Rebecca Vnuk is the Executive Director of LibraryReads. She was formerly the Editor, Reference and Collection Management, for Booklist Publications.
Here’s one that begs another read. In Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), a black author, sick and tired of no one reading his uber-literary historical novels, (he reaches his breaking point when he discovers his books—including his latest novel, which involves Greek philosophers—on the “African American Studies” shelves at Borders) writes a ridiculous spoof of contemporary street lit called My Pafology. He […]
Karleen Koen’s Through a Glass Darkly (1986) is one of my go-to historical fiction finds. It has a strong female protagonist, rich historical detail, and both a prequel and a sequel, to boot, for if the patron enjoys it. Set in eighteenth-century England, it’s the tale of headstrong Barbara Alderley, who was born into a rapidly declining noble […]
Laura Moriarty’s The Center of Everything (2008) is a sensitive and moving portrait of a precocious girl and her single mom living just shy of real poverty in 1980s Kansas. Evelyn is a gifted 10-year-old but risks failing school because her home life is chaotic. Her mother, Tina, just can’t catch a lucky break. The […]
With all the talk of Ebola in the news, you might find that your copy of The Hot Zone (1994) is currently checked out. But never fear, there are a plethora of riveting and entirely “readable” medical books waiting to scare inform patrons about something else! And I’ll bet people have no idea what is waiting […]
It’s getting to be that time of year when librarians raid the shelves for anything remotely scary to put on a Halloween display. With that in mind, it seems like a good time to make sure you are all up to speed on everything horror. And there’s no better place to get your horror fix […]
The Booklist Reader is proud to once again partner with the Women’s National Book Association for National Reading Group Month. Every October, the WNBA supplies a list of Great Group Reads—and this list could not come at a better time of year for many book-group leaders. This is the month when many of us are […]
Back in the day, I created an Access database to keep track of the books I read. I used it for several years, and then, all of a sudden, not one, not two, but THREE online services popped up that made that old database completely obsolete. (That’s my current to-be-read pile below, and no, I […]
In A Drink Before the War (1994), Boston P.I.s. Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired by a senator to find an African-American cleaning lady he suspects of stealing sensitive documents from his office. When she’s gunned down by an Uzi, Kenzie and Gennaro realize that the congressman’s been lying about who the woman was […]
Last week’s news that Shopaholic Becky Bloomwood is coming back this fall has chick lit fans in a frenzy. But did you know that author Sophie Kinsella also writes chick lit (of the slightly less fluffy variety) as Madeline Wickham? (Well, perhaps you do know, since her last few Wickham books have blatantly advertised that […]
No, she’s not actually a rodent (she’s really a quite nice librarian). Lucy Lockley, Booklist Editorial Board member and collection development manager for the St. Charles City-County Library District in Missouri, coordinates the district’s Readers’ Advisory Team, also known as the RATs. Hence, she is the RAT Queen. The RAT program uses a combined book-discussion […]