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

According to recent polls by Harris Interactive, Americans’ favorite genre is crime fiction and their favorite book is the Bible. I’m sure Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007) could make a one-liner out of that, but I’ll just posit my suspicion that not everyone who picked the Bible has read it cover to cover. Here’s the [...]

I’m reading Thomas Kohnstamm’s Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics & Professional Hedonism (Three Rivers). Kohnstamm, bitten early by the travel bug, has an early-life crisis (at the time the book takes place, he’s still in his twenties), walks away from his job, and flies to Brazil to [...]

Or should that be “how-to-read books”? In the Independent, D. J. Taylor’s review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works mentions the “very considerable critical sub-genre: the literary user’s manual.” Which includes: How to Read a Novel, by John Sutherland (2006) How Novels Work, by John Mullan (2006) Fifty-Two Ways to Read a Poem, by Ruth Padel [...]

Trying to catch up on a few older items today. The National Book Critics Circle’s “Best Recommended” list is now “Good Reads“–but the new list is still susceptible to some of the same old criticisms, capably voiced by Ron Hogan on Galleycat: If you were ever truly fascinated by what a cluster of people “from [...]

Busy, busy day here. But the new issue of Booklist is live, and so are Editors’ Choice and Top of the List. Check ‘em out–they’re free! (Love or loathe our picks? Let me know!)

The Washington Post‘s Top Ten Books of 2007. The New York Times Sunday Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2007. (In common: The Savage Detectives, Tree of Smoke.) The National Book Critics Circle launches a new kind of list: the Best Recommended List. (Publishers Weekly called it the Most Recommended List.) (In common: Tree of Smoke.) [...]

Apparently the last half century has been a time of drought in Chicago letters. In its November issue, Chicago Magazine (“Tough Love: Great Chicago Novels“) offers its list of the “ten essential Chicago novels.” But while inclusion doesn’t necessarily hinge on a novel’s status as classic, the results skew that way, with only one post-1953 book–Sandra Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street [...]

In a brief article in USA Today (“Novels about 9/11 can’t stack up to non-fiction“), Bob Minzesheimer notes that nonfiction about 9/11 outnumbers novels by a staggering ratio: Six years after the twin towers fell, enough non-fiction has been published about Sept. 11, 2001, to fill an entire section of a bookstore: 1,036 titles, according to Books in Print. [...]

My absence yesterday was not, in fact, because I was tired out from writing my massive Tuesday post – I was home with a sick kid. (Mine, fortunately.) And now today I feel almost to tired to post. But books never rest, and neither do I. (Huh?) From the Guardian (“Alastair Campbell tops poll of discarded books,” [...]

Di Herald’s kick-ass readalike on Kick Ass Heroines reminded me of why I wanted to play striker for Manchester United and use a meter maid for goal practice this morning. I wasn’t parked more than ten minutes! It wasn’t even 8 a.m.! And she saw me coming to move my car! But the more I think about [...]