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Book Group Buzz - Discussion of Book Clubs, Reading Lists, and Literary News - Booklist Online
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Cold-blooded awards
If you’re wondering where all the publishers of Scandinavian mysteries are getting their scoop on the best novels to translate and ship across the pond, perhaps they’re looking here. Here’s a listing of five of the top awards given to Scandinavian writers of mysteries. Quite a few haven’t been translated, but as long as the [...]
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Thinking inside the Box
Now in its second decade and with 12 books, C. J. B0x’s Joe Pickett series has proven to be one of the mystery genre’s most dependable. Joe is a game warden (when he’s not on the outs with other government officials) working from little Saddlestring, Wyoming, where he has access to some of the wildest [...]
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From Mary Rogers to Marie Roget
Edgar Allan Poe, the creator of the modern detective novel, has always been worthy of book discussions and it might be interesting for book groups to pair Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget” with a nonfiction account of the actual crime, The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder [...]
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Alison Bechdel’s “Are You My Mother?”
I just finished Alison Bechdel’s new comic memoir, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, and can’t stop thinking about it. My book group discussed her previous comic (graphic novel) memoir, Fun Home, several years ago now and we found it rich for discussion, full of lush, complex themes and images. Nick DiMartino, a former [...]
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Biography of a Crime
Today is National Biography Day. On this day in 1763, Samuel Johnson had a meeting with John Boswell and a beautiful biography was born. Mystery writers have given the biography a bloody twist. Historical figures investigating crimes make for entertaining reading and hopefully even more entertaining discussion. There’s the built in topic of how accurate [...]
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Recommendation Exploration, Part 1
An important part of the book club experience is using what we learn from our fellow readers to find books that will suit us. But as book clubs succeed and fail in selecting or reviewing books collectively, individual members succeed and fail at the art of recommendation. It’s a subject worth exploration, and in this [...]
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The Lace Reader
Have any of you BG Buzzers out there read The Lace Reader, by Brunonia Barry? At my library, it’s classed as a “mystery,” although I noticed that on the cover, the publisher calls it a “novel.” I’ve been puzzling over it, for a number of reasons, so I guess in that sense it is a [...]
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The Cunning of Dunning
I’ve just finished my first dip into John Dunning’s Cliff Janeway series with the opener Booked to Die. It’s a brisk, entertaining mystery with a sympathetic cop who doesn’t like the way his job is tapping into the dark side of his character. He turns to work in the private sector, rubs elbows with well [...]
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That’s Using Your Bean
Fiction has been kind to the career of Sean Bean, who has perhaps appeared in more films adapted from novels than any other contemporary actor. You could easily theme an entire book group meeting around the great novels that have been made into films and series in which Bean figures prominently. Now he’s about to [...]
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Strangers on a Train and The Chameleon’s Shadow
As our local crime fiction book discussion group continues its genre study of crime and mystery fiction, we find ourselves reaching the category of psychological suspense. In writing Make Mine a Mystery, I proposed the idea that the after effects of war has changed how readers approach death in fiction. After WWI, my idea is that [...]
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