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

Like most book group leaders, I’m always looking around for something interesting to do with my faithful attendees to keep the gathering fresh and fun and unpredictable. There have been plenty of great suggestions in this blog for how to spice up the meeting when chat has taken a u-turn into dullsville. I’ve used most [...]

Book group leaders who have access through their libraries to the superb reading resource database NoveList are probably already familiar with the book discussion guides it offers.  Those who don’t know about NoveList should check with their libraries to find out if the library makes it available and if they can view it (there is an [...]

  For the spring conference of the Wisconsin Association of Public Librarians, I led a book discussion on Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.  There is nothing easier than doing a book discussion for librarians who lead book discussions.  When I train, I always talk about the perfect book discussion or what I refer to [...]

Last week I highlighted book group support web sites where discussion leaders can find reading guides and discussion questions for their book club selections. Another excellent source for these are the publishers themselves. Most major publishers of literary fiction have figured out that distributing reading guides is a good way for them to increase word-of-mouth and [...]

With the help of Book Group Buzz (or possibly, sniff!, some other minor resource) you’ve selected the next choice for your book group. Where can you go to get more information? Many publishers make it easy these days, with discussion questions and author interviews included in the back of the book. When that fails, we [...]

I’m dipping into my handy bag of book tricks again as I prepare for another workshop on book groups: facilitating, feeding, and tattooing. One of the gems I like to draw attention to is A Year of Reading by Elisabeth Ellington and Jane Freimiller. Published in 2002, this trade paperback-sized treasure is great for folks [...]

Recently I gave a workshop on Book Group Basics–starting, facilitating, choosing titles, that sort of thing. Don’t look at me like that. There are still folks out there who don’t belong to a book club and think it might be nifty to start one. One of the print resources I bring with me is The [...]

  The Long Embrace:  Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved by Judith Freeman (Pantheon, 978-0-375-42351-2) For book groups looking to discuss a work of non-fiction, this title might work.  The reason why I say might is that I am not sure what weight Raymond Chandler carries in the world anymore. When I was a [...]

Those reading guides that publishers provide in the backs of trade paperbacks are an interesting lot of pages, aren’t they? If you read the guide, you run the risk of encountering some spoilers (“At what point did you realize that Hortense was completely crazy and pouring her heart out to a shrink instead of her diary?”) [...]

Many groups start by reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but I think To the Lighthouse is another great one to start with. It focuses on the Ramsey family and their summer guests in the Hebrides. Here are some discussion questions I came up with when I could not find any elsewhere: 1. What distinguishes Woolf [...]

There are two things Librarians don’t do on the job. The first is read. Sorry. Gotta dispel that myth right now. And if you still believe that one, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn tucked in the side pocket of my overcoat to sell you. The second thing Librarians don’t do is take a lunch. [...]

Okay, I must have memoirs on the brain. But the film version of Marjane Satrapi’s powerful graphic novel memoir (or “graphic memoir”—a more apt term must exist or be created) is coming out shortly and is already generating critical acclaim. In 2006, The Seattle Public Library chose Persepolis (1 & 2) as our “Seattle Reads” [...]