2023 Book List

Wow, did I let 2022 escape from me! Nothing posted here since March. Not even the list of books for 2023 until the second week of the new year. I promise to do better in 2023! In the coming week I'll get everything updated on this page so things are current for you to use.

Starting with getting you (finally!) the list of books for 2023. The theme this year is "You Learn Something New Every Month." As always (you know me!), this list might change. I might try to work in my nonfiction to fit the theme. I might try to work in something that's on everyone's lips. I'm going to try to get book bags for a lot of these selections so we may be captive to when the bags become available. 

January: Glitter and Glue by Kelly Corrigan (our nonfiction)

February: While The Patient Slept by Mignon Eberhart (our classic)

March: The Circle by Dave Eggers (book club bag)

April: Women Talking by Miriam Toewes (is being released as a movie)

May: Of Women & Salt by Gabriela Garcia (book club bag)

June: The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford (book club bag)

July: The Midnight Library by Matthew Haig (book club bag)

August: The Turk and My Mother by Mary Helen Stefaniak (book club bag)

September: Omaha Reads selection

October: Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

November: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (book club bag)

December: Holiday party and book exchange

February and March

Playing catch up - completely forgot to update the last two months! 

In February we read Annie Spence's Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak In The Stacks, which fit our theme for February of love because it's a series of love letters to books and libraries. It was not a big hit and initially posed some difficulty in figuring out how to discuss it. But a pop quiz got us talking about a lot of the different books that Spence talked about, a lot of the books we've read, and brought out some really fun stories from members. 

In March we read Colm Toibin's Nora Webster. Only four of us could make the meeting and only two of us had finished the book but we still managed to have a decent discussion about a book that none of us loved. It's a slow mover and we weren't entirely sure what Toibin's point was. The best part of there only being four of us was that we could sit around Cheryl's kitchen table and nosh and talk. But the best part of the evening was Mary Beth's Irish jokes which she tells with a fantastic Irish accent. 

Can't say that we can recommend either of these books for book clubs, although Nora Webster might have made for better discussion if we had all read it or if there had been more of us to talk about it so that we might have gotten other opinions. 

 

January - The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

For 2022, every book will represent a theme of the month. January is about new beginnings and no one in literature may have had more new beginnings than Addie LaRue. This is a long book but most of us were able to finish it. It was all love and roses for everyone (although some did love it) but it certainly gave us plenty to talk about. For this book, we divided into teams and each team took turns having players pick A or B questions. A questions were worth more but harder to answer and almost everyone picked them. In the end, it came down to a tie, which meant is was just like the show Whose Line Is It Anyway, where the points don't matter. 

This one had us talking about religion, leaving a mark on the world, morality, and what we would give up for love. It was a rare fantasy book for our club which is proof that it's good to break out of routine now and again. 

Sadly, we're back to Zoom meetings, with CoVid numbers up again, which works ok for book discussions but makes chatting with each other harder. Thanks to Linda for getting the meeting set up again.