Are you in a book discussion group, and looking for affordable ways to supply your group with books to discuss? The library is here for you! Each month or so, we’ll share a varied handful of titles, any one of which would make for terrific discussion, and each of which – at the time of posting – has a dozen or more copies currently available at our various branches. Let’s get started with this month’s batch:
Just Us: An American Conversation, by Claudia Rankine.
“The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. I don’t want to forget that I am here; at any given moment we are, each of us, next to any other capable of both the best and the worst our democracy has to offer.” 44 print, 6 eBook copies available.
Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu.
“…we made it our own place – Chinatown. A place for preservation and self-preservation; give them what they feel what’s right, is safe; make it fit the idea of what is out there. Chinatown and indeed being Chinese is and always has been, from the very beginning a construction, a performance of features, gestures, culture and exoticism, invention/reinvention of stylization.” Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 20 print copies available.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk.
“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.” 38 print, 12 eBook copies available.
House Lessons: Renovating a Life, by Erica Bauermeister.
“A choice of a home is not just about where we’ve been or what we remember; it’s also about who we want to be.” Thoughtful memoir in essays about our houses and what they mean to us, by a local author.
23 print, 7 eBook copies available.
Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam.
“It was like some tacit agreement; everyone had ceded to things just falling apart. That it was common knowledge that things were bad surely meant they were actually worse.” 30 print copies available.
Deacon King Kong, by James McBride.
“while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.” 49 print copies available.
We’ll be back next month with some more book group ready titles.
~ Posted by David W.
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