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My friends at the Reader’s Advisor Online Blog have collected a nice set of links to features about new books for this summer. I’m sure all of you will be just as happy spending an hour clicking through them as I was.

I just returned from being an instructor at a Roads Scholar workshop in Green Lake, WI, called Just in Crime with Theodore B. Hertel, Jr., Libby Fischer Hellman and Michael Black.  The six day experience includes lectures, workshops, film showings and various entertainments found at the Green Lake Conference Center that have nothing to do [...]

The Goodreads website has launched a site-sponsored online book group. While many libraries and other websites have attempted to sponsor such groups, most of the attempts I’ve heard of have been ineffective because the groups have not had a wide enough audience to get off the ground. But Goodreads has attracted plenty of devoted readers, [...]

One of my groups just finished discussing Ellen Klage’s Portable Childhoods (thanks for the awesome suggestion Neil!).  This group happens to be extremely informal, often spending just a few minutes on the books we read and then spending the rest of the time just chatting about anything and everything.  Mostly the participants just like getting [...]

Our staff book discussion genre for June was Regional Fiction and the leader selected a book from our state:  Driftless by David Rhodes.  What a delight this book turned out to be. Set in the southwest corner of Wisconsin where the glaciers did not go, the region gets its driftless nickname from landscape which proves [...]

A book that makes one reconsider a familiar classic while providing entertainment in its own right is always a great choice for a book group. Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey is just such a work. It returns the Homerian epics of The Odyssey and The Iliad to their roots, as oral accounts [...]