Blog
Happy New Year! I hope you all had a very relaxing holiday.I am stealing a few extra days on the Outer Banks to get some paperwork and reading done before I head back to the office on Thursday. It's nice to have a few days of utter quiet before I get caught back up in the swirl of things.
We're wrapping up 2009 with a list of twelve of our most memorable posts of the year, from Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout's own prize-winning favorites to Joyce Maynard's true-life tale about how a single book club meeting changed her life.Enjoy the holidays. We'll be back on January 4th!Annie Barrows: Literary Meandering
Bookreporter.com's first ever Book of the Year is The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Set in 1963, it's the story of three women --- two African American maids in Mississippi and a young white woman who sees a story in the world that they live in. You can read more about why it was selected here.
What makes a reading group stay together for an incredible two decades, or longer? Last month we introduced five book clubs that have marked the 20-year milestone.Today we talk with Gillian Jones about her Southern California reading group --- what has kept them meeting for so many years, how their camaraderie extends beyond their book club boundaries, how they got their intriguing name and much more. "Our group is an important part of my life," says Gillian. "I love the opportunity to read and share thoughts on the wide variety of books that we read."
A book club going strong for 75 years? Yes! It's one of the impressive and interesting groups featured in this round-up of headline-making book club news, along with insight from Hannah Tinti on her novel The Good Thief.Jamestown News: Seventy-Five-Year-Old Book Club Still Going StrongA North Carolina book club founded in the early '30s is still going strong.
For author Juliette Fay, there are many highlights of the holiday season --- Christmas carols, festive decorations, egg nog. But as she shares in today's guest blog post, there is one aspect she's not so enamored with. (Visit Bookreporter.com to read more writers' stories about holiday giving and getting.)
Susan Kandel traded her job as an art critic to write a mystery series featuring Cece Caruso --- California girl, biographer of dead mystery authors and amateur sleuth. Her latest whodunit is Dial H for Hitchcock. Today's guest blogger, Susan shares some insights into the research process (which involves reading books and watching movies) and what she'll be serving for Christmas dinner.
In Tell Me Something True, Leila Cobo unfolds the story of a young woman who finds a diary that belonged to her late mother and learns about the secret life she led. Leila, today's guest blogger, talks about how she came to write the novel and what some readers of the book have revealed to her.
