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Has your book group discussed Abraham Verghese’s big, drama-stuffed novel, Cutting for Stone, yet?  From what I’ve been hearing, it’s currently a very popular choice with book clubs, even though it weighs in at well over 600 pages.  Because of the book’s length, I assigned it to my group in November for our January selection [...]

Some writers manage to capture our present in a timeless way and one such writer is Stewart O’Nan.  Last Night at the Lobster envisioned America’s economic collapse and celebrated the quiet, unsung struggle of so many to make their way in a time of uncertainty before the recession really hit. Stewart O’Nan’s latest novel, The Odds, is [...]

Knowing that many readers today have been trained by our societal clock to never luxuriate in any enterprise, I almost hesitate to recommend a book for discussion that took me a week to read. But when the book is Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, it is easy.  The basic plot of this murderless detective [...]

John Lithgow’s memoir, Drama: an Actor’s Education, is a refreshingly frank and focused take on the familiar actor biography. While there are a few tidbits here about the many famous people he’s shared a stage or screen with, and a little bit of backstage gossip, the bulk of Lithgow’s book is not about name dropping [...]

Here are the top five vote-getters so far in historical fiction from the 2011 All-the-Best-Books Compilation. You can see all 91 titles in this genre that have received votes or review any of the other genres by downloading the full ABBC spreadsheet via Blogging for a Good Book at Williamsburg Regional Library. Tied for fourth [...]

The Women Who Dare book group at Kansas City Public Library likes to discuss books that are written by women and that focus on women’s relationships, concerns and issues. This is a group that reads women’s fiction with depth and literary quality. Here’s the list for the coming year. January: When She Woke by Hillary [...]

Some times publicity works in reverse. I am probably the only person on this site who has nor either read Cold Mountain or seen the film.  I have no excuses, just stating the facts.  When I read the reviews for this novel, I knew the appeal factors contained within those raves made this book a [...]

Today, I came across an interesting article about reading at the Harvard Business Review of all places. It explores how reading novels can make one more successful in the business world. I’m not terribly interested in the business aspect, but the fundamental argument of the piece is that reading novels makes one more empathetic to [...]

Facilitators looking to add some international flavor to their reading groups should have a look at the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. This prestigious award will be presented at the annual Jaipur Literature Festival. The award’s short list was announced last October and on January 21, the second annual prize will be given in [...]

The compilation of all the best-books-of-2011 lists and awards continues, and the latest version of the resulting ABBC (All the Best Books Compilation) can be reached via my other blogging home at Williamsburg Regional Library’s Blogging for a Good Book. While the compilation is a work in progress, trends are beginning to emerge, and I [...]

Ali Smith’s There but for the is a novel begging for discussion. For one, it features a truly peculiar predicament and an elusive main character. It starts with a dinner party, rather ordinary if snootish dinner party in Greenwich, a suburb of London which also hosts a famous observatory and the site of Greenwich Mean Time. [...]

I don’t think I understood how much work goes into selecting discussion group titles until this year. I had to put together lists for three different book groups and do my best not to duplicate titles since some of the book group members like to drop in on all the book groups. However, I do [...]

As a young man I know that I was a literary snob.  I claimed that I had read all the classics with an emphasis on the early superheroes.  My favorites were d’Artagnan from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, Robin Hood and King Arthur. As an old man, I now realize that my claim to having [...]

This installation can be found at the entrance of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art. The image was taken by Hanif Shoaei. Whenever I hear someone complain about the weeding libraries do, I call to mind gorgeous works of creativity such as this.

In my spare (ha!) time, I organize a Con. I’ve been with MarsCon in Williamsburg for eight years now, wearing many hats (usually my trusty bowler), for the last two serving as Programming Chair. Our best known guest this year is S.M. Stirling (whose books, especially those about The Change in Nantucket or Oregon, would make a [...]

The folks at The Millions are at it again, with a couple of strong recent posts. If you prefer to look back at 2011, try their Year in Reading, which asked a long list of authors, including some well known ones like Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan, Charles Baxter, Philip Levine, and Jonathan Safran Foer, what [...]

One would hope that in a nation of immigrants, defined by the immigrant experience, we would get it right.  The evidence does often point in the opposite direction and certain voices are able to capture the dysfunctional attempts to bring people into American society and find a use for them. Unfortunately, on occasion, the use [...]

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge has become a book group darling and discussions about the book have been shared here many, many times. So it came as quite the surprise to me when I engaged a reader in a discussion this weekend to learn that they stopped attending book groups because of Olive Kitteridge. This reader [...]

I just discovered a Canadian book award that I think I’ll be following closely from now on. The ReLit Award recognizes the best new work in three categories, Fiction, Poetry, and Short Story, released by independent publishers. The award was founded by Kenneth J. Harvey, a biblio-Renaissance man, and the prize is given at the [...]

I’m in a bit of geek heaven today because of a new online discovery. The British publisher Gollancz has launched a new website (http://www.sfgateway.com) to distribute classic works of science fiction and fantasy as ebooks. That’s pretty nifty, especially if you’re a fan of Golden Age SF that might not be available new in print [...]