available in regular print, large print, and audiobook formats, and this factor sometimes limits her choices if she is looking for a particular kind [...]

I’m always looking for something fun to share with my book groups and Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous Frauds by Melissa Katsoulis is the latest. Katsoulis takes this subject seriously as she examines the financial, cultural, and professional effects literary fraud can have on an author and the publishing industry. The James Frey [...]

I’ve been browsing through Bernard A. Drew’s Literary Afterlife. It’s essentially a bibliography of works in which one author has used the characters created by another.  It strikes me that it might be fun to devote a book group meeting to reading such pastiches. Don’t get me wrong. For the most part, these are not [...]

Are we ourselves, or our we a product of our families? Is life nature vs. nurture or is it more complex than either? The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard is the story of two girls, born on the same day, to entirely different families. Ruth is sensitive and artistic and can’t seem to understand her [...]

Along with my colleagues David Wright and Abby Bass, I am co-teaching a class online at the Information School at the University of Washington called “Adult Reader Services in the Public Library.” In preparing my lecture on book groups, I have reflected on how much I have learned from the greater community of readers’ advisors, [...]

I decided to read Lynne Reid Bank’s popular 1960s novel, The L-Shaped Room, after it kept popping up as a book I might like as I searched online. Customer reviews made it sound like a good read. I knew that it was about pre-Pill, pre-abortion England and that in it a young girl becomes pregnant [...]

The National Book Critics Circle announced their nominations for the 2010 Award finalists in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction last night. Four of the five fiction titles should look familiar for turning up on other Best of/award lists. Comedy in a Minor Key is the dark horse title. Written in 1947 by Hans Keilson, it was [...]

As with my last post, The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst  is another book discussion book with a potentially frustrating, and possible unreliable, narrator.  In this case it is novelist Octavia Frost who is walking through Times Square one day on the way to deliver her new book to her agent when she sees on the [...]

The book group crystal ball post of a couple of days ago is incomplete. One book I left out is A Discovery of Witches, bowing in February from debut novelist Debora Harkness. This rich and mesmerizing story of a scholar witch who tamps down her powers in pursuit of academic success and the vampire geneticist [...]

One of the lions of American literature, particularly southern literature, passed away Thursday at the age of 77. If your book group has not sampled the works of Reynolds Price, then now might be a good time to consider them. Price was a Rhodes Scholar and a long-time professor at Duke University. As a writer, [...]

This year I will be sitting in for one of KCPL’s favorite book group leaders of one of KCPL’s most lively book groups. Gayla wanted to take a little break and I was happy to step up and handle biblio-chat duties for her. Our Tuesday night group is Women Who Dare and these readers like [...]

Have any of you tried Book Movement? I don’t know what rock I’ve been living under, but I just came across it recently.  It looks good, but I haven’t bothered to sign up for a (free) membership yet.  Anyone want to give it a plug? They do have an impressive list of over 13,000 titles [...]

You don’t have to consult more than one source to get the results of all of the best-books-of-the-year lists in one spreadsheet. For the third consecutive year, I’ve been compiling all of the results, counting up all the votes, from all of the major review sources into one “megalist.” So far, I’ve compiled about 50 [...]

When a reader is frustrated with the behavior of the characters in a book can that lead to a dismissal of the book?  Is this misguided aggression against the author or is the reader mirroring the behavior of the characters that they are reading about?  How enjoyable can a book be when it has multiple [...]

Either I’m getting to know the right publishing reps, they’re getting to know my reading tastes, or it’s just going to be a bumper crop of good stuff for reading groups in 2011, take your pick. But I violated my cardinal rule of “thou shalt not cart home conference swag cause it hurts your back [...]

Print or E, people still like to talk about what they’re reading. Some booksellers in the Chicago area are concerned, but others are not letting the new formats keep them from doing what they love–connecting readers with good books and other readers to talk to. They’re looking for ways to sell the new e-formats directly [...]

Like many book club leaders, I’m always on the lookout for news of what other groups are doing.  Whenever I visit my mother-in-law in Urbana, Illinois, I make a point to check her local newspaper to learn about the activities of the book clubs in her area.  Recently I discovered that the Champaign Public Library has encouraged [...]