'Mockingjay,' by Suzanne Collins: Our first pick in the EW Shelf Life Book Club!

I’ve been wanting to do a book club on EW.com’s Shelf Life blog since it first launched. First, the fact that we’re here together means we share a love of books and enjoy reading and talking about them. But unlike the traditional book club forum, which requires being some place in-person at a designated time regardless of how we felt about the book, here on the Web, you can just skip (or defer) a discussion if you’re bogged down with work, family, Mad Men — or if you flat-out didn’t like what you read that week.

So how will the EW Shelf Life book club work? Each Tuesday we’ll assign a book. You’ll have a week to read it, and then we’ll meet back here the following Tuesday for a discussion — what we liked, what we didn’t, etc. We’ll pick them from a broad range of genres — thrillers, literary fiction, short stories, memoirs — and we’ll also periodically put a future selection to a vote, letting you, the readers, pick what book we tackle next. Some weeks we’ll have the selected book’s author join us, either by taking questions submitted ahead of time here on the blog, or by participating in a live chat discussion.

To kick things off, we’ll talk about Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay, which went on sale this morning. It’s a smart, brainy read that straddles the teen and adult fiction worlds, laced with the kinds of issues and questions that make for lively debate. And — maybe the most important of all — it’s just a great story. So crack open your copy of Mockingjay — like you haven’t already! — and join me here next Tuesday, Aug. 31. We won’t have Suzanne Collins (though we’ll mine from an interview we recently did with her) — but there’s still plenty to talk about. And let me know: What kinds of books would you like to see here?