More Book Lust

February 28, 2005
Rarely does a member of that unjustly maligned species, the librarian, attract the kind of attention Pearl did when she founded the first citywide reading program in Seattle in 1998. Many readers will seek her advice in this companion volume to Book Lust,
which offers a wealth of new reading lists. (Many of the books on them, she acknowledges, are out of print—making for a good opportunity, she suggests, to visit your library.) The upshot is that these are not all classics—they're just books she or someone else really enjoyed reading, presented in more than 100 lists covering a delightful range of topics, from the biographical or geographical (Winston Churchill, Africa) to favorite writers categorized as "too good to miss" (including classics such as P.G. Wodehouse and contemporary writers like Jonathan Weiner and Walter Mosley). More idiosyncratic recommendations for the questing reader include "All in the Family" (books by writer dynasties); "Dick Lit" (her much better term for Lad Lit, for which, she admits, Nick Hornby has set a high bar); and "Tricky Tricky" (books that pull a fast one on you). If you're clueless about what to read next, you'll find something to pique your interest here.

Starred review from April 15, 2005
Pearl's enthusiasm for good reading seems never to end. The well-known librarian has updated her best-selling "Book Lust" with approximately 120 more reviews to help satisfy the appetite of voracious readers or simply encourage more people to read. Like its predecessor, this book is an excellent choice for librarians and teachers who make recommendations for various interests, but many readers will simply enjoy the colloquial chatter about books, some of them grouped by author or by topic but some "just too good to miss." Readers unfamiliar with town and school libraries will appreciate "Dewey Deconstructed," a chapter introducing Dewey Decimal system cataloging and great books found in each numerical grouping. From "Adapting to Adoption" to "Your Tax Dollars at Work", Pearl recommends a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction. If Pearl's book does not encourage reading, nothing will! Highly recommended for public and school libraries. [This spring, Pearl will embark on a ten-city tour to promote this book. -Ed.] -Carolyn M. Craft, Longwood Univ., Farmville, VA

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2005
In this sequel to her phenomenally popular " Book Lust "(2003), Pearl, former Seattle librarian and a continuing national book-talk host, dips further into her repertoire of have-read books (both fiction and nonfiction) and offers up another batch she is only too happy to talk about. As in the previous volume, she creatively arranges her titles into unexpected but certainly tantalizing and even provocative categories, this time presenting a whole new set of categories. From "Adapting to Adoption" to "Your Tax Dollars at Work: Good Reading from the Government (Really!)," and including "Nagging Mothers, Crying Children," "Science 101," and "Gender-Bending," Pearl suggests titles relevant to each category and gives a brief annotation for each. A self-confessed "readaholic," Pearl lets us benefit from her addiction. May she never seek recovery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)