My Book Clubs

If you want to enrich your life by discussing books and ideas and developing deeper friendships, why not make starting a book club your new year’s resolution?

January reminds us of new beginnings, and that’s how one of my book clubs began, as a friend’s new year’s resolution. Other than a couple of us, the others she asked to join were women she wanted to know on a deeper level than at social functions. So our monthly morning gatherings were in homes, with the requirement that the hostess serve coffee and tea and water. No treats necessary, although I’m the only one who has now and again gotten away with offering no morning spread. Now, fifteen years later, we’re still going strong, although members have moved away or moved on and new members have fit right in.

A neighbor started my other book club, and it has had an assortment of readers through its seventeen years of evening meetings. Jim and I are charter members, and the neighbor who started it moved across town, but is still at the core of our group.

Rarely do we all like or dislike a book, be it fiction or nonfiction, adult or young adult, a Pulitzer Prize winner or a mass market paperback. A couple times we’ve all read different biographies of the same subjects then compared them. Some of us check out books from the library or order cheap used copies or read Kindle versions. Occasionally we have to buy a new hardback and actually support an author. Discussions have become lively as we’ve debated our opinions.

Through the years, the hour meetings of both groups have increased to two hours, and although we always discuss the book and its themes that apply to our own lives, we also venture into personal issues. Friendships have grown and real trust has developed, all through the sharing of books and ideas.

We have read some outstanding books. We’ve also read terrible ones, and I believe their authors were related to the acquiring editors.

We choose our books by a member’s suggestion, but the member does not have to have read the book. I’ve read books I would never have picked up. My list of books-I-should-have-read-but-avoided could stretch to the moon, but I’ve now read some of the classics.

So, I repeat, if you want to enrich your life by discussing books and ideas and developing deeper friendships, why not make starting a book club your new year’s resolution?

Here are the books I’ve read in my book clubs. I won’t mark the winners from the losers, since we all like different types of books. You will notice duplications where I conned one group into reading a book that I’d read in the other club, not just because it was good, but also so I had less to read at a busy time in my life. I’ll bet you’ve already read a number of these books.

The Evening Group:

A Time to Kill by John Grisham
Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi
Nightmare in Pink by John D. McDonald
Biographies of John Adams
Belgrade Square by Anne Perry
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
To Dance with the White Dog by Terry Kay
Biographies of Jimmy Carter
Night by Elie Wiesel
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Biographies of Duke and Duchess of Windsor
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
The Loop by Joe Coomer
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
A Simple Plan by Scott Smith
Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat
The Lighthouse Keeper by James Michael Pratt
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Leaving Home by Garrison Keillor
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
A Widow for One Year by John Irving
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill
A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks
The Perfect Man by Linda Howard
Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
Moo by Jane Smiley
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amore
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man by Fannie Flagg
West with the Night by Beryl Markham
Rise to Rebellion by Jeff Shaara
The Spirit Catches You and Then You Fall by Anne Fadiman
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
The Persian Pickle Club by Sandra Dallas
The Day After Roswell by Philip J. Corso
The Portable Dorothy Parker
The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw
The Choiring of the Trees by Donald Harington
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
One for the Money by Janet Evanovich
Three Junes by Julia Glass
I Dreamed of Africa by Kuki Gallmann
The First Eagle by Tony Hillerman
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The Sisters by Mary S. Lovell
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
Flying Crows by Jim Lehrer
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Work of Wolves by Kent Meyers
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
The Year the Colored Sisters Came to Town by J. Guidry
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief by Bill Mason
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
The Pale Horse by Agatha Christi
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth
Widow of the South by Robert Hicks
The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett
The Black Rose by Thomas B. Costain
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy M. Montgomery
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Che Guerra by Eric Luther
Bag of Bones by Steven King
One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Angry Housewives Eating Bonbons by Laura Landvik
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The River of Doubt by Candice Millard
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse By Louise Erdrich
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
My Invented Country by Isabel Allende
State of Fear by Michael Crichton
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Hot Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The Dutchess by Amada Foreman
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel
The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz
She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb
Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Thunderstruck by Eric Larson
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Stout
Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall, Denver Moore, and Lynn Vincent
Term Limits by Vince Flynn
Biographies on Albert Einstein
Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig
Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
1984 by George Orwell
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
1491 by Charles Mann
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Jackdaws by Ken Follett
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Citizens of London by Lynne Olson
The Price of Everything by Eduardo Porter
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Murial Barbery
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett
Driftless by David Rhodes
The Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (Green Fire movie 1/13)
Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson
The Floor of Heaven by Howard Blum
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
Pox and the Covenant by Tony Williams
God’s Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Declaration of Independence and Constitution
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Heart is a Lonely Hunger by Carson McCullers
Forgotten Man by Amity Shales
Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier
Outcasts United by Warren St. John
Argo by Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman
Four Fish by Paul Greenberg
Elsewhere by Richard Russo
The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles
David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell
A Mathematical Mystery Tour by A.K. Dewdney
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
Collapse by Jarad Diamond
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
Time and Again by Jack Finney
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Bliss by O.Z. Livaneli
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus by Nabeel Qureshi
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
A Man Called Ove by Frederick Backman
Packing for Mars by Mary Roach

The Morning Group:

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Loop by Joe Coomer
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
The Brothers K by David James Duncan
Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig
Waiting by Ha Jin
West with the Night by Beryl Markham
The Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis
The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
Protect and Defend by Richard North Patterson
A Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn By Betty Smith
Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards
Three Junes by Julia Glass
All Souls by Michael Patrick McDonald
The Christmas Train by David Baldacci
As You Like It by William Shakespeare
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The Professor’s House by Willa Cather
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis
The Work of Wolves by Kent Meyers
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
The River Warren by Kent Meyers
The Dive from Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Flowler
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less by Terry Ryan
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
The Fourth Hand by John Irving
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse By Louise Erdrich
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
The Giver by Lois Lowry
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris
Eddie’s Bastard by William Kowalski
The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett
The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty
Love in the Present Tense by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Mermaid Chair by Sue Kidd Monk
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry
The Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
About Alice by Calvin Trillin
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
Philistines at the Hedgerow by Steven Gaines
Where Ever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Outsourced by R.J. Hillhouse
Angry Housewives Eating Bonbons by Laura Landvik
Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig
Astrid & Veronika by Linda Ollson
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Tallgrass by Sandra Dallas
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
I Don’t Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
The Necklace: Thirteen Women and the Experiment that Transformed Their Lives by Cheryl Jarvis.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan
The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Murial Barbery
How I Became a Famous Author by Steve Hely
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen
Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
1984 by George Orwell
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.
Wishin’ and Hopin’ by Wally Lamb
When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins
Little Bee by Chris Cleave
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Driftless by David Rhodes
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
Unbroken by Laura Hilldenbrand
The River Wife by Jonis Agee
Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool
Bright’s Passage by Josh Ritter
Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
At Wit’s End by Irma Bombeck
The Know It All by A. J. Jacobs
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks
The Greater Journey by David McCullough
Goldberg Variations by Susan Issacs
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
Native Son by Richard Wright
True Believers by Kurt Andersen
The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Stroud
Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier
The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Traps by MacKensie Bezos
The Circle by Dave Eggers
One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson
Man Alive by Mary Kay Zuravleff
All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell
A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of 7th Grade by Kevin Brockmeier
The Interestings by Meg Walitzer
The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson
So Big by Edna Ferber
In this House of Brede by Rumer Godden
In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist by Ruchama King Feuerman
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
Shock of Gray by Ted Fishman
Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
The Unraveling of Mercy Louis by Keija Parssinen
The Children Act by Ian McEwan
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Us by David Nicholls
Bettyville: A Memoir by George Hodgman
Bossypants by Tina Fey
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivy
Daisy Miller by Henry James
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
Hold Still by Sally Mann
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk