What fiction would you like to read this summer?
Last summer, we read Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a generational Bildungsroman of Vassar graduates in the early years of the New Deal. I would like to reprise the structure of last year’s book club: once we have a selection, I’ll divide it into chunks which I’ll post about in sequence, and which I’m hoping we can discuss in the comments.
If you have an idea for what we should read–if there’s a novel you’ve been planning on reading or a great one that you would like to see us take up at the blog–please comment below. I would like it to be a fairly recent book–perhaps one published in the last five years. Below the fold, I’ve listed some books that I think we might consider, though these are really just a way to get the conversation rolling. I’ve added a couple of keywords that seem to be related to each novel for your reference.
Happy summer!
- T. Geronimo Patterson, Welcome to Braggsville (political correctness, neo-Confederacy, academia)
- Ryan Gattis, All Involved (LA, racial violence, riots)
- Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (Vietnam, spies, Cold War)
- Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (dystopia)
- Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (dystopia, drought)
- Jabari Asim, Only the Strong (race, Bildungsroman, St. Louis)
- Nell Zink, Mislaid (racial passing, 1960s, academia, sexuality)
- Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members (academia)
- Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Jamaica, Bob Marley, spies, War on Drugs)
- Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek (survivalism, social work)
- Laila Lalami, The Moor’s Account (Spanish colonization of North America)
- Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul (Haiti, US foreign policy)
4 Thoughts on this Post
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These look like excellent choices! I have thought about reading the new Mat Johnson novel, “Loving Day,” about interracial dating in recent American history. It has garnered mostly strong reviews.
The one book on this list that I had some previous awareness of is The Sympathizer. If that one ended up being the choice, I might make an effort to read it (sorry to sound so tentative, but best to be realistic about one’s time-management skills or in my case, lack thereof…).
I’ve read the Schumacher book; its the funniest academic satire I’ve read since _Confederacy of Dunces_.
I’ve heard really good things about the St John Mandel, and the Zink looks rather intriguing too . . .
I just started reading A Brief History of Seven Killings and it’s really impressive so far. I’d like to read “The Sympathizer” at some point and I enjoyed Bacigalupi’s last book (environmentally conscious sci-fi is an underrated genre).