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In the latest print issue of Entertainment Weekly 9/2/11 , you will find a great example of readers’ advisory on the Letters page. It starts with “If You Love The Help…” and two readers of EW made the same suggestion for a readalike, Like One of the Family: Conversations From a Domestic’s Life. EW staff [...]

It’s time for part six of my big list of ways to bring some variety to a book group that’s become too mundane. 18. GOOD DEEDS, GOOD READS How about combining some service with a book group meeting? There are several ways you might provide useful help. See if a local childrens’ hospital or retirement [...]

You may have already come across this recent ABA article on bookstore and library partnerships, but it’s worth putting out there again because it really drives the point home – if you are lucky enough to have a bookstore in your community, see how you can work with them to promote your events and serve [...]

I’ve spent the last five days preparing for, riding out, and then trying to pick up after the passage of Hurricane Irene. Here in the Hampton Roads of Virginia, we’re becoming wary of “I” storms. Eight years ago, just as I started at Williamsburg Regional Library, we got walloped by Isabel. For a while, Irene looked like [...]

Along with all the great new fall fiction, book group facilitators can look forward to fascinating nonfiction that will please devotees of “the real story.” Steve Paul, senior writer and arts editor at the Kansas City Star, added his two cents to the crop of autumn reads with a round-up of the most intriguing nonfiction. [...]

With Labor Day right around the corner, I’m feeling a little wistful that summer will soon be over. But with Labor Day right around the corner, I’m also feeling artistic, musical, and literary anticipation. Because the Fall Arts calendar will soon be in full swing. New theatre, new exhibits, new opera and symphonies, and the [...]

I have found someone I would like to take out to dinner and talk to about book discussions.  His name is Alan Jacobs and he is a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois.  He is the author of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.  Although this book only speaks directly [...]

At a recent workshop on leading book discussions that I presented to graduate students at Dominican University, the talk turned to online book discussions, and participants enumerated some of the strengths and weaknesses of this form of sharing ideas about books. Here are the “pros” of this format, as defined by the group: 1.  Gives [...]

I was wandering around the stacks in my library when I found a book that I had read years ago and liked very much, Charity Girl by Michael Lowenthal. It is historical fiction and would be a good choice for book groups interested in little known pieces of American history. Charity Girl is a heartbreaking, [...]

The Children’s Book Council of Australia recently named the winner in the Picture Book category, Hamlet by Melbourne artist Nicki Greenberg. It’s a graphic novel based on the Shakespeare play. Yet the author is encouraging parents to review her graphic novel before giving it to very young children. It may be a picture book, Greenberg [...]

Here’s part five of my ongoing series listing ways to shake up your book group with a little variety: 14. READ LOCAL–THEN VISIT If you live near a location that has been used as a setting in a book, consider combining a site visit with your discussion. You could hold the meeting on site, discuss the [...]

In Kathleen Tessaro’s fourth novel, The Debutante, artist Cate leaves New York after a disastrous affair to work in her aunt Rachel’s London auction house.  When she is paired with handsome Jack (on the run from his own demons),  sparks fly but their baggage doesn’t seem to be a matched set.  As they work together [...]

Wendy McClure’s memoir of her love and search for the reality behind the fiction of an American classic of childhood is a great idea for a one-time theme for a book group. McClure chronicled her Little House quest in The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of ‘Little House on the Prairie‘. Readers [...]

Recently over at Slate, Nathan Heller asked an intriguing question: Why do readers like book clubs? Indeed, what do readers see in gathering, books tucked under arms, brownies balancing precariously, as they march up the driveway for an evening of edification? Heller ponders this point as he takes his audience through a concise history of [...]

My science fiction and fantasy group met on Tuesday to discuss the theme of aliens, and it seemed that half of us had picked out books by John Scalzi. If you haven’t tried Scalzi, he’s a writer with a great throwback style, full of action, adventure and humor, reminiscent of Robert Heinlein and some other [...]

The Daily Beast just created a list of what President Obama has read since the campaign trail in 2008. It’s an interesting list and might be a good trajectory for a book group to take. Do click on the link as the book stack graphic is quite nice!

What can happen in a chance meeting on a London train? Which moments in time will be the ones to change your life or alter its course? How can a connection be momentous for one person and a sidenote for another? Tessa Hadley asks these questions and more in her understated character-driven novel, The London [...]

Here’s the latest in my series of suggestions for spicing up your book group: 11. GUILTY PLEASURES We’ve all got them–for one meeting, flaunt them. Ask your participants to bring books that they love, but that they know aren’t the finest literature ever published. This is a particularly good choice if your group normally reads [...]

When something comes along outside of my normal reading range, and I can’t stop thinking about it, that’s a pretty good clue that it would make a good book discussion pick.  Such is the case with Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. It’s pretty much the opposite of what I normally like to read – [...]

Over at NPR, genre experts Gary K. Wolfe, Farah Mendelsohn, and John Clute winnowed the history of science fiction and fantasy down to a list of 237 well-loved titles and series. The list was controversial in some quarters, because it excluded short stories (which removed the best work of a good chunk of the classic era [...]