This week saw the launch of My Favourite Place in Scotland, a joint project between Scottish Book Trust and BBC Scotland which encourages people to write about the place in Scotland that they love the most. 

Glasgow's book festival, Aye Write! kicked off this weekend with the book-lovers of Glasgow descending upon The Mitchell Library for a fix of good, old-fashioned mental stimulation.

We’re not really feeling the love in the Scottish Book Trust office this Valentine’s Day, so we’ve put together a selection of ten books that will probably put you off relationships, hearts and flowers for life! What books would you recommend to restore our faith in Cupid?  

Back for a second year, and now taking place simultaneously in the UK, Ireland, USA and Germany on 23 April 2012, World Book Night offers avid readers the opportunity to spread their love of books amongst those who perhaps haven’t quite got the reading bug yet.

So far for Book Talk’s featured books I’ve created two related quizzes and asked about your feelings about ambiguous endings.  I recently finished January’s book, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, and decided that I needed to do something a bit different.

2012 looks like a pretty exciting year for books and the Book Talk books for the first few months have been chosen, read and enthused about here in our office. We can't wait to share them with you all.

Since Glister is a book that defies genres and generalisations, it was pretty difficult to decide what kind of quiz to have in its honour this month, but since December is a month for games, quizzes, puzzles, reading and movies, our volunteer (and resident sci-fi expert) Cassandra came up with this excellent sci-fi quiz, which will present a challenge to even people who think they know loads about the genre!

Glister, a novel about the moral and environmental decay of a Scottish community, is not short of talking points. With political, spiritual and moral themes running through it, the book leaves a lot of questions unanswered and has great discussion potential. So if you want to try it in your book group, we can suggest the following regime!

December’s Book Talk read, Glister by John Burnside, is a book rife with ambiguity, particularly when it comes to the ending, which left me scratching my head. Dean Koontz’s Servants of Twilight was another such book and I wondered for days whether or not the main character, a little boy, was actually a normal child or the Devil’s spawn. And what Stephen King fan can forget the ending to The Dark Tower series.

John Burnside, author of Glister, Book Talk's Book of the Month for December, spoke to us about the ideas behind the novel, ambiguous endings and the inspiration he takes from Moby Dick author Herman Melville.