Dear BookBrowsers,

Sadly, summer is mostly in the rear-view mirror now and while there's still time for barbecues and watermelon, the annual ritual of reading often prescribes light reads for the summer and more "serious" literature for fall.

This doesn't mean that we can't lighten up our reading with picks from the humor and satire pile, or indulge droll and dry wit. After all, laughter is the best prescription. And while the book club selections in this list might not be laugh-out-loud funny, they're sure to bring a smile to your face. If you'd like to, please share your own recommendations by posting at the bottom.

Your editor,
Davina

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As a true book lover you know: summer is all very well for an occasional guilty pleasure and a whole pile of page-turners to tote to the beach but the real serious lifting -- both literally and metaphorically -- in terms of reading comes with the turn of the leaves in fall.

This season we have many heavy hitters from darlings of the literary fiction world such as Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen, and also remarkable work from newer talent to keep an eye out for. Here are a dozen we have our sights trained on. Feel free to add your recommendations for upcoming fall releases as well.

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Dear BookBrowsers,

The Cold War might be a thing of the past but the "Red Menace" still rules the West's collective imagination. For those of us who remember the duck-and-cover drills, the race to space and the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which world geopolitics permeated everyday lives, a peek behind the Iron Curtain is as fascinating as it is informative. We present here a mix of fiction and nonfiction books specifically about Russia and Russians, both before and after the disintegration of the powerful federation that was the USSR.

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A book with pages that can kill more than 99% of bacteria while also educating communities on safe water habits has passed multiple trials in countries such as Ghana, Bangladesh and South Africa. What's more the book is very cheap to produce and one copy can filter sufficient water for an individuals needs for a full four years!

This extraordinary concept is the result of Dr Teri Dankovich's work over several years. Dr Dankovich, now a postdoctural researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh developed and tested the concept at McGill University in Canada and at the University of Virginia. Like Liter of Light, the concept is wonderfully simple:

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This blog first ran as a "beyond the book" article for BookBrowse's review of The Watcher by Charlotte Link

Thanks to authors like Jo Nesbo, Karin Fossum, and Henning Mankell, not to mention Stieg Larsson, American readers have become quite familiar with contemporary Scandinavian thrillers and novels of psychological suspense. As The Watcher demonstrates, however, the Nordic countries hardly have a monopoly on this genre, and in recent years several novels by contemporary German thriller writers have begun to hit the English-speaking market. Here are a few names to look for:

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This excerpt is from BookBrowse's July 2015 white paper on book clubs. You can download the full research report for free at bookbrowse.com/wp

National surveys confirm that men tend to read less than women. For example, a 2013 Pew Research Center survey of 1000 adults ("A Snapshot of Reading in America in 2013") found that 69% of men read at least one book a year compared to 82% of women. This white paper focuses in on frequent readers, defined as those who read at least one book a month - that is to say, people who read sufficiently to belong to a book club, whether they choose to or not. Even among frequent readers, it will come as no surprise that far fewer men report being in a book club than women.

To explore the topic of men in book clubs in more detail, and to minimize the bias from our own members (who were a minority in the survey but represented a disproportionate percentage of those in book clubs), we conducted a follow up qualitative survey of 130 men to ask about their experience and opinions of book clubs. The great majority of these were not BookBrowse members and 50 had not visited BookBrowse at all, having been randomly selected from a national sample of men aged 35+ who read at least one book a month.

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