“White Teeth” by Zadie Smith
“Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women” by Rebecca Traister
“Room” by Emma Donoghue
“The Furnace of Affliction” by Jennifer Graber
“Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot
I’m very excited about this list. We have a mix of fiction and nonfiction, even a YA book (Lowry’s). We meet monthly, and on months where we don’t read a book, we’ll be discussing short articles or essays on topics that interest the group. We’ll also have a poetry night. And we’ll have two meetings that are purely social, one in the summer that includes our spouses and kids, and one in December that involves cookies and choosing the next year’s books.
Our club was nearly defunct six months ago. No one was coming; no one was reading the books. Time is always the problem for women with jobs and young children. The key was finding the right mix for us, a mixture of genres to keep things interesting, a book every other month to give people a chance to read it. It’s not about quantity. It’s about quality–the quality of the books and the quality of the time we get to spend discussing them. Read on!