Summer book club? (AA Group)
Summer is my big reading time. Work is typically less intense and my kids are home. When they were younger, I took them to the pool and read poetry with my feet in the baby pool and one eye them at all times. When they got a bit older and I still needed to be with them but didn't have to watch them every minute, I switched back to literary fiction. I read Infinite Jest mostly in a lounge chair under an umbrella at the local JCC a few years back. We were at the pool a bunch that year.... That book is insanely long. Now they are teens and don't need me to be there at all, but I still go there to read just out of habit. Go figure.
I am planning some of my summer reading right now. I love this group and know that many here are also very literary so I thought it would be fun to have a reading group. I'm going to suggest the selection below as a book that fits the mission of the group and is also new, so unlikely that anyone has read it yet. It is on ALL the summer reading lists and people seem to love it. Plus it is a good summer book; of a decent length, not too hard but dense and interesting. And it will be a good way for members to touch base, even when we are on vacay or sick of the political season.
“Homegoing is an inspiration.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates
A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi’s magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.
https://www.amazon.com/Homegoing-novel-Yaa-Gyasi/dp/1101947136/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1465823475&sr=1-1
https://www.buzzfeed.com/adamdavis/great-books-to-read-in-june?utm_term=.wuNxKKVlq#.syR011dpM
I am open to other suggestions, too, if anyone else has ideas. Thoughts?
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Guns, Germs and Steel was really interesting too. I read it a while ago, so I could give that one another go too.
Here are some reading guides for Homegoing. We could just have a general thread where people could post their thoughts, or we could do a specific question each week or two.
We would need to have a reading schedule so people who were ahead would not post spoilers and if you were behind, you know not to read the thread until you got caught up.
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533857/homegoing-by-yaa-gyasi/9781101947135/readers-guide/
http://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/13-fiction/10667-homegoing-gyasi?start=3
Whatever is decided, it is on my summer list for sure!
Looking forward to it. It's been years since being a part of a group for reading a book and it was beautiful experience 
Some old favorites, some I didn't get around to yet. Please note the one about the "magic" of tidying up at the bottom of the mess. Sigh.... I'm hopeless there.
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Homecoming yesterday! 
I am not a host, but my experience, anyone who abides by group rules is welcome 
A classic and I don't recall reading it before. I read a great article about the Brontes recently. They were such an enchanting sibling group; I thought it would be fun to read one book by each sister. I did read Wuthering Heights a few years back, so one down, two to go....
A biography of Ronald Reagan. Bleh, I know, but it will be broadening. I am making a genuine effort to understand what motivates them instead of being kneejerk judgemental. I dunno if I can read one this summer. Depends on how mentally strong I am feeling. But it is on the "possible" list. Might do LBJ instead. Or take the summer off from political reading completely. Not the worst idea I ever had....
M Train by Patti Smith. I read her first memoir about her early artistic life with Robert Mapplethorpe recently, which was great, so looking forward to the second book.
Gravity's Rainbow is on the list, but again, probably not this summer. My goal is to read the big three of huge, impossible postmodernist literature, Infinite Jest, Ulysses, and GR. Two down, GR is the only one left. But that kind of reading requires more bandwidth than I have right now. Maybe I'll re-read Naked Lunch instead 
Murder mysteries. Lots of murder mysteries. The more hardboiled and noir, the better.
And Homegoing. Going to kick my summer off with that one. It is a new book and covers a large amount of history too. I like historical fiction because it is a two for one. I get the fun of a fictional narrative and a better understanding of real historical timelines. The big question now is Kindle or paper? I want the paper but will be traveling a great deal. It will be much more convenient on the Kindle. Decisions, decisions....
Just finished Invisible Man. Some profound truths in that one, I can see why they try to ban it periodically.
so I did too. Dick Francis and John D. MacDonald come to mind. I got Agatha Christies, which I never like that much, from the library. Later I did Tony Hillerman's series. Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard are a hoot. Faye Kellerman is good. I just finished one by the guy who wrote The Wire, Pelacanos. Walter Mosely's Easy Rawlins series is my all-time favorite.
There is a lot that is amusing in that genre. Much of it is character and dialog driven, so if I like those I can read a series indefinitely. I check them out on my Kindle the library and there are plenty more paperbacks at the actual branch, so every now and then I will get a pile and tear through them.
There was not much good YA when we were kids, was there? I liked horse books. Misty of Chincoteague, The Black Stallion series, that kind of thing. I read them all pretty fast and still wanted more. I somehow got my hands on a copy of Steinbeck's The Red Pony in 4th or 5th grade. I remember cracking it open noticing that one of the horses was named Cigarette and thinking, hmmmm, this is different that the others. Not to be a spoiler, but the pony dies in the end 
I ended up in the fetal position on my bedroom floor after I finished. I read Fatal Vision (hey, it was in the house, so I read it) and tried to discuss it with a friend's mother when I noticed she was reading it at the pool. She was a bit surprised.... Ah, the pain of the precocious reader. You CAN read adult novels, but you really shouldn't.
