Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Seven months ago, four Booklist editors were shown up by the book-themed board game It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. Seeing how our scattered egos were approaching reassembly, it was time for another round of humiliation. That’s just how we roll.
Thus: Bookchase. The box claims as its audience everyone from “people who have never [...]

It used to hold that one of the reasons you became a writer was that you were the sort who ducked out of photographs and preferred to communicate through quill-written correspondence. These days, though, these Salingeresque avoidance techniques won’t win you much love from your publisher–and probably won’t push many books, either.
So Penguin’s the Screening [...]

Who doesn’t love dueling book covers? Not me! (That is, I don’t not love them–although I really could have said this more clearly, couldn’t I?) Anywho, Kaite Mediatore Stover, our “She Reads” columnist and Book Group Buzz blogger, brought the following to my attention:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Still Life, by Joy Fielding, was published by Atria in March, while Keeper of [...]

We all know Stephen King wrote The Body, but this is probably the first time he’s written on a body. The July issue of Esquire features a new story by King, “Morality,” the first few lines of which have been lovingly painted across the bod of Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli. The story is about a [...]

The always-worthy Jacket Whys brings to light a potentially ruinous jacket similarity. Just imagine the horrific scenario: Grandma and Grandpa are birthday shopping for young Kayleigh, they stumble into a Borders with a fuzzy mental picture of the book they’re supposed to buy, and they end up bringing home . . . inspiring words of [...]

Even though I cringe a little bit each time a book goes under the knife, I love book art. And Thomas Allen has made some of the best I’ve seen.

Book-cover enthusiasts should stop by The Art of Penguin Science Fiction, where they’ll find an arresting mosaic of Penguin sf book covers; click on a thumbnail image and you’ll be taken to a detail page with a larger image and an interesting note about the cover or the author or, perhaps, the difficulty of defining [...]

If you have a few minutes this Friday afternoon, and you like looking at books, you could do a lot worse than browsing the Book Cover Archive:

Or if that’s not postmodern enough for you, you could visit kottke.org, where Jason Kottke takes a look at Media Packaging Mashups:

This stuff only gets more esoteric. Take, for [...]

It’s Earth Day, the 39th Earth Day to be exact, and a good day to think about where books come from. The relationship between trees and reading has inspired an intriguing website, Eco-Libris, and a green mission. The Eco-Libris folks encourage us to plant a tree for each and every book we read. This makes reading [...]

In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Marche has a nice piece on books that don’t exist (”Longing for Great Lost Works“)–not books that have been invented by authors for fictional purposes, but books that have been destroyed or lost forever. A poignant thought:
Classical literature, like classical architecture, is a collection of delicious ruins. The destruction [...]