Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

I’ve been thinking about memoirs again while reading Rosalind Reisner’s new book, Read On… Life Stories. It’s a superb addition to the Read On… series, providing annotated lists of books selected from the best of memoir and biography, with each list focusing on a particular storyline, character type, setting, writing and language style, or mood. Reisner’s book [...]

Those of us who can’t get enough Jane Austen in whatever form can look forward to a new production of Emma on Masterpiece Theatre. The three-part adaptation starts on January 24.

Book a meeting room. Book a meeting room for successive months. Have a positive self help kind of attitude that says “I know lots of people are going to enjoy attending my short story reading group, so I’m going to book the room for the same time each month for an entire year, right out [...]

Even if you haven’t read books by Cory Doctorow, you probably know the name. His blogs, essays, and opinions seem to be everywhere, particularly in regards to digital culture, intellectual property, or technology. Doctorow almost always has an opinion, and whether or not one agrees with him, (like me, you’ll probably find yourself siding with him on [...]

Book Group Buzz has a new blogger, Rebecca Vnuk.
Among her other achievements, Rebecca is the author of two readers’ advisory nonfiction titles for Libraries Unlimited/Greenwood Press, Read On…Women’s Fiction, and Women’s Fiction Authors: A Research Guide.  She was named Library Journal’s Fiction Reviewer of the Year in 2008. The rest of us Book Group Buzzers are thrilled to have [...]

One of the things I like to do with my book discussion group is reserve the last meeting of the year for our annual “Book Chat”.  This is an unstructured discussion that is open to anyone, where the participants come ready to talk about their favortite books of the year.  There are many pluses to [...]

I just walked out of our monthly staff readers advisory session. Our category this month was Historicals and our choice was the very challenging novel by Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange (Morrow, 2001).
I love this type of novel. Its structure is such that you jump from the present into the past. Veiled hints [...]

Can you talk about a book in 140 characters? You’ll have to if you join The Book Studio’s Twitter Book Club. Now six months old, the Twitter Book Club meets online once a month to talk about a recent book. Picks for the past few months have been Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Lorrie Moore’s  A [...]

It’s safe to say that Oprah’s already gone global, but she’s taking on the webiverse with the upcoming discussion of Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan.
On Monday, November 9, a live discussion will be simulcast from Oprah.com, CNN.com, and Facebook. Anderson Cooper will also participate in the conversation with Oprah and Uwem Akpan [...]

Today the Readers’ Advisory Section of the Wisconsin Library Association discussed a great book for our purposes: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.
This book is such a complex overlaying of issues that to try to explain the plot becomes a challenging enterprise. Let me say that it involves Leopold Gursky, an old man now [...]

Here’s a blog concept that voracious readers and book groupers should get behind. Shelf Renewal (http://www.shelfrenewal.com/) is a new project by Chicago-area librarians Rebecca Vnuk and Karen Kleckner. I stole their cheeky tagline for the title of this blog entry. Fighting the stream of publicity for new books that are already getting plenty of attention, [...]

While I’m Falling by Laura Moriarty is one of the titles that has been selected by the Women’s National Book Association as a National Reading Group Month Great Group Read. In this coming-of-age novel, Veronica’s chaotic junior year in college gets even messier when her recently-divorced mother shows up, needing a place to live. Midwest book groups [...]

My wife just made me aware of a new online book club provided by the editors of Real Simple magazine.  Here’s how the club works:  every month, one of the editors chooses four books they consider to be great for discussion and asks readers to vote on them; the title with the most votes wins.  Once [...]

The winners of two major literary prizes, the Man Booker and the Nobel, were recently announced. 
The Man Booker Prize, awarded each year to  the “very best” full-length novel written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland, went to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall , a fictionalized biography of Thomas Cromwell. Wolf Hall’s [...]

The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey is one of the Great Group Reads selected by the Women’s National Book Association Reading Group Month committee. Abigail, an actress, owns the titular London house and lives upstairs with Sean, a struggling Keats scholar.  Abigail’s best friend from college, Dara, is a therapist who who occupies the garden flat. [...]

Hard boiled detective novels and speculative fiction are not common subject matter for book groups, but that’s a dirty shame. Some of the best fiction being written these days is in the genres. A coincidence in my recent reading schedule has left me thinking about books in which these two genres coincide.
I just received Strange [...]

The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist  is one of the titles that has been selected by the Women’s National Book Association as a National Reading Group Month Great Group Read. It’s a dystopian tale about a society in which some people are considered dispensable–in this case, older men and women who are childless. At age 50 for women and age 60 [...]

Appassionata by Eva Hoffman is one of the titles that has been selected by the Women’s National Book Association as a National Reading Group Month Great Group Read.  Described by the New York Times as “intelligent and affecting”  and by the Washington Post as a “serious pleasure,” this novel about an American concert pianist who becomes involved with [...]

I’m always looking for another group to partner with for a book discussion. I have found that groups associated with local arts organizations are one of the best and most receptive groups to approach. The arts organization gets to offer a new activity for members and the library gets to promote programs and services to [...]

A week ago my crime fiction book discussion group started its new season with an author whose work we have been reading, one book each round. Her name is Minette Walters and we have worked our way up to her 2005 title, The Devil’s Feather.
This is a rather challenging story to read as it deals [...]