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-terer. And I’m not twitting you. You can follow my unvarnished, 140-character musings on life, the universe, and everything (related to books, that is) at http://twitter.com/Booklist_Keir. I still have mixed feelings about this stuff–I really do fear that we’re getting so glued to our social media that we are losing our ability to think, reflect, [...]

Responding to my historical fiction query, Carol Kubala, a librarian in Connecticut, writes: I believe historical fiction will always have an audience. Whether it’s hot or not, I’m not certain. Many of the books on Booklist‘s Top 10 Historical Fiction are getting high circ in our library. I truly don’t know if our readers are [...]

I received a couple more responses to my historical fiction query over the weekend–and found a few in my junk mail folder from last week. Is “histfic” (just kidding) still hot? Karleen Mauldin writes: You bet it is! My children and I love historical fiction! Home educators, most of whom probably do not subscribe to the [...]

Arrived at work this morning to find an e-mail from Keith Michael Fiels, ALA’s executive director, announcing the death of Judith Krug, the founder of Banned Books Week and the director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom. There’s a brief note on AP (“Judith Krug, founder of Banned Books Week, dies“); click “read the rest of [...]

In yesterday’s issue of REaD ALERT, I asked, “But is historical fiction still hot?” I’ve gotten a wide variety of answers, which I’ll try to group into some kind of logical order. My apologies if I haven’t included your reply or if I’ve cut too much from it. (I’ve taken the liberty of linking book titles [...]

A recent issue of Shelf Awareness had a really interesting Q&A with Greg Ames (Buffalo Lockjaw). This was my favorite part: One day, by mistake, I took home an Edgar Allan Poe collection from the bookmobile. I was in third grade. Reading Poe was like learning a foreign language. I understood every third word. After [...]

April is National Poetry Month and the month that brings us Earth Day, so what better time to read nature poetry? Poetry has always drawn its tropes and metaphors from the living world, from the cycle of the seasons to the character traits of animals to the powers of the sun, the moon, and the [...]

 . . . so far. Via Galleycat, Colson Whitehead offers a sample of his proposed poetry series Tony Danza Miracles: Haiku Inspired by Popular Television Programs. This one is a poem for the hero of 24. Release Jack Bauer! Quickly they reconsider Arrest Jack Bauer!

Now this is smart: a used books merchant doing read-alikes. A while ago, I got an e-mail from AbeBooks touting their “End of the World Literature – Post-Apocalyptic Fiction” list. While it includes many titles that I included on my “Core Collection: Before and after The Road,” there are titles that I either missed or [...]

In a Los Angeles Times article about homework (“Some schools are cutting back on homework,” by Seema Mehta), Eileen Horowitz, head of the Temple Israel of Hollywood Day School, had this to say: “As adults, if every book we ever read, we had to write a report on — would that encourage our reading or discourage [...]