About Advent Book Blog

Welcome to our annual collaborative book recommendation project.

It’s like one of those cardboard holiday calendars with 25 pieces of chocolate inside them. Only this calendar is made of pixels and instead of being filled with chocolate it’s filled with book recommendations from awesome people.

The Advent Book Blog was created in November 2009 by Sean Cranbury and Julie Wilson and many of our friends & colleagues associated with books, publishing and creativity in general.

We had a simple idea: to build a space where we could showcase the enthusiasm that people have for the books that they love.

To highlight not only the book, but also the person who recommends it.

In this way we hope to build a better community conversation about good books, writers and publishers.  Also, we hope to give readers a genuine alternative to the generic holiday reading lists of the Usual Suspects Guild.

We call this the digital handsell.

Here’s how it works:

We ask our participants to respond to the following imaginary scenario:

You’re working in your favorite bookstore and a customer walks into the store and tells you that he/she needs a good book.  A gift for a curious, open-minded and adventurous reader.  The customer is someone that you’ve helped many times before and they trust your taste implicitly, but they’re in a hurry.

Our readers are that imaginary curious, open-minded and adventurous reader. What book do you put in your customers hand without hesitation?

In 75 words or less (or more, depending on your sense of restraint) what book do you recommend?

What book, regardless of genre, format, relative bestsellerness, colour or shape, gets your unequivocal stamp of awesomeness?

Tune in on December 1st to find out!