Overbooked Booklist for Bibliophiles - Books about Books and Book People

Books about books, reading and readers, booksellers and bookselling, libraries and librarians. All Fiction genres may be included. This list also includes nonfiction titles.

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

Fiction

• Oracle Night
  Author: Auster, Paul
  Publisher: Holt $ 23 ISBN: 0805073205 Date: 2003
  Booklist
  Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, 34-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. For the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and puzzling events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.
  Suggested Reading: Author Author
  Updated 10.8.03
• Fahrenheit 451
  Author: Bradbury, Ray
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 23 ISBN: 0743247221 Date: 2003
  LJ
  Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. Then he met a seventeen-year old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid, and a professor who told him of a future where people could think. And Guy Montag knew what he had to do....
  Suggested Reading: On Fire
  Updated 11.18.03
• Ibid: A Life
  Author: Dunn, Mark
  Publisher: MacAdam/Cage $ 22 ISBN: 1931561656 Date: 2004
  LJ
  The author of Ella Minnow Pea and Welcome to Highby returns with an hilarious novel written entirely in footnotes.
  Updated 4.5.04
• The Jane Austen Book Club
  Author: Fowler, Karen Joy
  Publisher: Putnam $ 23.95 ISBN: 0399151613 Date: 2004
  Kirkus Booklist
  Nothing ever moves in a straight line in Fowler's fiction, and in her latest, the complex dance of modern love has never been so devious or so much fun. In this newest work, six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens.
  Updated 3.22.04
• Ex-Libris
  Author: King, Ross
  Publisher: Walker $ 24.95 ISBN: 0802733573 Date: 2000
  Kirkus Booklist
  A cryptic summons to a remote country house launches a London bookseller on an odyssey through 17th-century Europe. Given the task of restoring a magnificent library that has been pillaged during the English Civil War, Isaac Inchbold finds himself slipping from the surface of 1660s London into an underworld of spies, smugglers, ciphers, and forgeries.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Mystery Stars | If You Liked the Da Vinci Code
  Updated 2/28/00
• This is Not a Novel
  Author: Markson, David
  Publisher: Counterpoint $ 15 ISBN: 1582431337 Date: 2001
  PW Kirkus
  This may not be a novel, but it is a highly inventive work that drifts between fiction, non-fiction and psychological memoir. After what seems to be a circuitous route with characters, stories, quotes and anecdotes, the real meaning lies in the journey, not the destination.
  Updated 3/14/01
• The Wind Done Gone
  Author: Randall, Alice
  Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 23 ISBN: 061810450x Date: 2001
  Kirkus
  In a brilliant act of literary invention, Randall revisits the world of Gone With the Wind from an African-American point of view as Scarlett's mulatto half-sister--beautiful and brown--gets to tell "her" story.
  Suggested Reading: African American Stars
  Updated 4/27/01
• The Man Who Wrote the Book
  Author: Tarloff, Erik
  Publisher: Crown $ 23 ISBN: 0609604686 Date: 2000
  Library Jounral
  From the author of Face-Time comes an engaging, hilarious, sexy romp of a book about a college professor's unorthodox take on the academic imperative to publish or perish.
  Updated 5/9/00.
• Adele: Jane Eyre's Hidden Story
  Author: Tennant, Emma
  Publisher: Morrow $ 25.95 ISBN: 0060004541 Date: 2002
  Kirkus
  Following the success of Scarlett and Rebecca's Tale, this is the brilliant companion novel that captures the era and spirit of Charlotte Bronte's romantic classic, Jane Eyre.
  Updated 10.10.02

Nonfiction

• The Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World
  Author: Basbanes, Nicholas A.
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 29.95 ISBN: 0060082879 Date: 2003
  Kirkus
  From the notable author of A Gentle Madness and Patience & Fortitude comes this story-filled narrative on books in contemporary society.
  Updated 9.08.03
• Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture
  by Basbanes, Nicholas A.
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 35 ISBN: 0060196955 Date: 2001
  Booklist Library Journal
  The author of A Gentle Madness now considers the evolving form of the book over the centuries, preservation efforts, and the great national, public, and institutional libraries around the world.
  
• Library: An Unquiet History
  Author: Battles, Matthew
  Publisher: Norton $ 24.94 ISBN: 0393020290 Date: 2003
  Library Journal
  Battles, a rare books librarian and a gifted narrator, takes readers on a spirited foray from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the British Library, and explores how libraries are built and how they are destroyed.
  Updated 4.29.03
• Postmodern Pooh
  by Crews, Frederick
  Publisher: FSG $ 22 ISBN: 0865476268 Date: 2001
  PW Kirkus
  Purporting to be the proceedings of a forum on Pooh convened at the Modern Language Association's annual convention, Postmodern Pooh brilliantly parodies the academic fads and figures that hold sway at the millennium.
  
• Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World
  Author: Denby, David
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 30 ISBN: 0684809753 Date: 1996
  Booklist Kirkus LJ PW
  The national bestseller that offers a dramatic and entertaining account of some of the greatest works of literature, a persuasive defense of the magnificence of the Western literary tradition, and a thrilling personal odyssey of one man's return to academia.
  Updated 8.13.04
• Book Business: Publishing: Past, Present and Future
  by Epstein, Jason
  Publisher: Norton $ 21.95 ISBN: 0393049841 Date: 2001
  PW Kirkus
  In this book based on his W.W. Norton Lectures given at the New York Public Library in October, 1999, Epstein discusses the severe crisis facing the book business today--a crisis that affects writers and readers as well as publishers--and looks ahead to the radically transformed industry that will revolutionize the idea of the book.
  
• Walter Benjamin and the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond
  by McMurtry, Larry
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster ISBN: 0684854961 $ 21 Date: 1999
  PW LJ
  The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove provides a brilliant portrayal of Texas past and present - and the startling tale of his own path from rancher's son to Lone Star State novelist laureate, at once a literary and autobiographical tour de force.
  
• A History of Reading
  Author: Manguel, Alberto
  Publisher: Viking $ 26.95 ISBN: 0670843024 Date: 1996
  Booklist Kirkus
  From clay tablets to CD-ROM, from book thieves to book burners, bibliophiles, book fools and saints, noted essayist Alberto Manguel follows the quirky and passionate 4,000-year-old history of the written work whose true hero is the reader.
  Updated 8.13.04
• Book Row America: An Ancedotal and Pictorial History of the Antiquarian Book Trade
  Author: Meador, Roy
  Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 28 ISBN: 0786713054 Date: 2004
  PW
  The story of the sellers and the dealers, the collectors and the readers, when America got high on books. They called it the New York Booksellers's Row, or, more commonly, Book Row. It's an American story, the story that this richly anecdotal historical memoir amiably tells.
  Updated 8.13.04
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
  Author: Nafisi, Azar
  Publisher: Random $ 23.95 ISBN: 0375504907 Date: 2003
  Kirkus PW LJ
  Reading Lolita in Tehran is the astonishing true story of young women who met in secret each week to read and talk about forbidden Western classics--and their lives and loves--in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars | Reading Group Stars
  Updated 3.21.03
• So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading
  Author: Nelson, Sara
  Publisher: Putnam $ 22.95 ISBN: 0399150838 Date: 2004
  LJ
  Nelson--editor, reporter, reviewer, mother, daughter, wife, and compulsive reader--set out to chronicle a year's worth of reading. Throughout, So Many Books, So Little Time is pure delight--a work at once funny, wise, and rueful: enough to make a passionate reader out of anybody.
  Updated 8.13.04
• The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel
  Author: Wood, James
  Publisher: FSG $ 24 ISBN: 0374177376 Date: 2004
  PW
  In 23 passionate, sparkling dispatches, Wood defends what he calls "secular comedy"--human, tragicomic, forgiving, bound up with the very origins of the novel--against the narrower "religious comedy" of satire and farce, which is corrective, punitive, and theatrical.
  Updated 3.11.04