Book Club Bliss

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Book Club Bliss

Created by Elissa - Updated on June 16th 2017

These books have all been read by my book club, "Book Club in a Pub." All of them prompted great discussion and many have publisher or author provided question on their websites.

Dark matter : a novel / Blake Crouch.

Crouch, Blake, author.

From the Publisher

A mind-bending, relentlessly paced science-fiction thriller, in which an ordinary man is kidnapped, knocked unconscious--and awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew.

Circling the sun : a novel / Paula McLain.

McLain, Paula, author.

From the Publisher

"Brought to Kenya from England as a child and then abandoned by her mother, Beryl is raised by both her father and the native Kipsigis tribe who share his estate. Her unconventional upbringing transforms Beryl into a bold young woman with a fierce love of all things wild and an inherent understanding of nature's delicate balance. But even the wild child must grow up, and when everything Beryl knows and trusts dissolves, she is catapulted into a string of disastrous relationships. Beryl forges...

My Thoughts

2016 Mid-Columbia Reads author

Our souls at night / Kent Haruf.

Haruf, Kent.

From the Publisher

A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future.

The other Einstein : a novel / Marie Benedict.

Benedict, Marie, author.

From the Publisher

The Other Einstein offers us a window into a brilliant, fascinating woman whose light was lost in Einstein's enormous shadow. It is the story of Einstein's wife, a brilliant physicist in her own right, whose contribution to the special theory of relativity is hotly debated and may have been inspired by her own profound and very personal insight. Mitza Maric has always been a little different from other girls. Most twenty-year-olds are wives by now, not studying physics at an elite Zurich...

The underground railroad : a novel / Colson Whitehead.

Whitehead, Colson, 1969- author.

From the Publisher

A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.

Hillbilly elegy : a memoir of a family and culture in crisis / J.D. Vance.

Vance, J. D., author.

From the Publisher

Shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author--a Yale Law School graduate--while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective demons of the past.

Another Brooklyn : a novel / Jacqueline Woodson.

Woodson, Jacqueline.

From the Publisher

Jacqueline Woodson's Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time when childhood gives way to adulthood--the promise and peril of growing up--and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that united four young lives. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant--a part of a future that belonged to them. But beneath the...

Shrill : notes from a loud woman / Lindy West.

West, Lindy, author.

From the Publisher

Shrill is an uproarious memoir, a feminist rallying cry in a world that thinks gender politics are tedious and that women, especially feminists, can't be funny. With inimitable good humor, vulnerability, and boundless charm, Lindy boldly shares how to survive in a world where not all stories are created equal and not all bodies are treated with equal respect, and how to weather hatred, loneliness, harassment, and loss, and walk away laughing. Shrill provocatively dissects what it means to...

Wool / Hugh Howey.

Howey, Hugh.

From the Publisher

In a ruined and toxic future, a community exists in a giant silo underground, hundreds of stories deep. There, men and women live in a society full of regulations they believe are meant to protect them. Sheriff Holston, who has unwaveringly upheld the silo's rules for years, unexpectedly breaks the greatest taboo of all: He asks to go outside. His fateful decision unleashes a drastic series of events. An unlikely candidate is appointed to replace him: Juliette, a mechanic with no training in...

Pretty girls : a novel / Karin Slaughter.

Slaughter, Karin, 1971- author.

From the Publisher

It's been more than twenty years since Claire and Lydia last spoke. Claire is the glamorous trophy wife of an Atlanta millionaire; Lydia, a single mother dating an ex-con, struggles to make ends meet. But neither has recovered from the disappearance of their sister Julia two decades earlier--and the shocking murder of Claire's husband brings the horror and heartbreak of the past roaring back into their lives. The vanishing of a teenage girl and the killing of a middle-aged man, almost a...

Girl at war : a novel / Sara Nović.

Nović, Sara, 1987- author.

From the Publisher

A powerful debut novel about a girl's coming of age-and how her sense of family, friendship, love, and belonging is profoundly shaped by the civil war that breaks out across Yugoslavia. Moving back and forth through time, Girl at War is an honest, generous, brilliantly written novel that illuminates how history shapes the individual. Sara Nović fearlessly shows the impact of war on one young girl-and its legacy on all of us. It's a debut by a writer who has stared into recent history to find a...