Book club recommendations sought

CharlasClub Read 2015

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Book club recommendations sought

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1Helenliz
Oct 14, 2015, 3:31 pm

Every December, my book club picks books for the year. Random draw out of the hat. I'm looking for ideas to go into the hat.

I know there are some Club Readers who are in book groups - I'm after picking your brains. What books have been good? Have provoked a positive reaction? Have provoked debate? Maybe, even , have divided opinion? Anything that has meant there was some discussion, rather than "meh, it was OK"

Doesn't need to be recent, and I've always said that nothing is off limits - if someone wants to suggest 50 shades, I'll add it to the hat >;-) . The more ideas the merrier.
Thanks, in anticipation...

2NanaCC
Editado: Oct 14, 2015, 6:25 pm

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson prompted some lively discussion when my two daughters and I discussed it. I believe that my daughter's book club also had great debate over it.

Edited to add that I think it helps to have read Life After Life first.

3karenmarie
Oct 14, 2015, 6:51 pm

Our bookclub has been going since 1997. Last year's books had two "keepers" for me - Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Lively discussions with both, including some reading aloud of favorite passages and detailed explanations of likes and dislikes.

From two years ago I'd recommend The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay and Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. Good discussions of these also.

And, finally, one that provoked the most like vs dislike - 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Took forever to read, but I loved it. Others, not so much.

:)

Good luck.

4SassyLassy
Oct 14, 2015, 9:03 pm

419 was a good one for my book club, as was Above all Things.

I don't know the makeup of yours, but I'm going to guess all female. In a perfect world, that shouldn't make a difference, but going with this supposition, authors that might work are Hilary Mantel or A S Byatt. The Children's Book comes to mind right away. For a recent film tie in, Far from the Madding Crowd might work.

5ELiz_M
Oct 14, 2015, 11:46 pm

Fiction:
Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Being Dead by Jim Crace
Making it Up by Penelope Lively
Harbor by Lorraine Adams
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Blindness by José Saramago

Huh, the above list makes my bookclub seem morbid. But these books had lively discussions because most of them are well-written books with a social/current events topic

Non-Fiction:
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
The Devil in the White City
The End of Poverty
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
The Sixth Extinction

My bookclub alternates fiction & non-fiction selections. It means we have a more eclectic group of readers -- 1/3 primarily read non-fiction and suffer through the fiction selections, 1/3 read mostly fiction and struggle with non-fiction and 1/3 enjoy reading both fiction & non-fiction.

6Mr.Durick
Oct 15, 2015, 2:59 am

Recently in our book club the books that prompted the most discussion and most general satisfaction were The Martian, The Warmth of Other Suns, and The New Jim Crow. The group is typically eight to twelve people, more women than men, in a Unitarian Universalist setting although a few participants don't participate much or at all in the church.

Robert

7baswood
Oct 15, 2015, 5:05 pm

never have any trouble with my bookclub not saying anything. Most of the time I have trouble in moving on to the next book (we usually read and review two per meeting)

Recent reads that have caused the most discussion and split the group were:
The Sound and Fury William Faulkner
Paradise Toni Morison
Under the net Iris Murdoch
The fault in our stars John Green
Lolita Vladimir Nabokov

8Limelite
Oct 15, 2015, 6:54 pm

The book world is sitting up and taking notice of The New Black Renaissance. African American writers are reaching a broad audience and receiving notice and prize recognition for their contemporary writing. With the exception of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the authors are all women.

So if you have a predominantly female club, maybe you can increase the diversity of their reading with titles such as these:

Fiction
Boy, Snow, Bird
Land of Love and Drowning
Claire of the Sea Light

Nonfiction
Men We Reaped memoir
Life in Motion autobio of prima ballerina, Misty Copeland
Between the World and Me race relations in US

9.Monkey.
Oct 16, 2015, 5:46 am

>8 Limelite: Your first title there has a lot of complaints about the ending being very transphobic, so personally, that's not something I would be promoting.

Also, why does a book club have to be female in order to increase their reading diversity?

10Limelite
Oct 16, 2015, 9:52 am

I didn't mean to imply it had to be. It's a conditional statement based on a survey of the book clubs talked about in the thread being all or mostly female. The titles suggested are all written by women who happen to be black. Comparatively speaking, black writers are "under-read" as to white/Anglo/Caucasian writers. Hence, increased diversity.

You could say the same about books in translation. From the book groups' reading lists one sees in real and virtual life, most tend to read American and British writers; predominantly female clubs tend to read books by women. I could have suggested black male authors, but, as one discovers, other than Coates -- where are the contemporary black male authors?

11AnnieMod
Oct 16, 2015, 6:42 pm

>9 .Monkey.:

Why not? It will open a pretty good discussion. Hiding from books that have a wrong idea of the way things are does not make the book or the ideas disappear.

12Helenliz
Oct 17, 2015, 3:54 am

Thanks, some good ideas there. Will let you know what we pick later in the year.

9> I'm pretty sure that "I don't approve" is no reason not to suggest a book to a group. Part of the aim of the exercise, to my mind, is to be stretched out of our comfort zones. Otherwise how do we ever learn, explore or discover things about ourselves and other people? Certainly that's what I'm looking for a couple of times in the 12 books picked for the year.

13.Monkey.
Oct 17, 2015, 11:18 am

As I said, that's not something I would be promoting. Personally I will not knowingly support an author who holds such views. *shrug*

(Just to be clear, it's also not like the book is some anti-trans plot, it just has a random thing at the end which, according to reviewers, does nothing for the story and was not needed, it was simply something that expressed the author's apparently rather bigoted view.)

14karenmarie
Editado: Oct 18, 2015, 10:19 am

#6 Mr.Durick - I just finished The Martian and am looking forward to discussing it t our next bookclub meeting. I find it interesting that quite a few of the women in our bookclub (and it is, for a variety of reasons, only women), tend to choose the same types of books. So out of the 12 books for the coming bookclub year (Oct - Sept), I always know Diane will choose books from a young person's perspective Brown Girl Dreaming, Nancy will chose something mathematics or science related The Martian, and Stephanie will choose something related to the arts Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. I like to mix it up, although last year mine was The Goldfinch and this year it's Go Set a Watchmanbecause I had bought them already and thought the group would like them.

I agree, Helenliz, that reading books we would not normally read is one of the purposes of a bookclub. Some of my favorite reads that I would never have considered picking up are from bookclub.

One more recommendation - Room by Emma Donoghue. They've just made a movie of it, but we read the book several years ago and it was one of our BEST discussions ever.