Suggestions for 2021/2022 Reading Year

WHAT SHALL WE READ

2021 - 2022

Suggestions from BAD members will be posted here so you can have a think before we vote on July 17th! Each person can submit 3 suggestions total in fiction and non-fiction.

From Gen

Crying in H Mart
by Michelle Zauner
2021
256 pages
Non-fiction

An unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

Lucky Boy
by Shanti Sekaran
2017
472 pages
Fiction
Lucky Boy gives voice to two mothers bound together by their love for one lucky boy. Solimar Castro Valdez is eighteen and drunk on optimism when she embarks on a perilous journey across the US/Mexican border. Weeks later she arrives on her cousin's doorstep in Berkeley, CA, dazed by first love found then lost, and pregnant. Kavya Reddy is a chef at UC Berkeley. When she can't get pregnant, this desire will test her marriage, it will test her sanity, and it will set Kavya and her husband, Rishi, on a collision course with Soli, when she is detained and her infant son comes under Kavya's care. She builds her love on a fault line, her heart wrapped around someone else's child. Lucky Boy is an emotional journey that will leave you certain of the redemptive beauty of this world. There are no bad guys in this story, no obvious hero.


Nives
by Sacha Naspini
2020
131 pages
Fiction
One of the most exciting new voices in Italian literature brings to life a hauntingly beautiful story of undying love, loss, and resilience, and a fierce, unforgettable new heroine. Nives can’t seem to be able to shed a tear for her husband’s death. She didn’t cry when she found the body, she didn’t cry at the funeral. Even the fog of her loneliness evaporates quickly when she decides to keep her favorite chicken Giacomina with her in the bedroom. She suddenly feels relieved, almost happy, but also guilty: how can the company of a chicken replace her dead husband? Giacomina becomes paralyzed, and Nives reconnects with an old acquaintance (now a veterinarian) and they end up discussing their pasts, secrets, stories of love lost, of abandonment, and silent and heartbreaking nostalgia.

========================================================

From Bev

Piranesi
By Susanna Clarke
2020
245 pages
Fiction

Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. Did you ever put together a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the finished picture was, and gradually watch the full image emerge? This book is like that. This story is poignant and beautiful and mysterious and heartbreaking in all the right ways.


The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander
2010
290 pages
Non-fiction
In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.


Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
2021
304 pages
Fiction
Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: What does it mean to love?

What shall we read .... 2021 - 2022

 WHAT SHALL WE READ .....

For 2021 - 2022 Reading Year

Suggestions from BAD members will be posted here so you can have a think before we vote at the July meeting ....  Let's start with no more than 5 suggestions (any combination of fiction / non-fiction) ... if there are not enough to choose from (unlikely!) then a few more can be added .... let's make this a curated, rather than long & unwieldy, list ...   Please include author, title, pub date, a brief summary / recommendation ....  

==============================================================

From Janice

FICTION

Daughter Of Moloka'i by Alan Brennert 

 336 pages

Sequel to Moloka'i, which we read a few years ago.
This is the story about Rachel's daughter, Ruth, who she had to give up at birth because of the laws concerning anyone with leprosy who gave birth.


The Five Wishes Of McMurray McBride by  Joe Siple 

 223 pages

With all his family and friends gone, one hundred year-old, Murray McBride is looking for a reason to live, He finds it in Jason Cashman, a ten year-old boy with a terminal heart defect and a list of five things he wants to do before he dies.

Anxious People by Fredrick Backman 

 335 pages

A poignant, charming novel about a crime that never took place, a would be bank robber who disappears and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined.


Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom

365 pages

A gripping tale of the South during the days of slavery....the novel explores the well-known side of the dark world of slavery as well as the not-so-well known world of white slavery or indentured servitude. The book is written in a manner that is fast-paced and action packed.


Spilled Milk; Based on a true story  by K.L. Randis  

246 pages

Brook Nolan is a battered child who makes an anonymous phone call to Social Services about the escalating brutality in her home. when Social Services jeopardize her safety, condeming her to keeo her Father's secret, it's a glass of spilled milk at the dinner table to speak out about the cruelty she's been hiding.

From Andrea

Let's Talk About Hard Things

by Anna Sale

Nonfiction

Published May 2021

297 pages

In Let’s Talk About Hard Things, Sale uses the best of what she’s learned from her podcast to reveal that when we have the courage to talk about hard things, we learn about ourselves, others, and the world that we make together. Diving into five of the most fraught conversation topics—death, sex, money, family, and identity—she moves between memoir, fascinating snapshots of a variety of Americans opening up about their lives, and expert opinions to show why having tough conversations is important and how to do them in a thoughtful and generous way. 

I love Anna Sale’s “Death, Sex and Money” podcast and the book sounds like it goes even deeper into how to talk about those topics.

Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents

by Minal Hajratwala

Nonfiction

Published March 2009

352 pages

An inspiring personal saga that explores the collisions of choice and history that led one unforgettable family to become immigrants In this groundbreaking work, Minal Hajratwala mixes history, memoir, and reportage to explore the questions facing not only her own Indian family but that of every immigrant:Where did we come from?Why did we leave?

What did we give up and gain in the process?

Sounds like fascinating exploration of how a family came to be in America.

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America

by Andrés Reséndez

Nonfiction

Published April 2016

323 pages without end notes, 431 pages with end notes

Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of Natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery—more than epidemics—that decimated Indian populations across North America. Through riveting new evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, and Indian captives, The Other Slavery reveals nothing less than a key missing piece of American history. 

Slavery of Native Americans is not often talked about and I think this will help us learn things we didn’t know about California history and the mission system.

The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth

by Karen Branan

Nonfiction

Published January 2016

312 pages

Harris County, Georgia, 1912. A white man, the beloved nephew of the county sheriff, is shot dead on the porch of a black woman. Days later, the sheriff sanctions the lynching of a black woman and three black men, all of them innocent. For Karen Branan, the great-granddaughter of that sheriff, this isn’t just history, this is family history.

As she dug into the past, Branan was forced to confront her own deep-rooted beliefs surrounding race and family, a process that came to a head when Branan learned a shocking truth: she is related not only to the sheriff, but also to one of the four who were murdered. Both identities—perpetrator and victim—are her inheritance to bear.

This sounds like a book that tries to figure out why such an event happened and will make for good discussion.

The Book of Longings: A Novel

by Sue Monk Kidd

Fiction

Published April 2020

432 pages

Raised in a wealthy family with ties to the ruler of Galilee, Ana is rebellious and ambitious, with a brilliant mind and a daring spirit. She is expected to marry an older widower, a prospect that horrifies her. An encounter with eighteen-year-old Jesus changes everything.

Their marriage evolves with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where Ana makes a home with Jesus, his brothers, and their mother, Mary. When Ana commits a brazen act that puts her in peril, she flees to Alexandria, where startling revelations and greater dangers unfold, and she finds refuge in unexpected surroundings. Ana determines her fate during a stunning convergence of events considered among the most impactful in human history.

We’ve read the Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd, which I enjoyed. This sounds like a compelling story.

Somebody's Daughter  by Ashley C. Ford

Non-fiction

Published June 2021

224 pages

Journalist Ford debuts with a blistering yet tender account of growing up with an incarcerated father. She retraces her childhood in 1990s Fort Wayne, Ind., where she lived in a family anchored by her weary mother, whose anger bubbled over frequently, and a judgmental but loving grandmother. Felt throughout is the shadowy presence of her father, who was serving a 24-year sentence for rape. The moving narrative unfolds with tales of childhood misadventures with her younger brother, frequent library visits, and days spent anywhere but home. Ford writes vividly of having to weather her mother’s rage and rotating cast of boyfriends, while navigating her own sense of shame and abandonment as a teenager fighting to be “loved ferociously and completely” in a series of painful relationships. Though she rarely visited her father in prison, he wrote to her often, and “his letters were clues to where I’d come from.” When they finally reconnected before his release, Ford describes their tearful reunion and reconciliation with devastating clarity. “Somewhere, in the center of it all, was my father’s favorite girl.” This remarkable, heart-wrenching story of loss, hardship, and self-acceptance astounds.

I listened to an interview with the author and this book sounds like it will be moving, beautifully-written and fodder for much discussion.

=======================================

Heidi’s Book Club Picks


Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia Fiction Published 3/2021 224 pages

From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Gabriela Garcia's Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals--personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others--that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America's most tangled, honest, human roots. First novel for Garica and it got really good reviews. I like stories that are generational.



The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead Fiction Published 8/2016 306 pages

An alternate history novel that tells the story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves in the southeastern United States during the 19th century, who make a bid for freedom from their Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad, which the novel depicts as a rail transport system with safe houses and secret routes. A National Book Award Winner and Pulitzer Prize for fiction.[ I saw the author in an interview and became intrigued.



Untamed by Glennon Doyle Fiction Published 3/2020 333 pages

Is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is. I thought it sounded good…



The Daughters of Erietown: A Novel by Connie Schultz Published 6/2020 480 pages

This riveting novel tells the story of Brick, Ellie, and their daughter Samantha. It begins with Brick and Ellie falling in love in the 1950’s and illuminates the issues facing working-class families and their communities, as it chronicles the evolution of women's lives in America. It also explores how much people know about each other and pretend not to, and the secrets that explode lives. This novel got rave reviews but those that didn’t love it said there was too much dialogue…

=========================================================================

From Gen

Crying in H Mart 
by Michelle Zauner
2021
256 pages
Non-fiction

An unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

Lucky Boy 
by Shanti Sekaran
2017
472 pages
Fiction
Lucky Boy gives voice to two mothers bound together by their love for one lucky boy. Solimar Castro Valdez is eighteen and drunk on optimism when she embarks on a perilous journey across the US/Mexican border. Weeks later she arrives on her cousin's doorstep in Berkeley, CA, dazed by first love found then lost, and pregnant. Kavya Reddy is a chef at UC Berkeley. When she can't get pregnant, this desire will test her marriage, it will test her sanity, and it will set Kavya and her husband, Rishi, on a collision course with Soli, when she is detained and her infant son comes under Kavya's care. She builds her love on a fault line, her heart wrapped around someone else's child. Lucky Boy is an emotional journey that will leave you certain of the redemptive beauty of this world. There are no bad guys in this story, no obvious hero.


Nives 
by Sacha Naspini
2020
131 pages
Fiction
One of the most exciting new voices in Italian literature brings to life a hauntingly beautiful story of undying love, loss, and resilience, and a fierce, unforgettable new heroine. Nives can’t seem to be able to shed a tear for her husband’s death. She didn’t cry when she found the body, she didn’t cry at the funeral. Even the fog of her loneliness evaporates quickly when she decides to keep her favorite chicken Giacomina with her in the bedroom. She suddenly feels relieved, almost happy, but also guilty: how can the company of a chicken replace her dead husband? Giacomina becomes paralyzed, and Nives reconnects with an old acquaintance (now a veterinarian) and they end up discussing their pasts, secrets, stories of love lost, of abandonment, and silent and heartbreaking nostalgia.

========================================================

From Bev

Piranesi
By Susanna Clarke
2020
245 pages
Fiction

Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. Did you ever put together a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the finished picture was, and gradually watch the full image emerge? This book is like that. This story is poignant and beautiful and mysterious and heartbreaking in all the right ways.


The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander
2010
290 pages
Non-fiction
In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.


Klara and the Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro
2021
304 pages
Fiction
Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: What does it mean to love?

=======================================

From Teri

How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang

Fic (2020)  272p

Library Journal Reviews:

DEBUT With visceral directness, Zhang opens her first novel with two children waking in a mining camp in the late 1800s American West and finding their father dead. As narrated by older child Lucy, various details emerge, if not explicitly; these children are of Asian ancestry, …. Discriminated against and destitute, the siblings flee with the corpse on a stolen horse...VERDICT This moving tale of family, gold, and freedom rings with a truth that defies rosy preconceptions. The description of human and environmental degradation is balanced by shining characters who persevere greatly. Highly recommended.

Many favorable reviews (‘gorgeous writing’) as this novel confronts common mythologies regarding immigration, race, and the westward settling of America.  It sounds appropriate to current issues and attitudes.

Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson

Fic (2020)  446p

The world looks quite different in 2054-- enter bots who have been created and imported to do the jobs that humans do not want to do.   Bot Jared is moved to tears by an old movie and thus has broken a cardinal rule.  Fleeing the Bureau of Robotics he heads for LA to become a screenwriter.

PW: But Jared's mechanical coming-of-age brings to the forefront the things that make life worth living as Stephenson delivers an amusing commentary on logic, love, and feeling. This entertaining and surprisingly poignant story is a charmer. 

 SF Chronicle Review, 9/4/20, : The ways Stephenson plays with various storytelling tropes are clever but sincere  — he ribs on Hollywood’s infamous reception to fresh screenwriters and subtly infuses elements from beloved films like “Blade Runner” and “Forrest Gump” into the plot. It’s no surprise that actual filmmakers are eager for a chance to adapt his book.

Sounds like a fun read … and somewhat different from our usual fare…

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 by Francine Prose

Fic (2014) 436p

Kirkus: A tour de force of character, point of view and especially atmosphere, Prose's latest takes place in Paris from the late 1920s till the end of World War II. The primary locus of action is the Chameleon Club, a cabaret where entertainment edges toward the kinky.

LJ: What's most striking about this latest work from Prose (Blue Angel) is how effectively she weaves together the stories of more than a half dozen characters to tell the larger picture of France (and, indeed, Europe) between the World Wars while reflecting on the nature of evil and the limits of biography (and biographical fiction). 

The time and setting of this novel (Paris! 20’s & 30’s!)  greatly appeal to me --looks like an engrossing and sprawling read.

Sergeant Salinger; a novel by Jerome Charyn

Fic (2021) 286p

Since Catcher in the Rye is one of my all-time favorites, ever since I first read it when I was about 14, this book caught my eye.  From the book jacket: ‘Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined… an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.’  The novel covers Salinger’s wartime experience from 1942 when he was drafted,  until 1947.

LJ: Charyn deftly leaves the reader wondering whether Holden Caulfield's teenage angst was really Salinger's personification of post-traumatic stress disorder. VERDICT An engrossing but dark work of historical fiction about the last private person in America.

Kirkus: A smoothly told, unexpectedly affecting foray into a lesser-known chapter of the literary giant's life.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Fic (2018)  502p

Reviews are generally favorable,  although somewhat mixed, for this large book from award-winning writer Richard Powers. Booklist: ‘...  a magnificent saga of lives aligned with the marvels of trees, the intricacy and bounty of forests, and their catastrophic destruction under the onslaught of humanity's ever-increasing population on our rapidly warming planet. A virtuoso at parallel narratives, concurrent micro and macro perspectives, and the meshing of feelings, facts, and ideas, Powers draws on his signature fascination with the consequences, intended and otherwise, of science and technology as he considers the paradox of our ongoing assaults against nature in spite of all the evidence indicating impending disasters.’

I’m intrigued by the storyline -- multiple stories woven together-- in what appears to be a challenging book.