Rebecca Vnuk is the Executive Director of LibraryReads. She was formerly the Editor, Reference and Collection Management, for Booklist Publications.
The mystery world has lost one of the grande dames. The much-lauded Ruth Rendell (winner of numerous mystery awards, including the 1991 Cartier Diamond Dagger for a Lifetime’s Achievement in the Field, not to mention being awarded a CBE in 1996), who had suffered a stroke at the beginning of this year, passed away on May 2, 2015. […]
Podcasts are hot right now (SERIAL, amirite?), and one of the best library-themed podcasts is Steve Thomas’s Circulating Ideas. This podcast features interviews with librarians, talking about the cool, innovative work they are doing to keep the profession relevant for the twenty-first century. On a regular basis, Steve interviews everyday librarians from across the spectrum—academic, public, systems and […]
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 […]