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 stand corrected about groups tackling larger books and even series. There are groups out there taking on series, even of the doorstop variety. For fantasy readers and book groups I wanted to share my recent discovery. Tor.com has two current threads in which both George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books are being [...]

The last 15 minutes of every Adult Reading Round Table Steering Committee meeting are reserved for reading recommendations offered by the committee members to each other.  It’s a great way to learn what your colleagues are reading and what their reactions are to these books – and at the same time, pick up some ideas about [...]

While BGB isn’t typically the place where epic fantasy series are discussed, since most book groups don’t want to read doorstops (let alone series comprised of five doorstops so far with two more planned), I just had to throw this out there. George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire aka [...]

I have been having my own Ray Bradbury reading streak of late and was pleased to discover that there has been something of a Bradbury revival out there. For one, Ray Bradbury just turned 91 and writer Alice Hoffman wrote a very nice piece for the LA Times about Bradbury to mark the auspicious birthday [...]

I finally found time for Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker-Prize-winning first novel, The White Tiger, and it’s easy to see why the book received so much praise. Books with unreliable narrators make for fascinating group discussions, and Balram Halwai, the titular White Tiger, is one of the most cagy cats you’ll ever encounter. Born into poverty [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Last week my book group met to discuss Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling. I was a little nervous as this was a book I requested for purchase to the Book Group Collection. It is not your typical book group book either, so I was not sure what my group would think. A week prior I [...]

A search for “Guernsey” shows no fewer than 15 posts here on Book Group Buzz about Mary Ann Shaffer’s and Annie Burrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. What can I say, I’m slow. Here’s sweet sixteen. There were certain words that kept popping up in descriptions of Guernsey that kept me at [...]

Last week my library book group discussed Ann Patchett’s first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars.  The main reason we decided to examine this book is that several members of the group had greatly enjoyed reading and talking about Bel Canto, another of Patchett’s novels.  (Many of you may be familiar with Bel Canto, since [...]

The long list for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, one of literature’s premier prizes, was announced earlier this week. Although most of these titles are still awaiting American distribution, book group leaders should seek them out in hardback in preparation for forthcoming release in more club-friendly formats. These are likely to be among the year’s most buzzed-about books. [...]