I enjoyed this so much, Betsy. I read it sitting beside a bookshelf that contains many books chosen for me, but also, a family history of that act. My mother’s Christmas gift girlhood copies of Little Women and Little Men, a great-great grandfather’s choices for a younger sister in the 1870’s, fill in missing pieces of “who” these ancestors were. And thank you for including my recollection of the red ink pen event!
Although I have never been in a book club I regularly discuss books with an old friend on a regular basis. We recommend different books to each other and discuss them on Zoom. The subjects are highly varied and so are the dates of publication but somehow all are relevant to our lives today. Anything from history to humor and from the famous to the unknown.
A two-person book exchange offers a lot of flexibility and the potential for depth, it seems to me. And I do like hearing you guys laughing from the other room.
"Here in San Diego, a coordinated effort to take certain books off the shelves of the public library by checking them out and refusing to return them backfired spectacularly. Within days, boxes of new copies were donated to the library by people from all over the city."
What a dastardly and idiotic plot to attempt in the land of the free and the brave! I hope that the library enforces late fees! Don't the dumb ones know that such an action incites others to read the covertly banned books!!
I just really loved the outpouring of books that followed this attempt. I wonder what happened to all the books that were taken out? Do you think they were burned?
I have been in a book club before and I just joined an online book club, the Bookish Road Trip Book Club, so my answer is in a gray area of yes, still am. But I do love getting books recommended to me and I love recommending them. I bought a few copies of The Music Shop and Braiding Sweetgrass this year, for my besties and my brothers and a niece.
My husband and I mostly read quite different things but occasionally give each other an author recommendation that is special (He doesn't usually read Scifi or historical fiction but I turned him on to Andy Weir and Eric Larson).
Thanks for the shout out for Honeymoon at Sea, or as my friend wrote it to me in a text, HatS.
I think loving the making and receiving of book recs must be linked to how well you know our friends and are known by them or do you think that it's more random than that? Either way, it's cool that you were able to bring your husband into a new space.
I have been making booklists for people for over fifty years- forfamily, relatives, fellow fiction writers and poets. I have a fair amount of elaxpertise derived from much experience and trial and error, plus a certain arrogance inherited from my parents and some writers read when Iwas younger (ie James Joyce one of a small group of writers with whom I have a lifetime love/despair relationship.
I also champion wriiters ignored, omitted, or plain flatout blatantly blacklisted by our literary establishmeent that I find instransigent, racist and sexist to such a subtle and polite selfdelusion that one marvels att their ability to live and function in such a state of calcified oblivion, especially in their unrelenting historical jingoism and refusal to acklowledge international writers of breadth and genius, and RADICAL POLITICS - ie Miguel Angel Asturias of Guatamala,Leonardo Sciascia of Sicily, Ousmane Sembene of Senegal, Mahmoud Darwish of Palestine, Nicanor Parra of Chile, Yu Hua of China, Okot P'Bitek of Uganda, Arundhati Roy and Mulk Raj Anand of India, Luis Sepulveda ofChile,Tadeusz Rozewicz of Poland, Ismael Kadare of Albania, Khalid Khalifeh of Syria, and so many others including in the US Sterling A.Bown, Janice Mirikitani,, Frances Chung, Pedro Pietri, Martin Espada, Dana Georgakas to be continued also- if you want my inprogess 8 page readng list email me at erbrill69@gmail.com and tell me your ten favorite books. best, ernie brill author of the forthcoming poetry book Travel Tickets out before the holidays ( some of you can sit in Santa's lap (or laptop) and read it to him hohoho.
If someone gives me a book, it will go on my shelf. It will get read. It may be next week. It may be in twenty years. I basically pick them at random, but not always.
I have never been in a book club. I read slowly, and I like to pick books for myself. But recommendations go on my "want to read list and eventually get read.
My favorite Banned Book of last year (for 2021) was Gender Queer, a graphic memoir and so beautifully heartbreaking. I see it's top of the list again for 2022.
I really love that comment from your aunt about knowing your size or knowing your mind. It’s so perfect and so wise.
Michael Connelly is one of my favorite genre writers. One of the real gifts in that series--and there are many--is the passage of time. It’s also a recent history of Los Angeles. Reading them almost feels like time travel to me because those books take me back to the city I knew as a kid and a teen.
I’m not in a book club, but I recently helped a friend with some recs for his book club. They wanted sci-fi. I suggested Neal Stephenson. I told them to start with The Seveneves or Snow Crash, since I thought they’d be an easier way into to his maximalist style. They went with Cryptonomicon. I got feedback right away. We’re so confused, my friend said. But also, this is fascinating. I told him that’s Stephenson’s writing in a nutshell--overwhelming intellect, but also a page-turner, even if you don’t fully understand the pages you’re turning. They ended up finishing Cryptonomicon. The review: “we understood 25%, but we’re sure we loved it 100%.”
My aunt and I haven't spoken for years but I have always loved what she said that day.
I'm interested in how you helped your friend with his book club pick. First, he reached out to you, presumably because he knew of your appreciation for sci-fi and he trusts your judgment. Then, you carefully considered the options and went for one that would push the envelope a little. And they loved it. There is this whole interplay of what you loved and what they were looking for (even if they didn't know it) and trust on the part of your friend who would, after all, be on the hook if they all hated it.
Some might say the stakes are not that high when it comes to book recommendations but when you consider the commitment it takes to read an entire book and then think about it, talk about it, DO something with it, they look a lot higher.
The stakes felt very high to me. They also do when someone asks for a book rec. My friend’s book club is with his coworkers. They have long commutes, so they decided to get into audiobooks, and then talk about them at lunch, instead of boring work stuff. These are wise people, I think. My friend told me that they loved The Martian and they loved Andy Weir’s other books. If it had just been Andy (my friend) I might’ve suggested just one or two books. But since there were strangers involved, I went through my library, selected about two dozen sci-fi books, wrote a few sentences about each, and grouped them into three groups: accessible, intermediate, and challenging. To my surprise, they picked one of the more challenging options in Cryptonomicon. If you don’t know the book, there’s a lot of cryptography (math) involved and there are numerous sprawling storylines that take place in two distinct time periods. Plus, Stephenson’s maximalist style means that if he introduces something as simple as a hammer, you get a mini essay on hammers (slight exaggeration on my part). Anyway, according to Andy, they’re still using my list, but they decided to work through the more accessible books. I don’t blame them. It took me a while to work up to Cryptonomicon and I’ll probably end up reading it again because there’re a lot of stuff that went over my head.
I enjoyed this so much, Betsy. I read it sitting beside a bookshelf that contains many books chosen for me, but also, a family history of that act. My mother’s Christmas gift girlhood copies of Little Women and Little Men, a great-great grandfather’s choices for a younger sister in the 1870’s, fill in missing pieces of “who” these ancestors were. And thank you for including my recollection of the red ink pen event!
I love the image of you being surrounded by book choices made by your family. It's another whole way to access those we love and formed us.
I've never been in a book club, but find myself often asking for book suggestions from my avid-reader sisters.....
A sisters book club. That works!
Although I have never been in a book club I regularly discuss books with an old friend on a regular basis. We recommend different books to each other and discuss them on Zoom. The subjects are highly varied and so are the dates of publication but somehow all are relevant to our lives today. Anything from history to humor and from the famous to the unknown.
A two-person book exchange offers a lot of flexibility and the potential for depth, it seems to me. And I do like hearing you guys laughing from the other room.
"Here in San Diego, a coordinated effort to take certain books off the shelves of the public library by checking them out and refusing to return them backfired spectacularly. Within days, boxes of new copies were donated to the library by people from all over the city."
What a dastardly and idiotic plot to attempt in the land of the free and the brave! I hope that the library enforces late fees! Don't the dumb ones know that such an action incites others to read the covertly banned books!!
I just really loved the outpouring of books that followed this attempt. I wonder what happened to all the books that were taken out? Do you think they were burned?
I have been in a book club before and I just joined an online book club, the Bookish Road Trip Book Club, so my answer is in a gray area of yes, still am. But I do love getting books recommended to me and I love recommending them. I bought a few copies of The Music Shop and Braiding Sweetgrass this year, for my besties and my brothers and a niece.
My husband and I mostly read quite different things but occasionally give each other an author recommendation that is special (He doesn't usually read Scifi or historical fiction but I turned him on to Andy Weir and Eric Larson).
Thanks for the shout out for Honeymoon at Sea, or as my friend wrote it to me in a text, HatS.
I think loving the making and receiving of book recs must be linked to how well you know our friends and are known by them or do you think that it's more random than that? Either way, it's cool that you were able to bring your husband into a new space.
I have been making booklists for people for over fifty years- forfamily, relatives, fellow fiction writers and poets. I have a fair amount of elaxpertise derived from much experience and trial and error, plus a certain arrogance inherited from my parents and some writers read when Iwas younger (ie James Joyce one of a small group of writers with whom I have a lifetime love/despair relationship.
I also champion wriiters ignored, omitted, or plain flatout blatantly blacklisted by our literary establishmeent that I find instransigent, racist and sexist to such a subtle and polite selfdelusion that one marvels att their ability to live and function in such a state of calcified oblivion, especially in their unrelenting historical jingoism and refusal to acklowledge international writers of breadth and genius, and RADICAL POLITICS - ie Miguel Angel Asturias of Guatamala,Leonardo Sciascia of Sicily, Ousmane Sembene of Senegal, Mahmoud Darwish of Palestine, Nicanor Parra of Chile, Yu Hua of China, Okot P'Bitek of Uganda, Arundhati Roy and Mulk Raj Anand of India, Luis Sepulveda ofChile,Tadeusz Rozewicz of Poland, Ismael Kadare of Albania, Khalid Khalifeh of Syria, and so many others including in the US Sterling A.Bown, Janice Mirikitani,, Frances Chung, Pedro Pietri, Martin Espada, Dana Georgakas to be continued also- if you want my inprogess 8 page readng list email me at erbrill69@gmail.com and tell me your ten favorite books. best, ernie brill author of the forthcoming poetry book Travel Tickets out before the holidays ( some of you can sit in Santa's lap (or laptop) and read it to him hohoho.
If someone gives me a book, it will go on my shelf. It will get read. It may be next week. It may be in twenty years. I basically pick them at random, but not always.
I have never been in a book club. I read slowly, and I like to pick books for myself. But recommendations go on my "want to read list and eventually get read.
My favorite Banned Book of last year (for 2021) was Gender Queer, a graphic memoir and so beautifully heartbreaking. I see it's top of the list again for 2022.
I really love that comment from your aunt about knowing your size or knowing your mind. It’s so perfect and so wise.
Michael Connelly is one of my favorite genre writers. One of the real gifts in that series--and there are many--is the passage of time. It’s also a recent history of Los Angeles. Reading them almost feels like time travel to me because those books take me back to the city I knew as a kid and a teen.
I’m not in a book club, but I recently helped a friend with some recs for his book club. They wanted sci-fi. I suggested Neal Stephenson. I told them to start with The Seveneves or Snow Crash, since I thought they’d be an easier way into to his maximalist style. They went with Cryptonomicon. I got feedback right away. We’re so confused, my friend said. But also, this is fascinating. I told him that’s Stephenson’s writing in a nutshell--overwhelming intellect, but also a page-turner, even if you don’t fully understand the pages you’re turning. They ended up finishing Cryptonomicon. The review: “we understood 25%, but we’re sure we loved it 100%.”
My aunt and I haven't spoken for years but I have always loved what she said that day.
I'm interested in how you helped your friend with his book club pick. First, he reached out to you, presumably because he knew of your appreciation for sci-fi and he trusts your judgment. Then, you carefully considered the options and went for one that would push the envelope a little. And they loved it. There is this whole interplay of what you loved and what they were looking for (even if they didn't know it) and trust on the part of your friend who would, after all, be on the hook if they all hated it.
Some might say the stakes are not that high when it comes to book recommendations but when you consider the commitment it takes to read an entire book and then think about it, talk about it, DO something with it, they look a lot higher.
The stakes felt very high to me. They also do when someone asks for a book rec. My friend’s book club is with his coworkers. They have long commutes, so they decided to get into audiobooks, and then talk about them at lunch, instead of boring work stuff. These are wise people, I think. My friend told me that they loved The Martian and they loved Andy Weir’s other books. If it had just been Andy (my friend) I might’ve suggested just one or two books. But since there were strangers involved, I went through my library, selected about two dozen sci-fi books, wrote a few sentences about each, and grouped them into three groups: accessible, intermediate, and challenging. To my surprise, they picked one of the more challenging options in Cryptonomicon. If you don’t know the book, there’s a lot of cryptography (math) involved and there are numerous sprawling storylines that take place in two distinct time periods. Plus, Stephenson’s maximalist style means that if he introduces something as simple as a hammer, you get a mini essay on hammers (slight exaggeration on my part). Anyway, according to Andy, they’re still using my list, but they decided to work through the more accessible books. I don’t blame them. It took me a while to work up to Cryptonomicon and I’ll probably end up reading it again because there’re a lot of stuff that went over my head.