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Earlier this month my book group discussed Dave Egger’s Zeitoun. A work of nonfiction, Zeitoun takes a look at Hurricane Katrina and how one Syrian-American man and his family are swept into a terrible storm of a different kind in the aftermath of the natural disaster in New Orleans. The book fostered a wonderful discussion [...]

My wife and I usually go to the movies on Friday night, so an essay at The Millions struck my attention this morning. It touts the new Library of America compilation of the film criticism of Pauline Kael, The Age of Movies: Selected Writing of Pauline Kael. It also argues that passionate debate about films is yet another item [...]

I am sure our colleagues in Southern Indiana will rise to the defense but the new collection of connected short stories by Frank Bill with the name Crimes In Southern Indiana is not going to be used to attract tourists or new residents to that area. Each story in this collection is brilliantly presented.  They [...]

Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow has a great first line: “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist.” As soon as I read the first line, I wanted to know this girl’s story. Narrated by two voices, Silver Sparrow tells the story of a secret, ‘outside’ daughter, Dana, and Chaurisse, the ‘real’ daughter who is unaware of [...]

What scares you? In the staff book group at Williamsburg Regional Library, we were asked to choose books that might scare us. Here are some of the adult and young adult titles that our readers brought to the meeting. Melissa likes Victorian stories, so she chose a collection of ghost stories from that era written [...]

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”   Joseph Heller, Catch-22   Last night we held our monthly crime and mystery fiction discussion and as I have previously mentioned, we are doing a mini-genre study this year with the group.  On this night we tackled thriller and suspense fiction.   As benchmark [...]

I’ve written previously about August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, but having just finished Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, I had to promote that work specifically. Wilson’s cycle has a play for each decade of the 20th century, and this is the entry for the 1910s. The action takes place in a boarding house, and concerns the arrival [...]

Here are the answers to the Misheard First Lines quiz. The misheard part of the line is marked in orange, the correct substitution in green. If you haven’t looked at the quiz yet, jump here first. 1. Many years ago, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon [...]

Here’s a little fun for your weekend. Below are ten famous first lines from novels, but in each case, the line has been garbled in translation. For each of the ten lines, see if you can identify the novel from which it comes and how it was misheard. I’ll post answers next week. 1. Many [...]

Let’s get ready to rumble! The latest Reading Group Choices book has just arrived on my desk and I’ll be using this to help select the book group titles for next year. RGC is in it’s 18th year and I have to say that I’ve kept every single one of these collections. I go back [...]

Which will make it onto your reading group lists next year? The National Book Award Finalists for 2011 were announced yesterday in Portland, OR and while there are some surprising omissions, there are also some surprising nominations. Click through any of the above links for the full lists of nominations in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and [...]

Back on September 18th I recommended The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle and mentioned how it was the first part of September’s crime and mystery book discussion at my library.  As our benchmark author for our Great Thinking Detective subgenre, it worked out quite well in the discussion.  The most oft repeated [...]

I recently read a book that has been lingering in my mind for weeks. The themes that Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden explore somehow resonated with me. Madden’s novel is about the long-term friendships and family relationships, the ways in which we do and do not communicate with one another and all of the [...]

Only published every other month, Bookmarks magazine will never rival Booklist or other major review journals for the number of books that it reviews, but for years now, without much fanfare, this magazine has been quietly doing one thing very well: aggregating reviews. Rather than focus on producing their own reviews, the folks at Bookmarks [...]

Way back on March 21, 2010, I sang the praises of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Because the subject matter is 9/11, I knew as soon as I read it we would be discussing this at the Greendale Public Library around the tenth anniversary of the event . So our Fall [...]

I can’t stop thinking about Olive Kitteridge. Olive, the book written by Elizabeth Strout (for which she was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), and Olive, the woman — a large-boned, blunt-talking retired schoolteacher living in a small Maine town — who dominates the pages of Strout’s engrossing novel.  Olive Kitteridge is the book [...]

With his simple, elegant style, a generous dusting of artful platitudes, and deep exploration of human nature, Leif Enger is a bit of a throwback. His writing evokes two of my favorite authors–John Steinbeck and Wallace Stegner–as well as other novelists from even earlier times. His first book, Peace like a River, was an unusual tale of American adventure that looked closely [...]

I just finished the book that is bound to be one of the buzziest books this fall–Chad Harbach’s debut, The Art of Fielding. It’s a book with larger than life characters written with such warmth and compassion that you come away imbued with a sense of wonder. I finished the book so satisfied–with the characters, [...]

This week I’m wrapping up my ongoing series of ideas for bringing the buzz back to a book group that’s gone flat. Here are the final four ideas in my list of 36. 33.  REVISIT AN OLD FRIEND Re-reading is an underappreciated art, and there are several ways to practice it in your book group. [...]