What’s happening in the library?

To start with, I’m going to suggest a few columns from the Guardian (UK).

• Authors Choose Their Top 10 Books on different topics, e.g., island books, romps and romances, black comedies, boredom, wilderness, etc.
• Literary Companions for Summer Travel — where authors suggest books perfect for particular destinations, e.g., Julian Barnes on Sicily, William Boyd on L.A., William Dalrymple on India, Maureen Freely on Turkey, etc.
• Digested Reads — the must-read books in 400 words — for those who have no time and don’t want to be left out of literary conversations…

Whichbook.net, a completely new way of choosing books to read, lets you specify the level of what you want in a book — the degree of happy/sad, easy/demanding, sex/no sex, safe/disturbing, etc.

Another fun one is Literature-Map, also known as the tourist map of literature — plug in your favorite author and see which other authors are located close to them on the map.

In the US the National Book Critics Circle has put out a list of Spring 2008 Good Reads.

I’ve also put together a list via WorldCat (a compendium of thousands of library catalogs from around the world): Summer Reading Suggestions. It contains both books I’ve read and books I want to read. Note that WorldCat also lets you type a city/country and it will find the libraries closest to you holding that book.

Here are a few book reviews that helped me determine my own to-read list:

• Say You’re One of Them — by Uwem Akpan
  

  “Poverty, slavery, mass murder: These are the torments that devour the children in “Say You’re One of Them,” a book so overwhelming that when you put it down — if you can — it takes a minute to adjust to the world around you. The writer is Uwem Akpan, a young Nigerian Jesuit. Each of the five stories in his debut collection is set in a different African nation; each is told from a child’s point of view; two are strong, three are devastating.”

• The Knife of Never Letting Go — by Patrick Ness
  

  “It’s hard to review The Knife of Never Letting Go without spoiling the story. It’s so cunningly written that I was 100 pages in before I even realised what genre it was.” (a children’s book — but don’t let that put you off…)

• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle — by David Wroblewski
  

  “Wroblewski creates a tender coming-of-age story and grafts onto it a literary thriller with strong echoes of Shakespeare and “The Jungle Book.” The result is the most hauntingly impressive debut I’ve read all year.”