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

I finally watched 2009′s A Christmas Carol, written and directed by Robert Zemeckis, with Jim Carrey as a motion-captured Scrooge. I was seriously impressed. Despite what some critics have said, I think the film’s visual style perfectly suits the material. Charles Dickens’ 1843 story is a fantasy about ghosts, time travel, and Christmas. It can [...]

We’ve all met a few characters in books that we’d like to hang out with, but Peter Brown one-ups us all. Here he is being interviewed by the character he writes and draws himself, Lucy the bear, from the imperatively-titled You Will Be My Friend: And, because the best gifts in life are free, here’s [...]

Blame my dentist for this one. I was strapped into the chair. While he rooted around in my gaping maw, we were jawing about movies, and he mentioned he’d recently let his 12-year-old son watch The Exorcist (1973). The boy found the movie, and I’m quoting here, “lame.” The Exorcist is, of course, based on William [...]

Some things just seem perfectly designed for you to love, like there was a high-level meeting in your brain where all the things that get you geeky were focus-grouped in elegant synchonicity to come up with your ideal product. The animated TV show Archer is just that product for me. It’s a perfect storm of cartoons, spies, [...]

A while back I briefly mentioned Fatherland, the 1994 television movie based on Robert Harris’s 1992 thriller about a German police detective investigating a homicide (and uncovering a high-level conspiracy). I recently watched the movie again, and I’d forgotten just how gripping it is. The novel is set in 1964. Preparations for the celebration of [...]

The children’s book community was taken aback yesterday by the news that Amazon had purchased Marshall Cavendish Children’s Books. People wondered if this meant the end of MC print and what the whole purchase meant for publishing in general. Of course, anything can happen, but Amazon has been publishing  adult books for quite a while now, [...]

The connection between medicine and literature is a long and noble one, including the works of Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, to name the two most readily cited. Women and men become doctors because they want to help and heal others, which are acts of compassion, and compassion is born of the imagination. To feel [...]

(Has anyone ever gone over to your bookshelf, picked up a book, and said, “What is this doing here?” This series of blog posts explains some of the more curious findings on one Booklister’s home shelves.) Way over on my lowest, leftmost shelves (right next to the cookbooks, for some unsanitary reason), rests Sex, the [...]

Today, in honor of ALA’s “Winter Event” that takes place in mere moments, let’s play a BTT game: Spot the typo! Fastest responder gets an e-high five from me. Modelland, by Tyra Banks BONUS: Name the narrator and you’ll get also get an e-wink, as well as the much-coveted “Duh!” award.

It’s always a pleasure to check out the judging panel for each year’s Eisner Awards (if you don’t know what those are, they’re often referred to as the Oscars of the comics industry). In recent years, more and more people associated with the library world have been on this panel, and this year is no [...]