The Best Book Club Books

This book examines the miscommunications that can arise when we're dealing with strangers. The author shares examples from history, like why Neville Chamberlain was convinced he could trust Adolf Hitler. He also looks at contemporary cases and tries to understand the contentious arrest of Sandra Bland and the trial of Amanda Knox.

People will both love and hate this book. But, either way, there is SO MUCH to discuss!

This was my pick for Book Club in 2019 and it resulted in fantastic discussion! It brings up so many thoughts about identity, religion, nature vs. nurture, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding access to DNA.

On a whim, Dani Shapiro takes a drugstore DNA test and discovers that her father was not actually her biological father. Both of her parents have passed, so to find out the story of her conception, she has to go digging and what she discovers changes her whole life.

This was my favorite book of 2018. It's a collection of essays by Maggie O'Farrell about encounters with death. One essay is about a time when O'Farrell narrowly escaped death at the hands of a murderer. In an other essay she shares an intimate experience about miscarrying a baby.

The book, despite being about death, is profound and life affirming. The essay format makes it very disccussable.

Melinda Gates wrote this book to share a very important message: If you want to lift a society up, you need to stop keeping women down. Sharing her experiences traveling around the world and working to lift communities, this book is simultaneously infuriating and inspiring.

Getting a group of women together to discuss this book is a good first step towards working for more equality all around the world.

I picked this for my book club to discuss in 2018 and everyone that read it thoroughly enjoyed it! There are fantastic book club guides and questions to go along with this one too.

After discovering oil beneath their land in the 1920's, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma became the richest people per capita in the world. And then, they started to disappear. David Grann, with excellent research and reporting, tells the true story of this horrifying conspiracy that history had largely forgotten.

This book brought the biggest turnout to our book club last year and was named the favorite read by many book club members at the end of the year. It was also the longest book club we had last year - we clocked over 3 hours discussing this book!

Raised by isolated religious fundamentalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover didn't enter a classroom until she was 17 years old. Her story of family violence is heartbreaking, but her quest for an education is inspiring.

With immigration being such a hot topic these days, this book is sure to inspire a good discussion! This book is about a family coming from Vietnam in the 1970's, but it could be interesting to look at today's immigration debates and compare and contrast with this book.

We're discussing this in our book club in a month and I'm so interested to hear what people think!

This is my favorite book by Joan Didion. It's an intensely personal and emotional book about losing her daughter. It tackles so many big things, but in such a beautiful way. A fantastic book for a discussions about loss, grief, parenting, and aging. It sounds somber, but it's powerful in the best of ways.

Don't let politics keep you from discussing this one in your book club. This is a book that folks on both sides of the political divide can enjoy. I don't think I've heard from anyone yet that didn't like this book!

This book takes a deep and personal look at a growing population of people who attempt to live on the road because they can't afford to settle down. Rather than dismissing these people as quirky van-wellers, the author spent three years getting to know many of them so she could understand this alarming trend.

Not only is this one a real page turner, but it will get you talking!

This was the first book club discussion I attended and it was so fantastic that I've been back almost every month for the past two years.

Paul Kalanithi was only 36 years old and just barely finishing a decade worth of training to become a neurosurgeon when he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. This is the book he wrote when he knew he was going to die.

You may know Trevor Noah as the comedian on the Daily Show, but in this book he's sharing the unlikely path he took from apartheid South Africa to where he is now. It's both funny and moving and sure to be a book club hit.

Yun Ling Teoh is the lone survivor of a brutal Japanese war time camp in Malaya. Years later, after studying law at Cambridge and helping prosecute Japanese war criminals, she returns to the jungle plantations or Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child. There she discovers the only Japanese garden in Malaya and it's owner, the exiled former gardener of the Emperor of Japan. As they work together to build a garden in memory of Teoh's sister, who died in the Japanese camp, she finds herself facing all her past trauma.

This is a magnificent book! You can discuss the structure of the book, the dual narrative, and the unique writing techniques the author employs. You could also talk about colonialism, war crimes, forgiveness, and memory.

This is my pick for book club this year! If you have a book club that enjoys good historical fiction, this is a great pick. Set in post civil war Spain in the 1950's, this book will give you so much to talk about. It's also a historical fiction romance, which I anticipate people will really enjoy.

This is a collection of 6 familiar fairy tales and folklore, but told with a creative and refreshing new voice that abandons old fairy tale tropes. It's creative and vivid and fascinating! Guaranteed to keep a room full of people talking for hours.

Greek gods, a complex heroine, action, magic, adventure! This book is everything and it's fantastic.

If you remember Circe at all, you probably only remember her brief encounter with Odysseus in the Odyssey when she turns his crew into swine on their way home from the Trojan War. But now, it's time to hear her story . . . and it's such a good one.

This book inspired one of our very best book club discussions last year. Not everyone enjoyed the book, but everyone definitely enjoyed the discussion.

Sixteen year-old Starr Carter lives in a poor, predominately black neighborhood, but she goes to school at a rich, mostly white prep school on the other side of town. She likes to keep her two lives separate. However, she's in the car when her best friend Kahlil is killed by a police officer and when the story erupts both of her worlds collide.

This is a modern classic, written in the 1950's, and is an excellent book to discuss.

Based on a true story, this book follows Jean Paget, who as a young English woman living in Malaya, was captured during the Japanese invasion and forced on a brutal death march. Years later, she's back in England when she finds out she's been left an inheritance. She decides to journey back to Malaya to repay the villagers there that saved her life. Her journey ends up taking her to a desolate Australian outpost.

Oprah thought this was good enough for her book club, and I think it's definitely good enough for mine!

Celestial and Roy are just newlyweds when Roy is accused of an unspeakable crime and is wrongfully incarcerated for years. The book follows the couple as they try to keep their marriage alive and try to prove Roy's innocence.

This is another modern classic and will appeal to a wide audience.

It follows the lives of two couples (two wives married to two professors) and is a reflective book about friendship and love. It's very difficult to describe, but very easy to discuss.

This is a fantastic book about Palestinian refugees who settle in Brooklyn. It's a moving look at the lives of conservative Arab women living in the United States and the culture of violence they inherit. It's a very timely read with plenty to talk about.

This is a middle grade book, but don't let that stop you from reading it in your book club. It's such a wonderful book!

This is the story of Thomas Jefferson's children, but told by his slave children that he fathered with Sally Hemings. It's a unique perspective on a man most Americans think they know well. I read this book years ago, but I still think about it often. It's a powerful read.

This dark comedy has so many layers to it that even though it's a short book, you'll want to spend plenty of time trying to figure it all out.

It's a book about two sisters: one who kills men, and one who cleans up the messes. However, it's also a satire about gender roles and power. I loved this one!

This is an epic saga about a house and a family over the course of five decades. The book opens with a lot of heartbreaking loss and destruction, but the real power comes from watching the characters work through their grief and make their way to the other side. So many layers and so many topics to discuss.

I'm always trying to get people to read this book! It would be so fun for a book club discussion. It’s a bit of a hidden gem and not nearly as well known as it deserves to be. It’s also not whimsical at all. It reads like a serious (though witty) regency novel, not unlike Jane Austen, however, all the characters are dragons. It sounds weird, but it's awesome.

Set in Depression-Era America, this one follows a group of women running a traveling library in rural Kentucky. It's lighter historical fiction, but it's a fun read. It's a story of friendship, books, and a little bit of romance too.