Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

I am often on the look-out for debut novels and coming-of-age novels are a huge draw for me as well. I ended up seeing a paperback copy of Nick Dybek’s When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man on display in a bookstore and was intrigued by the description. Beautifully written but understated, Dybek’s debut [...]

BEST NOVEL Live by Night by Dennis Lehane (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow) BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR The Expats by Chris Pavone (Crown Publishers) BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL The Last Policeman: A Novel by Ben H. Winters (Quirk Books) BEST FACT CRIME Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted [...]

I just visited my cousin, Rebekah, owner of the Kohala Divers business in Kawaihae on the Big Island, and she was generous enough to write for Book Group Buzz about her book group. About a year ago a wonderful woman in Waimea, Hawaii, Gale Bates, proposed the idea of a business themed book club in [...]

“There were two worlds here, behaving as if their own was all that mattered.” Despite the fact that we have not seen the sun in months, spring is in the air and that means it is time for the first Greendale Reads book discussion of 2013.  Our title this month was Flight Behavior by Barbara [...]

First I said forget it, absolutely not, I won’t read it.  Then I picked it up gingerly and scanned the first few pages, pausing to roll my eyes in case anyone was watching.  Then I ducked down an alley and devoured it. When I heard about the set up of Jojo Moyes novel, Me Before You (working class young [...]

The All-the-Best-Books Compilation (ABBC) is finished for 2012! I’ve compiled 180 different best-of-the-year lists and awards into one big spreadsheet, in the process finding over 2700 books that were mentioned as one of the best books published in the U.S. in 2012. You can download the final ABBC spreadsheet at my other blogging home, Williamsburg [...]

“I feel like I wasted my entire month!” No, that is not a character in the book The Signal by Ron Carlson.  It was a member of my book discussion after reading The Signal by Ron Carlson. How important is it that members of a book discussion all “like” the book?  I vote “not at [...]

Of late, I have flitted restively from book to book, unable to alight anywhere for long. This happens to me sometimes. If only there were a blog I could consult for book suggestions…hmm…well, never mind.  In the meantime I have my old standby: cookbooks. I need to consult them anyway during the course of each week, so [...]

It has been a month since I posted and I have been so isolated that it feels like I have been floating on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Wait, no it doesn’t.  Because after reading Laura Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken:A World War II story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption I now know what it [...]

Today I released the second of three editions of the All the Best Books Compilation (ABBC) at my other blogging home, Williamsburg Regional Library’s Blogging for a Good Book. The spreadsheet now includes mentions of over 2200 books, compiled into 12 genre and subject categories, noting all of the books mentioned by 120 different authoritative [...]

“If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual’s pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.” Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography At this year’s Academy Awards, Jennifer Lawrence talked briefly about the stigma that surrounds mental illness after her [...]

We recently read Susan Casey’s The Wave in the Oceans Book Group I attend in Olympia. As with most of our book picks, it’s gloom, leavened occasionally by doom. Brace yourselves folks: the oceans are warming up. Yup, it’s getting toasty on here. Seventy percent of the planet is a roiling cesspool of trash archipelagos [...]

From what I can see of the people like me, we get better but we never get well.  – Paul Simon Well, maybe; maybe not. Star Wars was the first movie I saw in a theater. I was six years old, and didn’t understand much of it, except that Princess Leia had the best hair [...]

I just read a book from Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries imprint and fell in love with it, hook, line and sinker. Elizabeth Savage’s short novel, The Last Night at the Ritz, is, as Nancy attests, full of great lines, but it’s also full of witty observations and wonderfully intimate thoughts and stories that shed [...]

Perhaps you have heard of the Mother Daughter Book Club series, and were inspired to start an MD group of your own.  Firstly:  splendid!  Secondly:  I suggest Beauty Queens by Libba Bray (after you read Anne of Green Gables, Pride and Prejudice and Little Women, of course). Tuck into this desert island tale of adventure, [...]

I was trying to figure out an appropriate book group for Kate Braestrup’s memoir, Marriage and other Acts of Charity.  You don’t need to be married to read this book, though I do think it might feel more relevant to a person who is, if not married, then contemplating the married state.  Still, her meditations [...]

A meeting themed around best books of the previous year provides a great opportunity for readers to try a title that they want to read but can’t otherwise fit into the pile. It’s also a great discovery session: As discussion proceeds, everyone who attends discovers more titles to add to their own to-read list. Here [...]

As part of our staff monthly book discussion and readers advisory training, we have a category called series (any book with a number on the spine, actual or metaphorical).  This month it was my turn to be the leader so I selected The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Sometimes getting copies in a timely fashion [...]

Last year I wrote about Hooks and Books, a Teen Book and Fiber Arts Club at The Kansas City Public Library. Teens gather to discuss young adult literature and graphic novels and also learn how to crochet. Why should teens have all the fun? The creative and energetic Youth Services staff at the Central Library [...]

Can you read a musical? Obviously a line-by-line account of the big tap number in 42nd Street isn’t going to give you much insight into why that show works, and the lyrics of most shows just aren’t as profound when they aren’t being interpreted by a skilled performer or accompanied by rousing music. Sometimes reading [...]