Book Talk: We Recommend
Recommended by Mary Wasmuth, Job-Search Coach, Main Library
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz. 213 pagesIf your group thrives on controversy, Junot Diaz is your man. And if you see in fiction a means to move past, as Diaz puts it “the checkpoints on your social borders,” you’ll do well to jump the fences of language and attitude and venture deep into the, as Publisher’s Weekly puts it, “precarious, unappreciated, precious lives in which intimacy is a lost art, masculinity a parody, and kindness, reason, and hope struggle to survive like seedlings in a war zone.”
Many of Diaz’s compelling, perfectly made, stories focus on a recurring character, Junior, as he moves from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey and later to Boston. With him, we watch his womanizing older brother flail against the cancer that will kill him. And we watch Junior fall in love, destroy love, and mourn its loss, over and over. This funny, aching, thought-provoking collection is guaranteed to get your book group talking.
The Round House by Louise Erdrich. 321 pages
Joe Coutts is thirteen years old when his mother is brutally raped. She’s further brutalized by a justice system skewed against native women. Joe’s attempt to achieve some resolution thrusts him into the complexities and traumas of adult life, and he learns he can no longer rely on the connections that had sustained him—his easy friendships, his open and loving parents, and the unquestioning acceptance of his extended family.
Over the years, Louise Erdrich has created a unique body of work, vividly populated and richly described; hilarious and heart-wrenching; many of them set in the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. Introduce your book group to this amazing writer, and they’ll be forever grateful.
Someone by Alice McDermott. 232 pagesSomeone opens with a crowded Brooklyn street viewed through the eyes of seven-year-old Marie, who, she says, is the “sole survivor, now, of that street scene.” We know from this that we’re reading about a community deeply connected in a way few today have experienced. We see that we’ll be moving back and forward through time with Marie, an extraordinarily perceptive guide. McDermott’s layered, moving novel is dense with reflection and feeling, a deceptively simple story about the life of an apparently ordinary woman. But we know better.
Unlike many titles recommended for groups, Someone doesn’t take on contemporary issues. Instead, it examines the meaning of family, love, loss, and community and shows us, subtly and beautifully, how a life accrues value and purpose. I’d call these topics worth discussing.
There But For The by Ali Smith. 236 pages
At a suburban-London dinner party, a guest locks himself in the bathroom and refuses to come out. Extending from days to weeks, Miles’s stay turns into a media circus, and an unlikely group of people assembles to support him. The book is narrated by four characters who know Miles slightly: Anna, a woman in her forties who encountered him on a high-school trip; Mark, a gay man in his sixties who met him at the theater; May, an elderly woman suffering from dementia; and "preternaturally articulate" ten-year-old Brooke. It may well take a book group to unravel the mysteries of this intricate, funny, literate, and affecting novel. Mine had a great time doing it.
And a Few More
The long and the short:
The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin, 426 pages
The Buddha in the Attic* by Julie Otsuka, 129 pages
For controversy:
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, 253 pages;
The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg, 273 pages
*reviewed in 2013's Staff Recommends
Even More Ideas
Book Browse Book Club Resources
Great Group Reads (selected by the Women’s National Book Association)
Indiebound’s Indie Next Lists (focus on book groups several times a year)
Reading Group Choices
Reading Group Guides
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