Six Past Book Club Bossy Favorites
- The Bossy Bookworm
- 25 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Book club love!
My OG book club has been together in some form for almost twenty years, meeting monthly to talk about life and--particularly if we are split or generally dislike a title--talking about a book, and for a good while I've been lucky enough to (surprise!) be the Bossy Final Decider of the books on our annual book list.
I ask for book suggestions from my fellow book clubbers, add my own ideas, make sure early reviews look solid enough for us, establish when an intriguing book is likely to be generally widely available from the library, vary our genres throughout the year--and adhere to our 400-page-ish page limit.
We read an array of types of books--often lighter titles in the summer, a nonfiction doorstop in the winter, historical fiction always, and sometimes a mystery or contemporary fiction book. Oddly, there is only one World War II-set book and there are zero Alaska-set books on this list. (These are elements I used to try to shoehorn into every list, until my friends rightfully began to resist.)
I thought I'd pick a point in time and highlight my favorite reads from that year--in this case, 2020, the year everything shut down and reading became even more essential for my own mental health and for many of my friends' as well.
For more of my favorite book club reads from the past, please check out the Greedy Reading Lists centered around book club.
Are you in a book club? What have been some of your favorite book club reads?
01 Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
Strout is truly a marvel in the way she crafts full, complicated lives through sharing small moments. I loved every bit of this and felt it was even stronger than the original novel that introduced Olive.
Oh, Olive!
In Olive, Again, she ambles through town and reflects on aging, on her life, and especially on memories of moments that shaped her life’s direction, her attitude, her viewpoint—and those of the people close to her.
Because this is the bristly character of Olive from Olive Kitteridge, these are not saccharine snippets of wisdom from a warm, cozy grandmother. The moments are sometimes sour, sometimes regretful, sometimes heartbreaking, but often lovely in their rough honesty. I could spend days reading about Olive's introspection and her outward gruff and straightforward ways.
I received an advance copy of this book from Random House through NetGalley.
For my full review of this book, please see Olive, Again.
Elizabeth Strout is also the author of The Things We Never Say, Tell Me Everything, Lucy by the Sea, Anything Is Possible, My Name Is Lucy Barton, and Oh William! as well as the prequel to this title, Olive Kitteridge.
02 The River by Peter Heller
I loved the deep friendship; details of outdoorsy expertise and adventuring; and life-and-death moments that hinge on skill or luck or both.
Low-key young men and best friends Jack and Wynn have taken many challenging outdoor expeditions together. They're skilled and joyful adventurers. But when a wildfire rages near where they're canoeing the Maskwa River in northern Canada, everything turns upside down.
Oh, Peter Heller! The details of running the Canadian river, traveling and camping, and Jack and Wynn's friendship itself all hooked me completely.
The final scenes were exquisitely painful and beautiful, and they hit me hard.
Heller is also the author of Burn, The Last Ranger, The Guide, The River, and The Painter, as well as the stellar novel The Dog Stars.
For my full review of this book, please see The River.
03 Call Your Daughter Home by Deb Spera
Although the three interconnected women face sometimes staggeringly tragic challenges, Spera injects moments of joy and wonderful details of 1924 life in South Carolina.
I worried during the first chapter that Gertrude was going to feel like a caricature of a backwoods Southern woman. But she and the other characters were developed fully. And despite the often devastating circumstances--believably reflecting real-life conditions at the time--Spera does manage to show joy--often related to the women's relationships to each other.
You can see where one of the storylines is going before the character involved understands it, and it might make your blood boil to see the evil situation go on unchecked. I wasn’t sure I bought into the reasoning for a character’s drastic and sudden turnaround in thinking—it seemed that she’d had previous reminders of this reasoning without being inspired to shift course.
But the details of cooking, surviving, race relations, and life in 1924 South Carolina were powerful, and I still think about this book although I read it some time ago.
For my full review of this book, please see Call Your Daughter Home.
04 The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman
Hoffman made me feel anchored to the characters and the emotions, concerns, and life-and-death decisions with which the three women grappled.
The world is unraveling on the cusp of World War II, and three strong women will be tested beyond anything they imagined before the end of the war and the end of the book.
The strong, gruff Hanni has a heart of gold; young Ettie is idealistic and grows to be tough as nails yet capable of deep love; and the heartbreakingly loyal golem Ava becomes satisfyingly powerful.
This was a beautiful book. The golem and heron and other ethereal elements could have been distracting or take the book in a direction that made for a strange tone, but they worked.
I was most struck by the character-driven WWII stories, which were haunting and lovely. Hoffman made me feel anchored to the characters and made their concerns in 1941 felt immediate and relevant.
For my full review, please see The World That We Knew. Alice Hoffman is also the author of many other books, including The Invisible Hour.
05 Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come by Jessica Pan
Pan is wonderfully honest, appealingly thoughtful, and often so so funny. I was happy spending time in her point of view throughout this book. I loved it.
Jessica Pan was an introvert out of a job. Her closest friends had moved away, and she found herself lonely, living in another country, and feeling too reliant on her husband for her entire social life.
Pan decided to deliberately put herself into extremely uncomfortable social situations for a year, and she fully commits. She does improv, approaches strangers on the Tube, goes on friend dates, attends networking events, takes a vacation alone (to a destination she doesn't learn until she's at the airport), and more. She regrets her one-year plan almost instantly but feels compelled to continue her terrifying exercises.
Her interviews and experiences with others who mentor her journey in different ways could have felt disruptive or jarring but didn't; they added a layer to her story that I found interesting and often revelatory.
I loved it and I'd read another book by her in a second.
For my full review of this book, please see Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come.
6 Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano
This story was so much more than I expected. Napolitano created an irresistible and true-feeling character in Edward.
I loved this book. I kept thinking about it while I was doing other things, and I just wanted to get back to Edward to find out how things were going.
Thankfully Napolitano didn’t rely solely on her book’s promising premise. She wrote the hell out of this and created an irresistible and true-feeling character in Edward.
Edward tries on the mantle of taking responsibility for every life lost; he wallows in the despair of others and their hopes that he will pursue their loved ones’ lost dreams and right their wrongs; then he messily works out how to create his own lucky, unshackled, truest life.
Nothing is too easy here, nor is it ever melodramatic in Napolitano’s hands.
I was given an advance reader’s copy of this book by Random House Publishing Group and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. For my full review, please see Dear Edward.
Ann Napolitano is also the author of Hello Beautiful.
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