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

In December, 1944, the Wehrmacht — the German army — was trying to push through the Ardennes mountains in Belgium. Easy Company, of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, was among the defenders in what came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. Stephen E. Ambrose chronicled this, and other Easy Company missions, in his [...]

Okay, so you’ve seen, and this is just a conservative estimate, 1,489,226 television shows and movies based — sometimes exceedingly loosely — on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). But how many literary spin-offs have you read? Adam Roberts, the British science fiction writer and parodist — I talked about him back in March, in [...]

A quick compilation of recent reads before I head off to the holiday party… In “No sex, please, we’re literary!” Laura Miller takes aim at the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, calling it a “sniggering exercise” that “poses as a knowing blow against literary pretension while embodying the most retrograde prudery.” This is the only [...]

One Day, one of the bestselling paperback books  in the UK this year, won the Popular fiction Book of the Year public vote. David Nicholls was up agains some stiff competition, besting Stephen Fry, Hilary Mantel and Jonathan Franzen to take home the prize. Edmund De Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes took the new writer of the [...]

There is no Academy telling me what to do here. If I want to hand out an award for “Worst Use of Female Acoustic Singer-Songwriter Music in an Eat, Pray, Love Knock-off Trailer,” I can. (It would be a hotly competitive category, I can tell you that.) But instead, I’m going to keep this simple [...]

The 2010 INSPYs, the blogger-created awards for inspirational Christian fiction, has announced some winners: General & Literary Fiction Crossing Oceans, by Gina Holmes Creative Nonfiction Evolving in Monkey Town, by Rachel Held Evans Historical Fiction She Walks in Beauty, by Siri Mitchell Thriller/Suspense/Crime Fiction The Knight, by Steven James Speculative Fiction Green, by Ted Dekker [...]

Oh! That’s us. After much sweat, many tears (paper cuts hurt!), and a headbutt or two, we’re finally ready to announce our 2010 Top of the List Editors’ Choice picks. Drum roll, please! Adult Fiction  A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan Adult Nonfiction  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot Youth Fiction The Adventures [...]

This isn’t strictly movie-related, but it does relate to a previous post about Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and it’s just too delightfully weird not to mention it here. According to this article at shocktillyoudrop.com, there is going to be a stage musical based on the novel.  As a fan of the book, and its [...]

Before you ask: no, I’m not talking about the dreadful Nicholas Cage movie from a few years ago (shudder). I’m talking about the original, the classic, the tragically little-seen The Wicker Man  from 1973, directed by first-timer Robin Hardy and written by Anthony Shaffer, author of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Frenzy and Sleuth, the brilliant [...]

…but which is which? Personally, I enjoyed some in both categories of the Huffington Post‘s “Book Videos: 19 of the Best and Worst.” The capsule view of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From may be the best of the lot.