What's Next?

Our current selection is Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe, meeting planned for 12 January, please let me know of any concerns with that date. 

Following that, we will read James Patterson: The Stories of My Life by James Patterson, meeting tentatively planned for 9 February, again please let me know of any concerns.

January 2023 will be our  Nine Year Anniversary!

Please shoot me an email or post a comment on this page with the title and author of books you would like to propose for future club reads.  Our club has a couple criteria for suggestions:  the page count must be under 800 pages, and the book must be available as a Kindle e-book.

Some free-format recent suggestions that aren't in my database yet: 

(selected from Jules Buono)

We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker

Dark Matter: A Novel by Blake Crouch

Beartown: A Novel by Fredrik Backman

...

email suggestions & such

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene 

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff 

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride from Hell by Tom Clavin

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

CIRCE by Madeline Miller

Gilgamesh the King by Robert Silverberg 

Who is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews

--

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: A Novel by Olga Tokarczuk

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A novel by Gabrielle Zevin

Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull & Amy Wallace

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang

The Map of Salt and Stars: A Novel by Zeyn Joukhadar

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

Island Beneath the Sea: A Novel by Isabel Allende

The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers

Suggested Titles (Descriptions are below the list)

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence
• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
• Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
• Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
• The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf
• The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Descriptions

Title	Author	pages	Yea or Nay?
A Clockwork Orange	No Author!	162	No Votes
Amazon's Blurb: (0 stars) No Blurb!
Originally suggested by: No SuggestedBy! Why? No SuggestedWhy!
Title	Author	pages	Yea or Nay?
Seven Pillars of Wisdom	T. E. Lawrence	704	No Votes
Amazon's Blurb: (4.7 stars) As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War'. Lawrence's younger brothers, Frank and Will, had been killed on the Western Front in 1915. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written between 1919 and 1926, tells of the vastly different campaign against the Turks in the Middle East - one which encompasses gross acts of cruelty and revenge and ends in a welter of stink and corpses in the disgusting 'hospital' in Damascus. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is no 'Boys Own Paper' tale of Imperial triumph, but a complex work of high literary aspiration which stands in the tradition of Melville and Dostoevsky, and alongside the writings of Yeats, Eliot and Joyce.
Originally suggested by: No SuggestedBy! Why? No SuggestedWhy!
Title	Author	pages	Yea or Nay?
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI	David Grann	347	No Votes
Amazon's Blurb: (4.6 stars) In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Originally suggested by: No SuggestedBy! Why? No SuggestedWhy!
Title	Author	pages	Yea or Nay?
Cry, The Beloved Country	Alan Paton	548	No Votes
Amazon's Blurb: (4.5 stars) Cry, the Beloved Country, the most famous and important novel in South Africa’s history, was an immediate worldwide bestseller in 1948. Alan Paton’s impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is a work of searing beauty. Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much. The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, “We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country the statesman, the poet and the novelist meet in a unique harmony.” Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.
Originally suggested by: Dave Why? Arukiyomi Hall of Fame http://arukiyomi.com/?page_id=3383
Title	Author	pages	Yea or Nay?
A Fine Balance	Rohinton Mistry	628	No Votes
Amazon's Blurb: (4.4 stars) With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.
Originally suggested by: Dave Why? Arukiyomi Hall of Fame http://arukiyomi.com/?page_id=3383
Title	Author	pages	Yea or Nay?
Blood and Thunder	Hampton Sides	624	No Votes
Amazon's Blurb: (4.6 stars) In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.In Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides gives us a magnificent history of the American conquest of the West. At the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won.
Originally suggested by: Dave Why? I don’t think I actually brought this one in, it may have been Darryl or Barbara? Not sure. But, its interesting to me now, so I'll claim it just to get something in here.
Title	Author	pages	Yea or Nay?
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World	Andrea Wulf	497	No Votes
Amazon's Blurb: (4.6 stars) The acclaimed author of Founding Gardeners reveals the forgotten life of Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world—and in the process created modern environmentalism. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. In North America, his name still graces four counties, thirteen towns, a river, parks, bays, lakes, and mountains. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether he was climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infected Siberia or translating his research into bestselling publications that changed science and thinking. Among Humboldt’s most revolutionary ideas was a radical vision of nature, that it is a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone. Now Andrea Wulf brings the man and his achievements back into focus: his daring expeditions and investigation of wild environments around the world and his discoveries of similarities between climate and vegetation zones on different continents. She also discusses his prediction of human-induced climate change, his remarkable ability to fashion poetic narrative out of scientific observation, and his relationships with iconic figures such as Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson. Wulf examines how Humboldt’s writings inspired other naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth, and Goethe, and she makes the compelling case that it was Humboldt’s influence that led John Muir to his ideas of natural preservation and that shaped Thoreau’s Walden. With this brilliantly researched and compellingly written book, Andrea Wulf shows the myriad fundamental ways in which Humboldt created our understanding of the natural world, and she champions a renewed interest in this vital and lost player in environmental history and science.
Originally suggested by: Dave Why? Not sure this was me… but, it’s a biography, and of a naturalist. I had an interest in things related to Thoreau for a while so this may have come to my attention that way. Still interesting to me as a biography.
Title	Author	pages	Yea or Nay?
The Moonstone	Wilkie Collins	423	No Votes
Amazon's Blurb: (4.2 stars) The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century British epistolary novel. It is an early modern example of the detective novel, and established many of the ground rules of the modern genre. Told from the perspective of 11different characters, tale of mystery and suspicion was considered the first modern English detective novel at its time of publication. Centred around a glorious yellow diamond that carries with it a menacing history, The Moonstone tells the story of Rachel Verinder, who inherits the stone on her eighteenth birthday. That very evening, the diamond is stolen and there begins an epic enquiry into hunting down the thief. At the same time, three Indian men, Brahmin guardians of the diamond are attempting to reclaim the stone in order to return it to their sacred Hindu Idol.
Originally suggested by: Dave Why? It is on the Lifetime Reading Plan. Wilkie Collins has 2 entries on the Lifetime Reading Plan, this one and "Woman in White". Both are mysteries. It seems many folks prefer "Woman in White", which is more gothic, where "The Moonstone" runs more toward a sleuthing mystery. Wikipedia says this novel "is considered a precursor to detective fiction, such as Sherlock Holmes". I thought it might appeal to the group as it is a mystery, by a contemporary and close friend of Charles Dickens.

Don't be intimidated by high page counts! remember, its one hundred pages per week, so the size of the book doesn't change your required reading rate, it only changes when we meet to discuss it.  Les Mis, at a whopping 1504 pages, is a 15 week read, or about 4 months.  Slaughterhouse-Five, a mere 288 pages, would only get 3 weeks.

Post a comment with your suggested title and author, I'll add it to the list. Also, if you know you will not read something on the list of suggestions, please either comment here, or shoot me an email, and I'll mark it a Nay