Misha Stone is a readers' advisory librarian with The Seattle Public Library. Follow her on Twitter at @ahsimlibrarian.
If your book group enjoys reading fiction set in New York, two recent literary novels centered in and around Brooklyn bring the borough vividly to life. Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers supplies some of the same charm I appreciated in Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings. Set in Brooklyn—Ditmas Park, to be exact—it follows a group of friends who have known each […]
Lindy West’s debut memoir, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, is getting a lot of attention for addressing topics like fat-phobia and tweeting about your abortion. In addition to being a deeply feminist memoir, it is also deeply and brilliantly funny as well. For book groups seeking titles that explore contemporary feminism, misogyny, women’s rights, body image, or online bullying, Shrill […]
Good historical fiction will remind book groups that there is more in history to amaze, shock, and stun than in George R. R. Martin’s historically-inspired fantasy. When it comes to court intrigue, jealousy, revenge, and long-game power plays, history’s annals are full of horror, heartbreak, bloodshed, subterfuge, and tyranny of epic scope. Weina Dai Randel’s duology […]
Chances are, many book groups have already read and discussed Isabel Wilkerson’s marvelous The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010). But, if you’re anything like me, and read more fiction than nonfiction, then you could have missed it. I will confess that I often find nonfiction harder to read, […]
Last week, I wrote about presenting on a panel called “Awesome Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy” with fellow librarians at Geek Girl Con in Seattle. And on Tuesday, I wrote in detail about three of the titles I discussed. And now here are three more that I hope you’ll find worthwhile, whether for pleasure reading or […]
In my previous post, I wrote about presenting on a panel called “Awesome Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy” with fellow librarians at Geek Girl Con in Seattle. For those of you who want to learn more about the titles I discussed, whether for pleasure reading or book-group selections, I’m including half of them here. Stay tuned […]
Recently, I was on a panel with five other librarians—Summer Hayes and Claire Scott from the Seattle Public Library; Jackie Parker from Sno-Isle Libraries; and Emily Calkins and Whitney Winn from King Country Library System—at Geek Girl Con in Seattle. Our panel was titled “Awesome Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy.” We had all been reading […]
Not long ago, I wrote about James Baldwin’s seminal book about race in America, The Fire Next Time. In every era there are books that are popular and others that are important and some that are both. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is garnering the kind of praise, enthusiasm, and reverence that […]
I will admit, I am stealing that comparison from Entertainment Weekly, which has already made the connection between Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games (2008) and Kelsea Glynn of The Queen of the Tearling (2014). But while these two trilogies are not that similar—one is dystopian fiction and the other is a fantasy/science fiction blend—it is true that readers hunger […]
The internet is awash in lengthy lists of summer reading. Overwhelmed? Here are my quick takes on two historical novels that make good choices for book groups or solo reading. In Wendy Jones’ The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals (2014), it’s 1924 in Wales and undertaker Wilfred is at a picnic […]