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The Lefty Award is my favorite Mystery novel award. It’s given to the best humorous mystery by the attendees of the annual Left Coast Crime convention. Book groups with a penchant for crime fiction will get a kick out of these current winners and nominees and past winners and nominees. Just because the book is [...]

The announcement for a new anthology of crime stories couldn’t come at a better time. As you may have gathered, May is Mystery Month at Booklist and Short Story Month everywhere. In August, fans of both can enjoy an anthology with a great title: Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense. [...]

When I give workshops about book groups the #1 conundrum presented during the Q&A is “how do we get more men to attend?” My stock answer is always, “Men are reading. But most of the men I know don’t want to schedule a time to talk about what they’re reading. The book conversation is happening [...]

A post at Book Riot, “The 42 Traits of the Perfect Reader,” has been making the rounds on the internet. It’s intended as a satire of snooty readers, but may also generate whimpers of sympathy for some of its points, especially from those who are feeling a bit beleaguered by the continued diminution of highbrow [...]

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 [...]

In light of the historic news we are all waiting to hear from our Supreme Court, it might be a good time to focus some attention on the Lambda Literary Foundation and it’s recently announced list of Awards finalists. The Lambda Literary Awards recognize “the best lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender books of the year [...]

The end of compilation is within sight now on the best books of 2012. You can download the ABBC spreadsheet with all the results from over 120 different sources at my other blogging home, Williamsburg Regional Library’s Blogging for a Good Book. The final edition will add about 40 more sources and will be available [...]

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 [...]

I’m continuing coverage of the best books of 2012, not just as noted in one source, but as mentioned in many authoritative sources, then organized into a spreadsheet on Williamsburg Regional Library’s ABBC: the All-the-Best-Books Compilation. The link will take you to my other blogging home Blogging for a Good Book, where you can download [...]

Short story collections can work well for book groups. They’re rich in content, but most often quick to read. Even if participants don’t finish the entire book, they can still talk about the stories they did complete. There are plenty of good options for approaching discussion: assign each reader to introduce a different story in [...]

I’ve released the first edition of my All-the-Best-Books Compilation (ABBC) for 2012. It compiles mentions of books in best-of-the-year lists and awards from 66 different sources into one spreadsheet with 12 different fiction and nonfiction categories, showing how many times each book was mentioned and which sources mentioned each. You can learn more about the [...]

Loaded words, I know. The greatest challenge I hear from book group leaders is getting more male readers to attend. Aside from snatching dudes wandering the DIY section of the stacks and plopping them in the middle of a book chat, facilitators consider the reading selections to entice men to the book group. If historical [...]

This is the sort of book non-readers (who are secretly jealous) give to readers. The non-readers may think they’re nudging their reader-friends, but really, we readers are just a teensy bit smug because we get all the in-jokes. Judging a Book by its Lover by Lauren Leto is a snarky fun look at the reading [...]

He knows fiction, he knows poetry, and he knows when a customer has garbled the name of an author. He’s Ben McFall, Fiction Manager at The Strand Bookstore in New York City, a biblio-mecca for many librarians, and especially readers’ advisory librarians. Mr. McFall is profiled in today’s New York Times. Library staff will appreciate [...]

They’re reading some interesting things over at the Read On… blog for Lexington Public Library. Just like we all can’t resist visiting each others libraries when we travel, I can’t resist looking at the suggested reading blogs maintained by libraries on the web. The staff combine pithy annotations with appeal elements and then throw in [...]

The Kansas City Public Library and The Kansas City Star continue a successful book discussion partnership with the last winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Historical fiction is a popular genre choice for this group, and most readers were very pleased with The Song of Achilles even [...]

For many people, October marks the start of autumn. For book group members, October is the start of lively conversation and colorful reading. October is National Reading Group Month, the annual book celebration from the Women’s National Book Association. In addition to celebrating all that is pleasurable in talking about reading, the WNBA also supplies [...]

A local administrator, Dr. Jeffrey Carroll, started a book group for boys who were reluctant readers a year ago at Williamsburg, Virginia’s Lafayette High School. Last year’s club read The Boys of Winter, a recounting of the “miracle on ice” 1980 U.S. Hockey team that stunned the world at the Lake Placid Olympics, then culminated [...]

I intended to write about something else today, but in browsing through the latest book news, I found myself so captivated by a new toy that I think I will highlight it instead. Book Psychic is a service provided by the Portland Public Library in cooperation with LibraryThing. It provides automated book recommendations for readers [...]

We’re all adults here, right? So forget the eye candy of the summer box office, the films that traditionally get readers excited are released in the fall and winter as the Oscar race heats up and more intelligent fare hits the multiplex and the art houses. Meetings that combine a book and a flick are [...]