Great/not so great book club reads

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Permalink Reply by Kelly on January 11, 2008 at 12:48pm

Hi Mikaela! I loved The Sparrow and sequel so much, I just bought them, and can't wait to reread them. I didn't think the wrap up was overly neat, but rather just what I wanted. There had to be some redemption for the characters! And Russell' website, BTW, says she's a convert to Judiasm, not Christianity.

For me, buying a book is the true sign of something special. I'm a huge proponent of the library, and will almost always borrow a book before purchasing.

Thanks for the recommendation of Snow Crash. Sounds like something I'd like, considering I actually slogged through Tad Williams Otherland quartet. Boy, talk about another one who needed an editor. I found myself skipping whole chapters in order to get to the "good parts."

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Permalink Reply by Lisa on January 1, 2008 at 4:37pm

One of my favorite book club reads, in terms of stimulating great discussion, was Self Made Man. It's nonfiction, by a female journalist who passes as a man at a bowling league, a monastery, a sales job, a men's retreat, and a strip club. And she reports back from her female (and lesbian) perspective on what goes on with men in these places. Great stimulus to discussion!

Another favorite book club topic- soon after Kurt Vonnegut died we decided to all read a different Vonnegut novels. Discussing this very prolific authors' various books, themes and development over time was great.

Our book club also has brilliantly solved the "we love to get together once a month but it's really difficult to read one book a month" by alternating reading a book one month and watching a video the next.

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Permalink Reply by Samantha Anne Scott on January 2, 2008 at 6:34am

I've never been in a book club, per se. This is the closet I've come to it, but here are some of my favorite books that seem like they'd be perfect for discussing and exploring as a group ...

♥ "Rent Girl" by Michelle Tea (Autobiography)

♥ "Neuromancer" by William Gibson (Cyberpunk)

♥ "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age: Or A Young Girls Illustrated Primer" by Neal Stephenson (Cyberpunk)

♥ "The Spook Who Sat By The Door" by Sam Greenlee (Black nationalist fiction)

♥ "The Bloody Chamber" by Angela Carter (Magic realism)

♥ "The Mixquiahuala Letters" by Ana Castillo (Correspondence format)

♥ "The Gate to Women's Country" by Sherri S. Tepper (Post-apocalyptic fiction)

♥ "Nadja" by Andre Breton (Surrealist romance)

♥ "The Blind Owl" by Sadegh Hedayat (Surreal Iranian fiction)

♥ "Our Lady of the Flowers" by Jean Genet (Surreal crime fiction)

I guess that's a good start for a list of my favorites. Happy reading!

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Permalink Reply by Mikaela Renz-Whitmore on January 21, 2008 at 8:35am

I just read Mixquiahuala Letters and hated it. I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt as "first novel" and all that, but I thought the format didn't work AT ALL, and although it's a correspondence between women, it was all about the men cycling through. Ugh. Reminded me of a chicana Sex & the City minus the humor and self-ribbing. Much too self-serious and overly treacle-y. I can't believe it's been adopted as a feminist text. Yuck!

I liked So Far from God much more, although I thought that had problems, too.

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Permalink Reply by Hazel Thornton on July 20, 2008 at 8:12am

I moved here 3 years ago, but still keep in touch with my CA book club.
Turns out my CA and NM book clubs have read many of the same books.

Reading now (NM): Three Cups of Tea (Mortenson and Relin)
Read last month: Shadow of the Wind (Zafon)
Reading later, at my suggestion: Easter Island (Vanderbes)
Sorry I recommended (I usually have read prior, but didn't this time): A Thousand Splendid Suns (Hosseini)
Beloved in CA: Rain of Gold (Villasenor) & The Girls (Lansen)
CA nearly came to blows: The Tortilla Curtain (Boyle)
Bo-o-o-ring: In the Fall (Lent)
Couldn't finish (sorry Kelly): Reading Lolita in Teheran (Nafisi)
Mixed reviews (haven't read it myself): The Red Tent (Diamant)

Personal book club favorites:
the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime (Haddon) -- turns out it was not just me fascinated because I have a nephew with Asperger's
My Sister's Keeper (Picoult)
The Lovely Bones (Sebold)
Wild Swans (Chang)
Fortune's Rocks (Shreve)
Sister of my Heart (Divakaruni)
The Giver (Lowry) -- I collect Newbery Award winners, but I wasn't the one who picked it in either book club!
The Kite Runner (Hosseini)

I though I wanted to recommend one of my all-time favorites ever: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Dillard)
So I sat down to re-read it (after 30 years) and...welll...uh....just couldn't get into it...has that ever happened to you? So sad.
Wonder if I'd still like River God (Smith) or Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy? Or, god forbid, Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)?

On my Bookshelf:
The Road (McCarthy)
Bel Canto (Patchett)
The Bone People (Hulme)

Interested from reading this thread: The Sparrow (Russell)

Not book club, but I did enjoy:
The Time Traveler's Wife (Niffenegger)
A Walk in the Woods (Bryson)
The Ballad of Frankie Silver (and other McCrumb books)

Here's the most fascinating book I WANT my book club to read, and have not heard anyone mention: Into the Forest (Hegland)
It's "emerging apocalyptic", if you will, and in the quietest possible way, i.e. it is unclear to the characters why the infrastructure is gradually breaking down

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Permalink Reply by Jill on July 24, 2008 at 3:19pm

Oh yeah, I read "Into the Forest" - that would definitely create some interesting book club discussions! That was one of those books that I couldn't stop thinking about. Not sure if I liked it or not, but either way it made me think. Kind of like The Road.

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Permalink Reply by Jill on July 24, 2008 at 3:49pm

Books that sparked the most discussion:

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (love love love it - this book, and its sequel, was responsible for my current - and probably permanent - obsession with science fiction)
Midwives by Chris Bohjalian (my book club is mostly made up of women with children, so there was a lot to talk about with this one)
My Sister's Keeper by Jodie Picoult (reviews were mixed, but great discussion. I personally find Picoult's writing style irritating)
My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki (almost made me a vegetarian)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer (beautiful book)
The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle (one of my favorite authors - this book really gets 'em riled up)
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld (this book resonated not because we liked it, but because we all knew people like that growing up)

Books I would like to see our club read -

The Girls by Lori Lansens (conjoined twins, a lovely book)
The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue (A young boy is captured by hobgoblins and replaced by a changeling. The fantasy part of this book is understated, a good read even if you don't like that genre)
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer (science fiction - not hard core, tho - with an ethical dilemma)
Mary Modern by Camile DeAngelis (a researcher clones her grandmother)
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Life Mask or Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue
The Host by Stephenie Meyer (I had no idea her books were such a huge cultural phenomena with young girls, but they have created a major buzz. Read any of the vampire books to see what it's all about -- this one is her first book for adults. I enjoyed it a lot, but as you can see by my list, I like weird stuff.)

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Permalink Reply by Mikaela Renz-Whitmore on July 24, 2008 at 3:56pm

I gotta put in a plug for Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool. He won the Pulitzer for Empire Falls, but that one didn't capture me like Nobody's Fool.

Bonus is there's a movie with Paul Newman. Drawback is that it barely captures the fun of the novel.

I literally laughed out loud the entire book.

It would be good for a book club with men, I think, as it really delves into male identity and relationships without you really noticing that's what it's doing.

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Permalink Reply by Ron Da Bomb on October 23, 2008 at 10:53pm

Oh wow.

I just finished The Sparrow.

On recommendation of this post. How did I not know about this author?? I am a sci-fi NUT!! Maybe that's why.

This, while sci-fi, is something else. I can't explain right now. I have been, for the last couplea days, contemplating this book. I loved the character development, and the religious undertones. The sci-fi aspect seemed minimal at best. This was a book about faith. And the apparent abandonment of love when we are most vulnerable to it. Some may read this book and replace "love" in the above sentence for "God" and I could not disagree.

I fell in love with so many characters in this book.

Okay. Let me say this. Those of you few who are sci-fi nuts like me .... I have endured many good plot lines at the expense of good writing, and I have endured a lot of "good writing" at the expense of a good story. This work has both. An eloquent writer who makes you think that you ARE the character, and then shifts the story and character in a way that is both predictable and unexpected at the same time. Am I making too much of this?

Read it for yourself. Like another person in this thread, I suspect the reaction will be 50/50. I am in the "50".

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Permalink Reply by Jetspawn on October 24, 2008 at 9:04am

I am a Sci-Fi fan, so I vote for Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (Changed my thought process) Calahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson, (An AA meeting in a bar!) and Ender's Game by Orson Scott (Should be required reading for all Elementary School Teachers, Military High Brass and world leaders.) JET

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Permalink Reply by Ron Da Bomb on October 24, 2008 at 6:54pm

Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" and Herbert's "Dune" vy for my fave sci-fi novel. I re-read both every few years...

If you are a Heinlein fan, you've perhaps noticed that he uses the phrase "stranger in a strange land" in a large percent of his novels.

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