2020 Book Club Reads

I've written of my book club before. There are a handful of hardcore attendees, we're all white, middle-class married women. There's a tiny bit of diversity in religion, but for the most part we're just exactly what you would picture for a book club in a small town in Wisconsin. 

February: Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
April: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
May: The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck

June: What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
August: Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
September: Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris
November: Circe by Madeline Miller
December: The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

Here's the order in which I'd place my favorites to least favorites. 

1) The Women in the Castle - I sometimes still think about the women in this book and if I'd have made the same choices that they did.  It was an interesting book club discussion and I would definitely recommend this as a book club choice.

2) What Alice Forgot - It was tough reading a book about a marriage in peril in 2020, but this book was a light, breezy read. It was an interesting discussion because someone said that they didn't know anyone like the character of Alice and I was dumbfounded because I thought it was representative of a good quarter of the people I went to high school with.

3) Red at the Bone - Distant third place for me, but the writing was poetical and lyrical. The themes were timeless and important.  We had a very small turnout for this book club and we found ourselves doing math and trying to figure out the timeline more than actually discussing the book.  (This was actually a split book club - some folks met face-to-face and I coordinated a Zoom meeting. I seriously considered quitting book club at this point, but the politics of Covid response in small towns is perhaps another post altogether.)

4) The Lying Life of Adults - I was disappointed in this book, but Ferrante is adept with words and places.  

5) Circe - A beloved book I found sort of dull. I found the discussion to be rather insipid, too.

6) Trust Exercise - I was out of town for this book (remember when I used to travel for work?) and so I recorded a voice memo of my thoughts on this for everyone else and they apparently listened to it and used it as a guide for their discussion. I have many thoughts, most of them not happy, about this book

7) Holidays on Ice - This did not age well and Sedaris is much too sharp in tone to read in 2020.  I have fond feelings for Sedaris, but there's a reason I try to steer our book club choices towards fiction and away from memoir and other non-fiction.

8) The Luminaries - A million pages of dense writing with no good payoff.  We did have a rollicking discussion about this one, though, basically just attempting to figure out the plot.