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When book groups make the news it’s for one of two reasons.  Either Oprah is reading or men are. Anytime Oprah opens a cover, publishers salivate. Book groups across the nation are about to make an overnight bestseller. Anytime men gather to talk about reading material that does not require power tools, it’s time to [...]

Over at his blog, author Nathan Bransford has some suggestions for the survival of bookstores that he’s culled from the way music stores have responded to the digital revolution. They all make sense and we’ve seen some of them in practice already. The indie bookstore in my town, Rainy Day Books, is putting their energies [...]

For those of you, who like me, maintain a free account there, recent upgrades at the Goodreads reading social networking site are worth noting. If you’re not tracking your reading with Goodreads, the new improvements might convince you to give it a try. The Goodreads site, like Library Thing and Shelfari, allows one to create [...]

I am in the midst of my section of an online class in readers’ advisory in public libraries. My section focuses on book-talking and book groups. One of my assignments is to have students participate in an online discussion of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee, which is also the 2011 Seattle Reads selection. In addition to [...]

Every month our staff meets to discuss a book from one of many genres that are on our reader’s advisory book discussion outline.  This month the topic was classic fiction and our youth librarian was the leader.  She selected Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. In discussing a title like this, one of the issues [...]

In Lee Smith’s The Last Girls, a group of college co-eds take a river rafting trip down the Mississippi  River in 1965. Nearly thirty-five years later, four of them gather together for another trip, this time on a luxury riverboat instead of a raft. The women tell each other what’s happened in their lives since [...]

Last week I listed the top ten other narrative nonfiction titles in my 2010 Megalist. Today, let’s take a look at the biographies and memoirs that have received the most mentions in best-of-the-year lists and awards. 1. Just Kids, by Patti Smith (34 votes to date) We know them as a rock goddess and a [...]

Recently The Kansas City Public Library held the first in this year’s Read it/Watch it book and film series. We opened with The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, which was also a featured title in the KCPL Winter Reading Program, Altered States. After a very lively discussion of the book on a Tuesday night, the [...]

There are plenty of ways to keep up with what’s happening in book clubs using social media tools (this blog being one of them ). I wanted to share just a few of the Twitter feeds I follow that tweet what other book groups are doing to get conversation started or forthcoming books that will [...]

When the Adult Reading Round Table’s Quarterly Literary Fiction Discussion Group met recently to talk about The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, more than half of the participants admitted they found the book confusing.  The novel employs multiple narrators, and frequently the readers weren’t sure who was doing the talking. It was revealed during [...]

The fourth, and near final update of the 2010 Megalist, my compiled spreadsheet of all the major best-of-the-year lists and awards nominees, was posted for download today. The Megalist now includes 121 different sources and 1,925 different books. Download a copy (in Excel) to see which sources voted for each of these titles. Today, I’d [...]

My book group’s recent discussion of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses took us in some interesting directions. Translated from the Norwegian, Out Stealing Horses is narrated by Trond Sander, a 67-year-old man who has moved to a remote region of Norway on the border of Sweden. He has moved to be alone, to have the [...]

If your group enjoys mystery or psychological suspense, then The Poison Tree would be a great pick.  In the vein of early Ruth Rendell, Erin Kelly weaves a tale fraught with drama, questions, and characters abound. It’s the mid 1990s, and relatively shy college student Karen is blown away when she meets gregarious free spirit [...]

The Millions has a great preview of books due out in 2011 that describes 76 different forthcoming titles. There’s plenty to look forward to: Alexander Theroux’s biography of Edward Gorey, a writer and illustrator whose twisted Victorian stories helped me develop my taste for the tartness of black humor, is out for the first time [...]

Looking for tales of love gone wrong/lost/misunderstood/ending in bloodshed? Look no further. Bobby Rex’s Greatest Hit by Marianne Gingher–Everyone’s in love with small-town-boy-who-made-good-on-the-pop-charts Bobby Rex. Everyone, that is, except Pally Thompson. Bobby Rex wrote a love song about Pally that hit number one and the fan in Pally’s small town of Orfax, NC. No one [...]

(Note: I usually gravitate toward puns in the titles of my posts. There were so many to use here with Mary Roach, but they would all just be wrong.I’m just sayin’… We now return to our regularly scheduled post.) Mary Roach is an author I turn to when I want to be both educated and [...]

Recently Neil has been doing a great job of letting us know which books published during the past year are winding up on the critics’s “best” lists.  What I’m curious about is whether our Book Group Buzz readers are planning to use any of these titles in upcoming book discussions.  Or maybe you have already?  [...]

I’ve just posted the latest revision of my 2010 Megalist at my other blogging home, Blogging for a Good Book. The compilation continues, now including 83 best-of-the-year lists and award nominees. Over 1600 books are compiled into the list, which will continue to be updated until its completion sometime in March. The Megalist is an [...]

Barbara Mead of Reading Group Choices asked me to pass this along: It’s one-of-a-kind: a list of favorite DISCUSSIBLE books for book groups! Though there are many lists of books and many book awards, not all of the books on them make for the kind of lively, fun, interesting, thought-provoking, unforgettable discussions that reading groups crave. [...]

My favorite English professor is back. Thomas C. Foster is also admired by blogger Misha Stone. We’re both big fans of two of his other books, How to Read Literature Like a Professor and How to Read Novels Like a Professor. We like his breezy, accessible writing-style and his keen intellect in analyzing literature for [...]