LAVA Discussion Book Candidates for 2023
These book candidates come from mostly from suggestions by LAVA members and from Bookmarks magazine, which summarizes book reviews in major periodicals. Other sources include lists of award-winning books, favorites of other book clubs, the Harvard Bookstore’s best-seller list, literary blogs, etc. Several were carried over from the previous voting list. There are 18 books on this list, but we will choose only 8 of them in this balloting, which unfortunately means that many worthwhile books will be excluded from next year’s reading schedule. As before, the most popular runners-up will be included in the next list of candidates. LAVA members are encouraged to research these book candidates in bookstores, libraries, on the web, etc.
Why do we need to choose only 8 books to cover 12 meetings? We don’t read a book for January because that month is occupied with choosing the next list of books. In the fall, we read the book chosen by Writers and Books for their "Rochester Reads" program. In July and September, we see a film at The Little Theater instead of discussing a book. That leaves us 8 books to choose from this list.
Bring this list and your thoughts to the potluck and business meeting at on Saturday, January 14, which will be devoted to sharing information and opinions on these books (and sharing good food).
After the January meeting and prior to the voting deadline of Sunday February 5, please "mark your ballots" and return them to Bill. First review the guidelines for choosing LAVA discussion books, which reflect some of the things we have learned about choosing books over the years. Then, using a system like the one used in the Olympics, rate each book individually on a scale of 1 to 10, using 10 to indicate books that you think would generate the best Lava discussions. If you aren't familiar with the system used by the Olympics, think of the traditional way of grading classroom papers: you would grade each one individually based on its own merits, not on how it compares with others.
The system works best if you provide a rating for every book on the list. Members often rate each book during the January meeting and turn their votes in before they leave. I will also email a list of the candidate book titles to everyone after the meeting. If you haven't already voted by then, you can enter your rating for each book into that email and return it to me. Or you can print this document, write your rating for each book in its margins and return it to me by surface mail. You can use any method you prefer as long as you get your ratings to me by the voting deadline.
Candidates for Regular Meetings (fiction)
The Boy in the Field by Margot Livesey. 254 pages, 2021. While walking home from school, three teenage siblings save the life of a young man who had been attacked and left in a field. The aftermath of the event leads them in three different directions, with one of the boys sometimes wishing they had never rescued the man. New York Times: "In the broadest sense, Margot Livesey’s exquisite novel The Boy in the Field is a whodunit .… But the real mysteries lie elsewhere, specifically and most compellingly with the characters who are witnesses to the crime." Minneapolis Star Tribune: "A swift-moving mystery that expands into subtler sorts of narratives — the coming of age, the family in crisis." New York Journal of Books: “… Livesey, whose novels have, for a couple of decades now, been successful at making the rich subtext of feeling, memory, and difficult life decisions mulled over, the main event of her stories.” Boston Globe: "Ultimately what keeps Livesey’s novel aloft is that it is full of kindnesses." LAVA read Livesey's The House on Fortune Street in 2010. Suggested by Bill on Andi’s recommendation. Reviews. 17 copies in the library system.
The Cold Millions by Jess Walter, 337 pages, 2021. In 1909, two orphaned brothers in Spokane, Washington become involved with the radical Industrial Workers of the World. One of them is pressured to switch his loyalties to the local power broker in exchange for his brother’s release from prison. Amazon says it has an “unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers.” San Francisco Chronicle: “The Cold Millions feels timed perfectly to this moment of stark income inequality, where the crevasse between billionaires and workers widens and activism increases … I haven’t encountered a more satisfying and moving novel about the struggle for workers’ rights in America.” Wall Street Journal: “Filled with a gusto that honors the beauty of believing in societal change and simultaneously recognizes the cruel limits of the possible.” Washington Post: “A work of irresistible characters, harrowing adventures and rip-roaring fun … One of the most captivating novels of the year.” Listed by Bookmarks as one of the 20 best novels of 2021. Reviews. 32 copies in the library system.
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, 394 pages, 1980. Bookmarks: “In this tragicomic novel, Ignatius J. Reilly, a junk-food addict and medieval scholar, rebels against the modern age. In search of justice, he decides to act on his beliefs – whether it entails working in a New Orleans department store or a hotdog stand.” The Chicago Sun-Times described the protagonist as a "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures." The Washington Post: “A corker, an epic comedy, a rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book.” This novel won the Pulitzer Prize. Review in Kirkus Reviews. Suggested by Diane. 16 copies in the library system.
Normal People by Sally Rooney, 287 pages, 2019. This novel is about two Irish teenagers from different backgrounds: Connell is a well-adjusted star of the football team, while Marianne is lonely, proud and intensely private. Amazon says it is about "two people who try to stay apart but find that they can’t … As she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other." Toronto Star: "The author’s great skill is her ability to make the crises of youth reverberate hard and personally in readers, from social ostracism to loss of virginity to the heavy desire to feel like — you guessed it — normal people." New York Times: "There is, in the pointed dialogue, a reminder of why we call it a punch line ... Rooney is almost comically talented at keeping the lovers in her novels frustrated and apart." Harpers: "Rooney is … a master of the kind of millennial deadpan that appears to skewer a whole life and personality in a sentence or two, leaving the knots of anguish and confusion beneath." This book was number 8 on the Bookmarks list of the most favorably reviewed novels of 2019. Held over from last year. Reviews. 37 copies in the library system.
The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller, 325 pages, 2021. In 1916, a man leaves Stockholm for a mining job on an Arctic island. Disfigured in an accident, he makes a life for himself there as a hunter and trapper. His solitude is interrupted when his niece arrives with a baby. Kirkus Reviews: “Sven’s ugliness is only skin-deep, and readers will love the beauty and depth of his story.” Bookpage: “By design, the novel is so full of lengthy descriptions that a certain amount of perseverance is required of the reader. But Sven is an insightful yet comically ironic narrator, and there is often great excitement in his story ... an unforgettable narrator who asks essential questions of human connection.” Suggested by Ken. Reviews. 10 copies in the library system.
Oh William by Elizabeth Strout, 237 pages, 2022. Lucy Barton’s unfaithful first husband learns that his mother had a previous family. He asks Lucy rather than his current wife to travel to Maine with him to meet his new relatives. LAVA read Strout’s The Burgess Boys in 2016 and her Pulitzer-Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge in 2010. Washington Post: “So much intimate, fragile, desperate humanness infuses these pages, it’s breathtaking. Almost every declaration carries the force of revelation.” The Guardian: “This novel ends with the assurance that the source of love lies less in understanding than in recognition—although it may take a lifetime to learn the difference.” New York Review of Books: “For all the depths of anger and despair they uncover, and the bitterness they attest to, Strout’s works insist on the superabundance of life, the unrealized bliss always immanent in it.” Reviews. More than 50 copies in the library system.
The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murphy, 338 pages, 2021. This is a fictionalized account of a real person in the early 20th century who became Pierpont Morgan's personal librarian for his collection of rare books. A light-skinned African American, she hid her identity so she could attend his social events without being noticed. Referring to the two authors, NPR says: “Benedict, who is white, and Murray, who is African American, do a good job of depicting the tightrope Belle walked, and her internal conflict from both sides — wanting to adhere to her mother's wishes and move through the world as white even as she longed to show her father she was proud of her race.” Suggested by Ken. Reviews. More than 50 copies in the library system.
Search by Michell Hunevan, 357 pages (not counting recipes), 2022. In this novel, a Unitarian Universalist food writer and author of two published memoirs in California is looking for ideas for her next book. She sees her chance when she is asked to be on church’s search committee, whose job is to recommend a new minister. The committee becomes deeply troubled by a generational divide. Hunevan, the author, a food writer herself and a member of the UU church in Pasadena, accurately depicts how UU church administration works. Los Angeles Times: “a surprisingly amusing account of ecclesiastical politics in the age of 'wokeness' … At book’s end, Huneven, a James Beard Award-winning food writer, serves up some of the recipes the group has enjoyed.” New York Times: “This novel has plot, character, structure and a delicious, deeply human pettiness that I think most honest readers will relate to.” Suggested by Bill. Reviews. 11 copies in the library system.
Candidates for Regular Meetings (non-fiction)
In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom, 222 pages, 2022. The author’s husband, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, decides to travel to Switzerland for “accompanied suicide.” USA Today: “Rarely has a memoir about death been so full of life …Bloom has a talent for mixing the prosaic and profound, the slapstick and the serious.” Kirkus Reviews: “This shimmering love story and road map is must-read testimony … You will never forget this book, and if you do, let’s hope someone close to you remembers.” The Washington Post: “… does not terrorize with grim statistics and forewarnings but rather destigmatizes euthanasia and enriches the reader’s life with urgency and gratitude. It renews those joys of being ‘In Love’ with the people around us—despite the numbing effects of routine and familiarity which so often cause happiness to lapse in middle age.” Reviews. 28 copies in the library system.
River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candice Millard. 282 pages, 2022. The story of the 1854 British expedition to locate the source of the Nile River. New York Times: “River of the Gods is a lean, fast-paced account of the almost absurdly dangerous quest by those two friends turned enemies, Richard Burton and John Speke, to solve the geographic riddle of their era.” Wall Street Journal: “The centerpiece of Ms. Millard’s book, goes beyond harrowing and into the ghastly.” Washington Post: “Perhaps as a corrective to the Anglocentrism of earlier accounts, she brings a third figure into the foreground: Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a formerly enslaved African who acted as guide and interpreter for Burton, Speke and several other explorers over the years.” LAVA read Millard’s Destiny of the Republic in 2015 and River of Doubt in 2014. Suggested by Connie. Reviews. 23 copies in the library system.
South to America: A Journey below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation, by Imani Perry, 387 pages, Jan 2022. Amazon: “This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes … She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life.” New York Times: “Scrupulously researched and teeming with facts and citations ... Any attempt to classify this ambitious work, which straddles genre, kicks down the fourth wall, dances with poetry, engages with literary criticism and flits from journalism to memoir to academic writing — well, that’s a fool’s errand and only undermines this insightful, ambitious and moving project.” NPR: “[Perry] focuses on a place and reflects on its distinctive relationship to the region’s history of slavery and racism, drawing on her own extensive knowledge of literature, music, art, and folklore, as well as her own family history.” This book won the National Book Award for nonfiction. Suggested by Tess. Reviews. 21 copies in the library system
Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote by Ellen Carol DuBois, 317 pages, 2020. DuBois is a prominent historian of the women's movement. Publisher: "Explores the full scope of the movement to win the vote for women through portraits of its bold leaders and devoted activists." Gloria Steinem: "Ellen DuBois tells us the long drama of women’s fight for the vote, without privileging polite lobbying over radical disobedience—or vice versa. In so doing, she gives us the gift of a full range of tactics now, and also the understanding that failing to vote is a betrayal of our foremothers and ourselves." Ms. Magazine: "The complex circumstances of the suffrage fight are difficult to disentangle and judge fairly; DuBois, an academic trailblazer in women’s history, brings vast knowledge and insight to the task." Booklist: [She] breaks through the dull casings that have calcified around the best-known suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony, and brings them forward as complex and compelling individuals." Suggested by Sheila. Held over from last year. Review in the Guardian. 14 copies in the library system.
The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution by David O. Stewart, 285 pages, 2008. Amazon: “The Summer of 1787 takes us into the sweltering room in which the founding fathers struggled for four months to produce the Constitution: the flawed but enduring document that would define the nation—then and now.” Publisher’s Weekly: “Briskly written, full of deft characterizations and drama, grounded firmly in the records of the constitutional convention and its members letters, this is a splendid rendering of the document’s creation.” Booklist: “A fine writer whose narrative unfolds like a well-structured novel.” The author is president of the Washington Independent Review of Books and the author of several histories. Suggested by Ted. Review in the New York Times. 7 copies in the library system (is this enough?)
Your Children are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York by Justin Murphy, 240 pages, 2022. Publisher (Cornell University Press): “Drawing on never-before-seen archival documents as well as scores of new interviews, Murphy shows how discriminatory public policy and personal prejudice combined to create the racially segregated education system that exists in the Rochester area today. Alongside this dismal history, Murphy recounts the courageous fight for integration and equality, from the advocacy of Frederick Douglass in the 1850s to a countywide student coalition inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement in the 2010s.” Ansley T. Erickson, author of Making the Unequal Metropolis: "Murphy adeptly analyzes school segregation in the city of Rochester by carefully blending sources from the era of the Great Migration up to the twenty-first century. Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger is a resource to local educators, community members, and students seeking to understand and improve Rochester schools.” The author is a reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Suggested by Sheila. Over 40 copies in the library system.
Longer Books (suitable for August and October)
We read no more than two books in this category per year, and we reserve these for our August and October discussions, which gives us two months to read them. This does not imply that our August and October books must come from this section: if all the top choices are shorter books, that is what we read all year.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 588 pages, 2014. In this novel two Nigerian teenagers fall in love and separately flee their country's military dictatorship, one to the US and one to Britain. Years later, Obinze returns to Nigeria and becomes wealthy, while Ifemelu, a successful writer, also returns. They renew their relationship and face tough decisions. Chicago Tribune: "Sprawling, ambitious and gorgeously written, 'Americanah' covers race, identity, relationships, community, politics, privilege, language, hair, ethnocentrism, migration, intimacy, estrangement, blogging, books and Barack Obama. It covers three continents, spans decades, leaps gracefully, from chapter to chapter, to different cities and other lives... [Adichie] weaves them assuredly into a thoughtfully structured epic. The result is a timeless love story steeped in our times." The Washington Post said Adichie writes about the U.S. and Nigeria "with ruthless honesty about the ugly and beautiful sides of both". This novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Time magazine named it one of the 10 best books of the decade. Suggested by Tess. Held over from last year. Reviews. More than 30 copies in the library system.
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, 622 pages, 2022. The ancient story of Aethon, who longs to become a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky, is told through the lives of several young dreamers and outsiders whose lives are intertwined over three time periods, including the near future. St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Doerr works literary magic to tell three cleverly entwined stories set centuries apart, celebrating children, and the natural world, and always, especially, libraries. We'll be talking about this one for a long time.” New York Times: “… wildly inventive, a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences.” Washington Post: “If you’re looking for a superb novel, look no further.” LAVA read Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize, in 2016. This novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, was on the New York Times bestseller list for over 20 weeks. More than 50 copies in the library system.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders, 2021, 406 pages. Saunders teaches a graduate level seminar on Russian short fiction at Syracuse University. This book contains the full text of seven Russian short stories together with the author’s analysis of each. The Guardian: “His book is a delight, and it’s about delight too .... tracks the author’s intentions—and missed intentions, and intuitions, and instinctive recoil from what’s banal or obvious—so closely and intimately, at every step, through every sentence.” Times Literary Supplement: “Many books that try to teach us how to write commit the first sin of bad writing: their guidance is abstract. There are even more books that try to teach us how to read. None I know do both with Saunders’s microscopic attention to the myriad impressions and calculations that occur within us when we compose or absorb even a single word on the page ... Saunders is the gentlest and most gracious of guides.” New York Times: “[Saunders] is moved by an evangelical ardor where fiction is concerned, intent on how it can help us 'become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional,' as he put it in a viral commencement speech.” Saunders won the Booker Prize for fiction in 2017 for his Lincoln in the Bardo. Suggested by Bill. Reviews. 16 copies in the library system.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, 425 pages, 2020. Publisher: "Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time―from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk 'hiding place' where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come―Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind." The Irish Times: "[T]his is … an account of adventure, terror, discovery and hope. In fact, this is a plea for the world seen in mythic proportions." New York Review of Books: "Macfarlane is gifted with qualities often mutually exclusive: the physical hardiness of travel, the sensitivity to evoke it, and a talent for scientific elucidation… At times his writing ascends to a kind of forensic poetry." Guardian: "There is throughout a transcendent beauty to Macfarlane’s prose, and occasional moments of epiphany and even ecstasy…One of the most ambitious works of narrative non-fiction of our age." A New York Times "100 Notable Books of the Year." NPR "Favorite Books of 2019." Suggested by Ken. Held over from last year. Reviews. 18 copies in the library system.