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

A few weeks ago, I looked at the best received biographies and memoirs of 2011. This week, let’s examine other narrative nonfiction. These results come from the All-the-Best-Books Compilation (ABBC) that you can download in full from my other blogging home, Williamsburg Regional Library’s Blogging for a Good Book, where we’ve just posted version 3.0, [...]

February 1st was the 50th anniversary of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ken Kesey was just out of the Stanford creative writing program, trying to make ends meet, when he took a job as a night orderly at a mental ward. The time there inspired Cuckoo, his epic novel of individualism and oppression that [...]

Let’s continue looking at the top vote-getters in the 2011 ABBC, today examining the speculative fiction category. I’ll focus on the top four, perhaps returning to this category at a later date, as it seems to be receiving more attention than ever in this year’s best-of-the-year lists and awards. As usual, the latest full ABBC [...]

The Downtowners book group at Kansas City Public Library is the fastest growing book group at Central. The group members do a great job of talking up the group among coworkers and friends, and they are very welcoming to new readers. They are an eclectic group of readers and have always been open to anything [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

While trolling around for older books I could suggest to community book groups I recalled a book blog I enjoyed very much. The Neglected Books Page. A recent visit reminded me of a classic author I’ll be sure to dust off and start promoting to library patrons. This blog has been in operation since 2006 [...]

Maggie Stiefvater’s new book The Scorpio Races may be a young adult fantasy, but it has everything I look for in serious adult fiction. Stiefvater takes the various Irish and Scottish myths about water horses and turns them into a page-turning, atmospheric novel. In the book, the capaill uisce are dangerous, flesh-eating horses that emerge [...]

On the first day of a fresh year, I’m offering up three debut novels that have book group appeal. Compelling stories, discussable points, and realistic characters make these books fine choices for a reading group. Gardens of Water by Alan Drew—Two families of differing faiths and cultures come together in Turkey in the aftermath of [...]

If there’s still room on your 2012 reading group lists, give some consideration to these outstanding titles on audio. Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson and narrated by Graeme Malcolm. A layered literary mystery full of dark charm and dry wit. Malcolm’s voicing of an aging actress on the verge of dementia is [...]

The majority of my reading during a year is for book groups. I manage three regularly scheduled groups and guest facilitate for community groups, local businesses and area libraries whenever asked. As Mary K. Chelton likes to say, “Have mouth, will speak.” I’ll add this addendum, “Have eyes, will read.” At the end of each [...]

When Yeine Darr is summoned from the far north to the city of Sky, she learns she is heir to the throne of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Every young girl’s dream, yes? Well, not so much… Yeine quickly learns that only the truly ruthless survive the political infighting in Sky, and to win the battle [...]

Last week, I spent several hundred words bemoaning the failure of many book groups to take on longer books, and outlining the reasons why I find that problematic. This week, I’d like to take a more positive approach, looking at some of the ways your group can bring longer books back into its meetings. The [...]

I’ve posted the link to the first edition of my 2011 All the Best Books Compilation (ABBC). This is my fourth year of compiling all of those different best books lists and awards into one convenient sortable spreadsheet where you can see how many different mentions each book received from over 150 authoritative sources. The [...]