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 [...]

So was it for our first session of A Dark and Stormy Night. For fun, and because the check hadn’t arrived yet, we played another round. This time, instead of taking books out of the box each time we got an answer right, we put them back–the first team to reshelve all its books won the [...]

(Previously on The Nerds and the Beautiful.)
Category: Children’s Movies
The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.
I had no idea. Fortunately, my partner had a very definite idea, and it was very definitely the correct idea. And, at 8 books to 7, The Winners [...]

(Previously on One Nerd to Live.)
A tied game. One more correct answer and The Winners take home bragging rights. Who will win? Will it be the team identified in Round 1 as “The Winners”? Or was that some kind of annoying postmodern joke?
Category: Science Fiction & Fantasy
In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a [...]

(Previously on Guiding Nerds.)
“This is exciting,” said someone who I will not humiliate by naming publicly. “It’s a photo finish.” As I mentioned, we’re nerds.
Category: Shakespeare’s Plays
Scene I Britain. The garden of Cymbeline’s palace. [Enter two Gentlemen]
FIRST GENTLEMAN. You do not meet a man but frowns: our bloods / No more obey the heavens than our [...]

(Previously on Nerd Hospital.)
Category: Novels, 1900-1950
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks–
“1984, by George Orwell!” I shouted, modestly.
–were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent [...]

(Previously on All My Nerds.)
Category: Nonfiction
Under the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back on the house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs, or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third house below [...]

(Previously on the Young and the Nerdy.)
Given another choice of category, I suggested we try Movies, but my Brave New Partner shamed me by saying, “I feel like ‘movies’ is cheating.”
Category: Novels, 1950-Present
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked [...]

(Previously on As the Nerd Turns.)
Category: Movies
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps [...]

(Previously on Nerd & Nerder.)
Category: Mystery
Given a choice of category, Ian suggested we try Mystery, to take advantage of my “mystery expertise.”
“That’s torn it!” said Lord Peter Wimsey.
“I’m more of a crime fiction guy than sleuthing,” I protested. “You know, books with shotguns in them.” Nonetheless, although the name Wimsey rang a bell, my guess of [...]