Book club books

At Passover seder at my parents' house two weekends ago, my dear family friend Liz and I were discussing our respective book clubs and good book club books.  Conveniently, while this question was fresh on my mind, my book club met last week.  Since I happen to have a Goodreads shelf keeping track of all the books we've read as a book club, we also took some time to scroll through the list and talk about the books and discuss which ones were the best.

Obviously, every book club is a little different, so first let me tell you a little bit about mine.  We started just about 7 years ago.  In the beginning, attendees at meetings fluctuated a lot, but eventually we whittled down to a core group of 7, which then became 6 when one of our members moved away.  We try to meet about once a month, and we rotate at whose house book club takes place, and the hostess gets to pick the book, though sometimes we discuss choices.  We only do books no one has read, so if someone has already read the book offered by the host, the host picks a new one, and we try to keep books under 400 pages.  We are not a super-literary highbrow book club - we read a variety of books, mostly a mix of contemporary fiction, historical fiction, and mystery/thrillers.  We've read amazing books, mediocre books, and a few really crappy books.  Interestingly, even though I am sufficiently obsessed with books to have a whole blog about books, some of the books I've picked have been downright mediocre - I guess that is a risk you take when you pick a book you haven't read!

In addition to discussing whatever book we have chosen generally, we also always start by going around in a circle and each giving the book a rating, from 1-5 stars, and why.  It's a great conversation starter, in addition to being interesting to hear everyone's different opinions.  Interestingly, I always seem to either give the book the highest rating of the group, or the lowest!

So, without further ado, here are some of the books my book club generally agreed were the best book club picks, in that they were both great books and inspired great discussions.  We have had some interesting discussions about books the group didn't like as much too, but why recommend those when I can recommend better books?

The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom - This was a wonderful historical novel; an interesting twist on a book about slavery, in that the main protagonist is a white indentured servant - a young girl orphaned on her way to America from Ireland and brought back by the boat's captain as an indentured servant to live and work with his slaves. A great book and we had a great discussion about it, and still remains quite memorable even though we read it all the way back in 2012 (it made my 2012 Top 10 list).  I think this is generally agreed by my book club to be the best book club book we've read, and I have definitely recommended it to other people for their book clubs in the past.

The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman - This novel starts at a wedding in contemporary Manhattan, where the groom's grandfather meets the bride's granddaughter and sees she is the wife he had before the Holocaust separated them. The story then shifts back in time to Prague in the 1930s and 1940s, going back and forth between the story of Lenka and her experiences at an unusual concentration camp called Terezin during that time, and Josef during the time after he came to America. I know my sister, who is in my book club, is not a big fan of historical fiction and especially not of Holocaust books, but I think everyone else really loved this one.  (This also made my 2012 Top 10 List.)

Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst -   This novel was about a family with two daughters, one diagnosed as on the spectrum. It's alternately narrated by the younger "neurotypical" daughter describing the family's experience going to live and work at a camp in the wilderness being established for families with children with issues, and by the mother in the years leading up to their decision to go there. In addition to being gorgeously written, this book had a lot to discuss.  This was a 5 star book for me which easily made my 2016 Top 10 List.

The Leavers by Lisa Ko - This novel is about a poor 11 year old Chinese-American boy in NYC, whose mother goes to work one day, and never comes home and he has no idea what happened to her. He ends up adopted by a white professor couple living in upstate New York. The book takes place mostly at that time, and ten years later, with flashbacks as well, and eventually we find out what happened to the mother as well. Such a sad and melancholy book, but beautifully written.  This is actually the most recent book we read for book club, and the book we discussed at our meeting last week - and it provided enough to talk about that we talked about it longer than our usual book club books.

Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin  - An interesting historical novel told from the perspective of the Alice who inspired the writing of "Alice in Wonderland."  The book discusses both her childhood and her (creepy) relationship with Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Caroll) as well as her adult life.  We read this back in 2013 but it remains another favorite of the book group.

(Dis)Honorable Mention:   I feel compelled to mention the book The Dinner by Herman Koch because the rest of my book group loved it, but I HATED IT WITH A BURNING PASSION!  I will admit we had an interesting discussion about it though.  But I still hesitate to recommend it, because UGH, I just hated it so much.

And because I can never stop with recommending - here are a few more that we read that I thought were great, but didn't make the top 5 above, for one reason or another - they either weren't as memorable as the books above, or our discussion on the book was not as interesting, and/or other people did not like the book as much as I did:  Room by Emma Donoghue (long before it was adapted into a movie), Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (I LOVED this book and included it in my dystopian fiction post and my 2015 Top 10 list, but some people didn't like it very much), The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion (such a charming and funny book but not the most interesting to discuss),  Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (though we all remember the book, no one even remembered that we had read this for book club!), A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron (made my 2011 Top 10 list),  We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, The Plum Tree by Ellen Marie Wiseman, and The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin.  And there were lots more that I loved too.

As regular readers of this blog know, I also am in a book club of just two people with my friend Sarah called GCBC (see here and here for our recent book club discussions), but since it's just the two of us and we pick books together just because we both want to read them, they're not necessarily typical book club books.  Perhaps in the future I will collaborate with Sarah to come up with a post on which books we've read together we think would make the best book club books.  In the meantime, I can tell you that the two books we read together which we both gave 5 stars were Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal and The Midnight Rose by Lucinda Riley.

Bonus recommendations:

I know, I know, I'm always giving you too many recommendations and making your to-read lists excessively long.  But here are a few books I have read on my own rather than with either of my book clubs, but which I think particularly would make for good book club conversations:

The Expatriates by Janice Y.K. Lee - I read this book almost exactly two years ago, but I honestly haven't stopped thinking about it since then.  It's a novel set in contemporary Hong Kong, about three American expatriate women living there. A small portion of the book is a bit of a satire of the expat lifestyle, but the majority of the book was a quiet but deeply emotional literary novel, very well written. This made my 2016 Top 10 List.

The Arrangement by Sarah Dunn - Very enjoyable and quick novel about a married couple who decide to try a six month open marriage experiment. We also get glimpses into the lives of other people in their town. The characters are quirky but very believable; they really come to life as does the town the book is set in. It's both funny and thought provoking. Fans of authors like Emma Straub and Meg Wolitzer would enjoy this, and it would provide a lot to talk about.  This made my 2017 Top 10 list.

Siracusa by Delia Ephron - A great novel about two married couples (and the child of one of the couples) on a trip to Italy, told from the alternating perspectives of each of the four adults. They're all told in hindsight, so all we know is that something went awry on the trip, and this does a great job of creating a lot of suspense in what otherwise is a slow character study of a story. The characters are all quite flawed and not likable, yet somehow you get totally pulled into their stories and even find sympathy for them. Lots of good stuff about the lies people tell themselves and each other.

The Good Liar by Catherine McKenzie - This book just came out last week, but I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of it so I read it a few weeks ago.  This novel is set a year after a (fictional) office building explosion in Chicago that killed more than 500 people, introducing us to three different women whose lives were affected in different ways by the tragedy. I went into this book thinking that it would be a mystery/thriller, but really it's more of a character study with just undertones of psychological thriller. LOTS of twists and turns, some of which I predicted and some of which really surprised me. Enjoyable read which would also make for a good book club conversation.

The Marriage Pact by Michelle Richmond - Unique and page-turning domestic drama and psychological thriller. A just-married couple receive a gift of membership in "The Pact," a secret and exclusive group dedicated to helping people stay married. Needless to say, before too much time passes, things take a turn for the sinister. Very entertaining read and while some of it was (intentionally) kind of crazy and out there, it also had some interesting stuff to say about ordinary marriages as well.

Ok, I'm finally done for today!

If you're in a book club, what are the best books your book club has read?