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

  It’s funny how, when you spend your life immersed in books, unbidden thoughts of a book can presage an event. We’ve been focusing here at Booklist on the best books of 2012 for our Editors Choice list, but a 2013 title kept popping up in my mind. This morning it surfaced again, and I found [...]

Just read Dan Kraus’ fine review of Jonah Winter’s “You Never Heard of Willie Mays?!” which will run in our September 1 issue. Terrific book, but I was frankly appalled by the premise. Really? Young people have never heard of Willie Mays? Given that he retired from baseball almost 40 years ago, I guess I [...]

Tributes are pouring in to honor the great writer, humanitarian, and library advocate Ray Bradbury, who died today at age 91, leaving us with nearly 30 books and 600 stories, works that profoundly changed our perceptions of ourselves, life on earth, and the entire universe. In our latest Spotlight on Science Fiction and Fantasy, editor [...]

I’ve been a Jennifer Egan fan since her first book, The Invisible Circus, came out in 1995, so I was thrilled at the triumph of her most recent novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. It was Booklist‘s 2011 Top of the List, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rumor has [...]

I’d been to the Edgar Awards, honoring the finest in mystery fiction, a couple of times in the past, but this year was different: an invitation to sit at legendary crime fiction editor, publisher, and bookstore owner Otto Penzler’s table is not to be passed up. The room was crawling with big-name authors, including a [...]

The winner of the Hatchet Job of the Year Award has been announced. For his 1,000-word evisceration of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, Adam Mars-Jones takes the cake (with a golden hatchet in it, naturally) and a year’s supply of potted shrimp, too. Judge Sam Leith praised Mars-Jones’ savage attack thusly: “Adam Mars-Jones’s review of Michael [...]

As a child it was my dream to put the family’s pure-bred, tortoiseshell Himalayan cat on a leash and parade her around the neighborhood. Unfortunately, this cat’s Siamese-influenced DNA and generally grumpy disposition meant I could barely pet, let alone catch, hold, and harness her. A few feeble attempts left me morose. As a consolation [...]

As a book reviewer—not, I hasten to point out, a book critic—I always enjoy seeing other reviewers’ rules or guidelines for doing the job. Last year, Robert Pinsky did an admirable job of reducing the rules to three; I added one of my own but, in retrospect, I might amend it. I recently received a [...]

As reported by Jill Lawless (Lucy, your long-lost sister is a reporter!) in the Associated Press, the brand-new Hatchet Job of the Year Award will celebrate “the angriest, funniest, most trenchant” book review of 2011. The winner will receive a year’s supply of something called potted shrimp (courtesy of the Fish Society)—so you know the [...]

(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 [...]