Elisabeth Ellington

Given the state of the internet, you might not need this sort of book ever again but I am still drawn to this variety of book like a moth to a flame. It truly is rather unfortunate though, since this book really does have some good advice and interesting tidbits of information about authors and other things. It talks about how to set up a book club and has suggestions of other books you might like based on the book in question.

The book says it suggests sixty books to start out with, but that isn't entirely accurate. Each month suggests five books and each book has a suggested reading section. It gives a short synopsis of the book and tells you about other things the author has done. So it is a bit like a printed version of Goodreads, only instead of having readers suggest other books to you, we have a person with a Ph.D. and a member of a book club. So I suppose I could say that this book is more gated in some ways than Goodreads, but since it is printed it is far more limited in the content it can address.

Given those points, it is not really disappointing or upsetting that this book is out there. Since it was printed in 2002 I suppose there was no way for them to predict the explosive popularity of the internet as we have it now.… (mer)

This has been on my wishlist for over a year so I was delighted when I found it on the shelf at Goodwill yesterday. So delighted in fact that I went home and spent the evening reading it. It broke down each month into a theme (eg. Women's History, Cold, Gardening, etc.) and then selected books in the following categories for each theme: Crowd Pleaser, Classic, Memoir, Challenge and Potluck. Each selection was followed with some information related to the book and author as well as questions. The book can be used for either individual or group reading. It was friendly without being patronizing in tone. I really liked this and intend to use it to enhance my reading.… (mer)

I picked up A Year of Reading because I thought I would get lots of good ideas for new books to read, and that I did!

A Year of Reading is set up to support a book group. For each of 12 months, a theme is chosen, and a book in each of five categories is presented. The five categories are: Crowd Pleaser, Classic, Challenge, Memoir and Pot Luck.

For each book presented, there is a ton of information, including:
- a section on what the book is about,
- some questions for discussion with your book group,
- information on the author,
- other works by the author,
- additional book- or author-related activities in which the book group can participate,
- related videos and movies, and
- a section on other books you might like if you enjoyed this one.

Even though I did not use this book for book group activities, I enjoyed going through it. If I hadn't read the selected book yet, I didn't spend time on the book group questions (I'll do that when I read the selected book), but I did review them for books I had already read. The questions are pertinent.

I filled this book up with a ton of red flags for all the books I'm interested in, so for me A Year of Reading was a big success, and could probably fill a year of reading with all of the books I have added to my wishlist.… (mer)