From Mark Sarvas of the L.A. litblog The Elegant Variation:

If you are around this Tuesday evening, I will be hosting a panel at Skylight Books that I am VERY excited about, and I hope you’ll stop by and take part in the conversation.  Here are the details:

Tuesday, February 5, 2008, 7:30 p.m.

 Panel:  The NBCC GoodReads Winter List.

 In December, the National Book Critics Circle launched “The Best Recommended” project – now rechristened GoodReads – in which the NBCC asked its members to recommend books that they’d recently read and truly loved, trendy or obscure.

 On February 5, the NBCC will announce its second round of recommendations and this panel will look both at the recommendations themselves, as well as the art of recommending:  Who are your best recommenders (we all have them, right?), the worst recommenders (someone who consistently doesn’t get your taste)? What constitutes a meaningful recommendation and what do you look for when you hear one?  What about the business of recommending itself: who has the authority to do it, where do good ones come from and how does it sell books, if at all? 

Please join the NBCC award winning poet Amy Gerstler, the NPR book critic Veronique de Turenne, the novelist Katherine Taylor, the novelist and critic Darcy Cosper, and the blogger and novelist Mark Sarvas for this entertaining and lively discussion, and bring along some of your own recommendations!

Hope to see you there!

Best,

Mark