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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 [...]

How many times have you taken note of fleeting details in a book you’re reading? I know when I read The Girl who Played with Fire, I found myself chuckling every time Billy’s Pan Pizza was mentioned, and simply laughed out loud at the details of Liz Salander’s IKEA furnishings—at one point, I thought I [...]

Following his film role as Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland, Johnny Depp (or, rather, his production company) has just announced that he’s planning a biopic about Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), with the strong possibility that he will star as the Cat in the Hat’s creator. Is the children’s book author biopic [...]

Earlier this year, my esteemed colleague Dan Kraus wrote a manifesto (My 2011 YA Wishlist) outlining the seven things we need to see less of in teen fiction. Well, in the spirit of making this a regular feature around here, here’s another report from what we’ll be calling the Booklist Book Crimes division. Think of it [...]

I received an e-mail yesterday about the Byook, which promises a “new reading experience.” Given that claims of revolutionary new reading experiences are becoming increasingly common, I’ll let history be the judge.  I’m just excited to have a new another made-up word to add to my list of unfavorites: vook, blook, wovel, poegel . . . and now [...]

The Booklist hallway. Where are we?  Off writing our 2011 manifestos. It is entirely possible that we in the Booklist youth brigade read more YA books than anyone else in the freakin’ world. You can’t do this and not start to feel a pang of despair when you’ve seen the same plot device, character quirk, [...]

So, the iPad is here (yes yes, total namefail) and all the geeks are mad because it does what everyone’s been conjecturing it’ll do for months if not years, but fails to do anything that no one thought of. Do people think that Apple has people coming up with ideas from different dimensions? Is it supposed [...]

And to think it all started with a plucky little mash-up called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In her review, Mary Ellen Quinn asked, with tongue firmly in cheek, “What’s next? Wuthering Heights and Werewolves?” Not a bad guess, but the next offering was actually Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Since the public’s appetite for good [...]

In “What’s the Point of Blurbs?” Daniel Kalder provides a nice entry in the Guardian‘s continuing coverage of blurbs, building on the work of Chris Power (“How to Judge a Book by Its Cover,” which mentions Irvine Welsh, as Kalder does) and William Leith (“Blurb Your Enthusiasm,” which mentions Nick Hornby, as Kalder does)–but couldn’t he have just blurbed [...]

If a third instance makes a trend, then here’s a new trend: book titles that read like the T-shirts sold in spring-break hot-spots. Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, by Chelsea Handler (2008) I Drink for a Reason, by David Cross (2009) You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning, [...]