Book Club: What are you reading?

[Lazarus]

I liked the first half, barely tolerated the last third. I did like learning about how Japan treats their own Korean citizens.

That’s exactly how I felt. Not as great a book as the hype and awards suggest but I am glad I read it.

[Sunshine]

I finished Laz’s Recommendation Everything I Never Told You. It was very good and I def recommend it.

(It’s what I had hoped Pachinko would’ve been. )

It is the story of a family with Asian dad and Caucasian mom, and issues about being The Other in America. Eye opener for sure. More interesting to me was the depiction of the parents subtle psychological problems and marital problems and it’s impact on the kids. And, you’re wondering all the way through the book on why their teenage daughter died.

the answer is complex and subtle and the author shows tremendous skill in handling nuance.

The book is very readable, complex but not obtuse.

[ssusan]

I am ‘reading’ Pat Conroys’s first book The Water is Wide’. Great as an audible because the reader has the perfect South Carolina accent. It is about his teaching experience at an island off the South Carolina coast. It takes place in 1969. It is a memoir. It is yamacraw island. The kids speak a dialect that he had trouble understanding, most of the kids didn’t understand his accent. Most were illiterate.
It’s wonderful.

[agate]

The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso?

I don't know if anyone has read this but would welcome opinions because I wasn't able to finish it. The audiobook from the library happened to be a commercial audiobook, and the narrator used a very fakey "foreign" accent for some of the characters' dialogue. Sometimes that is done in commercial audiobooks, I've noticed, and usually I don't mind so much though I prefer the straight reading done by the NLS narrators.

This time the accent was so heavy that I couldn't understand much of what was being read because those characters were saying a lot.

I didn't get past a few chapters in it but it's about two older women in a South African community--one of them white, the other the only black woman in their midst. The two are enemies. It was interesting as far as I got in it.

[Sunshine]

I am reading Skinny Dip by Carl Hiassen. It’s a fun read

[ssusan]

Mixing things up. I’m reading(audible) Educated. A memoir.
It was on Obama’s 2018 Summer reading list. It’s the story of a survivalist family in Idaho. I just started it. Scary stuff.

[agate]

I've been wanting to read Educated too.

A few years ago I read an account of a similar family but they were in Alaska. Yes, very scary. It was called Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness in the Alaska Frontier by Tom Kizzia.

[Sunshine]

Those kinds of books scare me, same goes for books about the Holocaust. Stephen King doesn’t scare me.
I think he said that the real life stuff is a lot scarier than the horror movie stuff.

[ssusan]

It’s disturbing.

[Sunshine]

I am reading All over But the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg.

It is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s a memoir of growing up destitute, but oh so much more.

[Virginia]

I am not reading anything right now - due to concentration. However, the next one I plan to read is The Silver Star by Jeanette Starr. A neighbor brought it by for next book club meeting.

My neighbor and I had both stopped reading James Patterson books when he started to co-author them. We did not think they were nearly as good as his old ones. She said today that his new one by him and Bill Clinton is real good. She encouraged me to read it so I probably will. She thinks Bill wrote a lot of it because she said it was things he would know about.

[Sunshine]

And to update Skinny Dip by Carl Hiassen, I didn’t finish it. It went from entertaining satire, to silliness, uncewsary sex etc.

But All over but the shoutin is the real deal. Totally loving the book.

[Lazarus]

WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY
By Lesley Nneka Arimah

Short stories ...gritty fantastical metaphorical and very interesting harsh stories dealing with pain and loss and cruelty

[Lazarus]

Here is a list of the books chosen so far for the NYTimes /Public Television Book Club. I started with Pachinko so there are a number I will go back to read. The book club is called “Now Read This” in case you want to follow discussions readers have about any of the books.

Jesmyn Ward's "Sing, Unburied, Sing" (January)
�� David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon" (February)
�� Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West" (March)
�� Dan Egan's "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes" (April)
�� Tara Westover's "Educated" (May)
�� Andrew Sean Greer's "Less" (June)
�� "Pachinko" by Min Jin Lee (July)
�� "What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky" by Lesley Nneka Arimah (August)

[Sunshine]

Are they all grim?
I wonder why they chose Pachinko. I know three people who read it and none finished it!