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?
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?
