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

    Mary Ellen previously mention one book one community discussions and the timing could not have been perfect.  Last night the Greendale Public Library held its spring Greendale Reads and our title was Jemmy by Jon Hassler.  While we have not been very successful in attracting a community wide effort for these reads twice [...]

So it is spring and the award nominations are blossoming like the trees.  The latest to be announced are the Agatha Awards honoring the traditional mystery.  So, what the heck is a traditional mystery?  According to the Agatha Awards Web site (http://www.malicedomestic.org/agathaawards.html), traditional mysteries are  “books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie as well [...]

It’s a young adult book, a work of science fiction, and the first book in a projected trilogy…but your book group, no matter what the age of your members, should give Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games a chance. Don’t just take my word for it: The Hunger Games was the best received young adult work of 2008, [...]

I happen to love a good coming-of-age novel. A bildungsroman, as the German call it. Coming-of-age novels can also be wonderful for discussion. But I got to thinking why I love them so much. For one, there is nothing so transformational in life as the journey from childhood to adulthood. So much can happen, so [...]

Piggybacking on Neil’s recent “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” post, and my book group’s recent readings of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Jose Saramago’s Blindness, I have also noticed that post-apocalyptic fiction is all the rage. Our Teen Center Advisors and Teen Librarians recently weighed in on the trend. They [...]

My last posting on upcoming film adaptations and the books upon which they were based covers films with release dates in the last four months of 2009. Chances are that several of these release dates will shift and that other adapted films will be added to the schedule before the upcoming year is finished, but these [...]

Anyone who runs a teen book group won’t be surprised to hear that teens read differently from the rest of us.  For one thing,  they’re comfortable with different ways to “read”;  and for another,  they expect to participate in what they read. The Young Adult Library Services Association held its first  YA Lit Symposium  in Nashville on November 7-9. The theme [...]

I’ve never broken the golden rule before. If I’m asking people to spend fifteen or twenty dollars for a book, and then asking them to set aside some dozen hours in their busy lives to read the book, I need to know and respect the book from beginning to end. It’s obvious to me that [...]

As I mentioned last week, filmed adaptation of books look more plentiful and promising for 2009 than they have in the recent past. Now is the time to prepare, so your group can read the book before the film arrives. Of course release dates shift, and chances are that many of these films will be shifted to [...]

I’ve read The Hobbit three times, The Fellowship of the Ring twice, The Two Towers once, and I’ve never read The Return of the King. What does that say about me?  As one of the iconic books of our time, The Lord of the Rings is often referred to with a reverence that’s uncritical, as [...]

Part of me wants to torture you by saying things like: You will never forget the scene with the baby octopus. Ever. And believe me, you won’t. I went completely into shock… Okay, but since young Belgian superstar Amelie Nothomb’s Tokyo Fiancee doesn’t come out until the first of January, that would be a mean [...]

  Some months the book is just special. This was one of them. I’ve never read a novel like Arto Paasilinna’s The Howling Miller – and for that alone, simply as a stand-alone, utterly unusual reading experience, the novel won my heart. The superb character of the miller, depicted almost entirely through action and words, [...]

Last week, I experienced something new — an intergenerational book discussion.  I wasn’t the leader — that job went to a friend of mine, a fellow librarian, who organized the activity at the request of a local elementary school principal.  My friend asked me to participate in the group, along with five other adults, mostly [...]

I really need to stop letting myself get so stressed out choosing the book of the month. It wears me down and makes me old. I take it so seriously. When I recommend a book, it means something. I want to be behind the book one hundred percent if I promote it and ask others [...]

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. My library was recently awarded the We the People Created Equal Bookshelf under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association.  Amongst the 21 books that came to our library was both an English language and Spanish language version of the classic speculative [...]

EarlyWord, the Web site that includes Nora Rawlinson’s Give ‘em what They Want blog, has just added a new feature called EarlyWord Kids. Contributor Lisa Von Drasek, librarian for the Bank Street Colllege of Education in New York, started posting last week about books for children and young adults.  Look for this tag on the site: to identify new [...]

  In five years of hosting a reading group, I’ve never seen anything like it. Slowly I watched the faces around the table last night losing their confidence as we waded deeper and deeper into our discussion of Carmen Laforet’s Spanish classic, Nada. It was like discovering you had read the wrong book. One person [...]

  Yesterday two different designers showed me their layouts for the postcard announcing the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Book Club. Both postcards were handsome, and both hammered home to me the same message: these particular books and these particular dates were about to be written in stone. Once the postcard goes to press, I’m committed [...]

  I began reading The Train of Salt and Sugar convinced I would like it, and I was almost right. It has all the ingredients of a thrilling epic movie. Based on a true incident that occurred in 1987, it opens in the midst of the savagely brutal Mozambique civil war, in which no passenger [...]

  Teen novels can be bleak and deal with very complex, heavy issues. Often that’s what teens are looking for–a reflection of the real, adult issues that many of them face. This week I read two popular teen novels for an upcoming training with our Teen Librarians. I read a fair amount of teen fiction, [...]