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  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 [...]

Summer is the season for exploration and discovery, and readers of all ages, interests, and tastes would love to visit the American Writers Museum—if only such a place existed. Although we have national museums celebrating the luminaries of baseball, rock and roll, the visual arts, various ethnic traditions, and science and technology, to categorize but [...]

The Hunger Games, in cinemas now, is based—you probably know this, but just in case—on the 2008 novel of the same name by Suzanne Collins. The story’s about a teenaged girl, Katniss Everdeen, who competes in a to-the-death contest against other teens in a widely popular reality show. It’s an intriguing story with a premise [...]

April brings Earth Day and The Orion Book Award .  Established in 2007, the award celebrates books “that deepen our connection to the natural world, present new ideas about our relationship with nature, and achieve excellence in writing.” I served as chair of the selection committee last year, and had I served this year, I would have nominated several of [...]

Many of us feel helpless in the face of catastrophes, especially one as devastating as the earthquake that hit Haiti Tuesday, January 12. We can make donations to humanitarian efforts, and we can channel our compassion by learning more about a place we perhaps know little about.  Stories help us connect with the “common humanity” President Obama reminds us of, [...]

News reports claim that most Americans are not worried about or even interested in hearing about climate change. It ranks last on the list of  things that keep us up at night, long after job fears and money woes. But the truth is, everything is connected. Answers to financial crises are found in new green industries and [...]

I have a confession to make. I was among the many who thought romance novels were silly. Formulaic, pure fluff. Damsels in distress. Ladies in long dresses and painful bodices. Men in puffy shirts. Then I became Booklist‘s romance editor. I scrutinized the wonderfully varied array of romance novels that arrived in the mail. I attended a Romance Writers of America [...]

From Bookends: Cindy and Lynn: Recently on YALSA-BK listserv there was a request for suggestions from a librarian who wanted a list of “Clean Vampire” novels. Now, we appreciate the efforts to satiate the Stephenie Meyer Twilight fans and are working hard to do that ourselves, but really, clean vampire stories? It’s our feeling that [...]

Writing in the New York Times, Motoko Rich asks, “For Books, Is Obama the New Oprah?” If he is, he’d better get more specific or he’s going to drive everyone crazy. When President-elect Barack Obama appeared on “60 Minutes” on CBS on Sunday in his first interview since winning the election, he mentioned having read “a [...]

To avoid unintended merriment at my expense, I’ll keep this short: Cynthia Crossen thinks A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz, is too long (“A Book in Need of a Good Editor,” The Wall Street Journal): But the blurbers and reviewers were so enthusiastic — Mr. Toltz was compared to Mark Twain, John Irving, Martin Amis, [...]