Personal Book Group Selections for 2014

I am fascinated with book discussion groups—how they are organized, their traditions, what books they choose to read, how they choose those books… I belong to a women’s book group that is just beginning its 22^nd year together. The group is not affiliated with the library. At the moment we have 11 active members. Our group has almost always been about this size or just slightly larger. We are a remarkably stable group. Of the current 11 members, 8 of us have been with the group since the beginning. And the remaining 3 of us have been around quite a long time. We meet monthly in each other’s homes--except for August when many of us are vacationing. The hostess always provides food and drink, which may or may not relate to the book being discussed. We have read and discussed 233 books together!

Each January our tradition is to have a pot luck dinner, where we enjoy food, one another’s company and select books for the upcoming year. Each member may choose any book that they wish, though some of us may bring a few titles to the table for consideration.  Here are the books we will be reading in the upcoming year.

This February we are reading The Lotus Eaters (2010) by Tatjana Soli

The Lotus Eaters tells the story of an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War as she captures the wrenching chaos and finds herself torn between the love of two men.

Our group typically avoids science fiction and fantasy titles, but this March we will read the award-winning

title Among Others (2010) by Jo Walton.

Raised by a half-mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales, she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom and promise in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. Then her mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, and Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled--and her twin sister dead.

2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. In April, our group will acknowledge this anniversary by reading Three Day Road (2005) by Joseph Boyden.

In 1916, two Cree Indians enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces and are sent to the western front as sharpshooters.

A fairy-tale-like title, The Snow Child (2012) by Eowyn Ivey, will be our May 

discussion book.

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm, she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees with a red fox as a companion. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this girl who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love the strange, almost-supernatural child as their own daughter. 

Orphan Train (2013) by Kristina Baker Klein will be our June discussion book.

Close to aging out of the foster care system, Molly Ayer takes a position helping an elderly woman named Vivian and discovers that they are more alike than different as she helps Vivian solve a mystery from her past.

In July our focus will be on the recent history of Chechnya when we read the novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013) by Anthony Marra.

The author sets this story in a rural village in Chechnya during the region's civil war with Russia. Eight-year-old Havaa is witness to the abduction of her father by Russian soldiers. Her neighbor, Akhmed, a kind, though incompetent doctor, rescues Havaa and delivers her to a nearby bombed-out hospital. He hopes to persuade Sonja, the hospital's only remaining surgeon, to care for her. Sonja, however, is preoccupied with treating the area's sick and injured and desperate to find her missing sister, Natasha. While the main focus of this novel is five eventful days in 2004, the story shifts back and forth in time, allowing for a more complete understanding of the complex relationships among ordinary people living under the brutal stress of war.

The award-winning title, Life After Life (2013) by Kate Atkinson will be our August/September book. One of the longer books of our reading year at 529 pages, it will help to have two months to read it.

"What if you could live again and again, until you got it right? Ursula Todd is born on a cold snowy night in 1910 -- twice. As she grows up during the first half of the twentieth century in Britain Ursula dies and is brought back to life again and again. With a seemingly infinite number of lives it appears as though Ursula has the ability to alter the history of the world, should she so choose. 

In October we will read The Lowland (2013) the most recent book by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue vastly different lives--Udayan in rebellion-torn Calcutta, Subhash in a quiet corner of America--until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds. 

In November we will discuss Amy Falls Down (2013) by Jincy Willett

The endearingly bitter writer, Amy Gallup, 60, has happily isolated herself from the world spending the last two decades teaching and reviewing. She has done a lot of thinking, but very little writing. Suffering a head injury after decades of being alone, Amy participates in a newspaper interview by a journalist who perceives her post-injury confusion for the rambling of a genius, a mistake that catapults her to fame and rekindles her literary ambitions.

Our book for December is And the Mountains Echoed (2013) by Khaled Hosseini

In this multigenerational novel revolving around parents and children, brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, the author explores the many ways in which family members love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another.

Our only nonfiction selection of the year, Five Days at Memorial (2013) by Sherri Fink, will be read in February 2015

Fink provides a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina-- and a suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice. After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. Fink unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

I am very much looking forward to this year of reading and discussing. What will your book group be reading this year?