Finding Good Books for Your Book Group
If you're in a book group, you know how much effort it takes to choose titles to discuss. The options can be overwhelming when you're browsing at the library or a bookstore, and it's sometimes difficult to determine which books will appeal to a lot of readers and inspire good discussion. There are more than a dozen book discussion groups at the Library, so your librarians have experience finding good titles to discuss. The following lists, websites and blogs are good places to start:
Book Club Book Lists page from Goodreads
Book Club Books page from LitLovers
Book Club Central from BookBrowse
Book Club Picks from Amazon
The following picks are recommended by librarians who lead book groups at the Library:
Fiction:
"The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak. Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
“A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” by Anthony Marra. In a rural village in Chechnya, a failed doctor, Akhmed, harbors the traumatized 8-year-old daughter of a father abducted by Russian forces and treats a series of wounded rebels and refugees while exploring the shared past that binds him to the child.
"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker. Celie is poor, despised by the society around her, and badly treated by her family. As a teenager she begins writing letters directly to God in an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear. Her letters span 20 years and record a journey of self-discovery and empowerment through the guiding light of a few strong women and her own implacable will to find harmony with herself and her home.
"The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton discovers her next subject in a book club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.
“Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami. Toru, a quiet and serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman. However, their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before.
"The Radiance of Tomorrow" by Ishmael Beah. Longtime friends Benjamin and Bockarie return to their hometown after the civil war in Sierra Leone. The village is in ruins, the ground covered in bones. As more villagers begin to come back, Benjamin and Bockarie try to forge a new community by taking up their former posts as teachers, but they're beset by obstacles.
"Room" by Emma Donoghue. Five-year-old narrator Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier, live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper's yard. But Ma, as Jack calls her, proves to be resilient and resourceful--and attempts a nail-biting escape.
“The Rosie Project” by Graeme Simsion. Don Tillman, a professor of genetics, sets up a project designed to find him the perfect wife, starting with a questionnaire that has to be adjusted a little as he goes along. Then he meets Rosie, who is everything he's not looking for in a wife but becomes his friend as he helps her try to find her biological father.
“Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel. Set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, "Station Eleven" tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
"The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" by Alan Bradley. In the summer of 1950, a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia's family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the garden and watches as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw.
“The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” by Rachel Joyce. Harold Fry is convinced that he must deliver a letter to an old friend in order to save her. He sets out to walk the length of England, meeting various characters along the way and reminiscing about the events of his past and people he has known.
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” by Maria Semple. Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect; and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents and secret correspondence, creating a compulsively readable and touching novel.
Nonfiction:
"The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" by William Kamkwamba. William dreamed of studying science in Malawi's top boarding schools. But in 2002, his country was stricken with a famine that left his parents destitute. Unable to pay the tuition for his education, William was forced to drop out and help his family forage for food. Yet William refused to let go of his dreams. Using scrap metal, tractor parts and bicycle halves, William forged a crude yet operable windmill, bringing electricity and a future to his family.
"Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" by Roz Chast. In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the loss of elderly parents.
"The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II" by Denise Kiernan. The author traces the story of the unsung World War II workers in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, through interviews with dozens of surviving women and other Oak Ridge residents.
"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta Lacks was a poor Southern tobacco farmer whose cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years. Yet her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than 20 years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without consent.
"Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory" by Caitlin Doughty. The blogger behind the popular Web series "Ask a Mortician" describes her experiences working at a crematory, including how she sometimes got ashes on her clothes and how she cared for bodies of all shapes and sizes.
For more information about upcoming book discussions at the Library, visit http://thelibrary.org/bookdiscussions.
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