Fellowship in a Ring: A Guide for Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Groups

(Paperback)

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Description

This comprehensive, spirited, and often laugh-out-loud funny handbook will help you start, maintain, or enhance a science fiction and fantasy book group. Bring fantasy and science fiction readers together for scintillating discussions with Fellowship in a Ring: A Guide for Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Groups. Providing everything you need to get started, the book offers detailed guidelines for some 50 fantasy and science fiction titles, plus guides for some 40 popular speculative fiction themes. For each of the featured titles, the book provides bibliographic information, author background, a plot summary, notes on appeal points, discussion questions, other resources to consult, and suggested read-alikes. You'll find instructions on how to get a group started, tips for helping fantasy and sci-fi readers get along, hints for understanding the genres and subgenres, and more. The book also offers materials useful to collection development, display building, and programming. Featuring books that run the gamut from literary genre novels to classic pulp stories, Fellowship in a Ring can help you avoid common pitfalls and build a flourishing community of satisfied book group adherents.

Reviews

Intended for discussion-group leaders, this will also be of use to librarians as a collection-development tool and readers'-advisory tool. Recommended. * Booklist *
While book groups are an excellent means of outreach, these idiosyncrasies pose a particular challenge to librarians seeking to facilitate successful groups for fans of these genres. Fortunately, this comprehensive guide comes to the rescue. It is an excellent resource for both novices looking to initiate groups, and veterans seeking to breathe new life into existing factions.Although the book is not specifically aimed toward those who work with teenagers, young adult librarians (and educators that are so inclined) will have no difficulty adapting the suggestions and themes to young adults as needed for a book group, as well as utilizing it as a general collection-development tool. Particularly in these genres, where there is a lack of functional ideas of how to appeal to fans, this manual is indispensable. * VOYA *
The tips are helpful; everything from how to organize the meetings to how to break the monotony if things start becoming staid. The lists are comprehensive, and it's hard to imagine anyone not finding something of interest within these pages. * School Library Journal *

Author Bio

Neil Hollands is an MLS-degreed librarian working at Williamsburg Regional Library in Williamsburg, VA. His published works include Libraries Unlimited's Read OnFantasy Fiction.