Book Club: What are you reading?

[Lazarus]

Linda, you'll be ON the PBS News Hour? We can watch for you?

I try to watch that every day and have been noticing that they do those "Now Read This" segments in connection with their book club, and they are always interesting. I'll be on the lookout for you! Congratulations on being selected!

In the email I got it said my question might be used. I sent a video. I doubt it will be used but if you see it let me know!

[stillstANNding]

We sent my Mom Pachinko and when we got here she said she had finished it and it was in my drawer. She loved it. It’s a sizable book but she said it’s a page turner. She lived through the time of the book so she found it particularly interesting.

Thank you, Linda.
ANN

[Virginia]

Just ordered Pachinko for my Kindle. I am not ready to start it yet, but will have it when I am ready for it.

[ssusan]

Sorry, Linda. Didn’t see this. Americanah by Chimanda Ngozi Adichie

[Lazarus]

NYTimes published this article today and lists top books of the year:

Fiction

Autumn

By Ali Smith

The extraordinary friendship of an elderly songwriter and the precocious child of his single-parent neighbor is at the heart of this novel that darts back and forth through the decades, from the 1960s to the era of Brexit. The first in a projected four-volume series, it’s a moving exploration of the intricacies of the imagination, a sly teasing-out of a host of big ideas and small revelations, all hovering around a timeless quandary: how to observe, how to be.

Read our review of “Autumn”

Pantheon Books. $24.95.


Fiction

Exit West

By Mohsin Hamid

A deceptively simple conceit turns a timely novel about a couple fleeing a civil war into a profound meditation on the psychology of exile. Magic doors separate the known calamities of the old world from the unknown perils of the new, as the migrants learn how to adjust to an improvisatory existence. Hamid has written a novel that fuses the real with the surreal — perhaps the most faithful way to convey the tremulous political fault lines of our interconnected planet.

Read our review of “Exit West”


Fiction

Pachinko

By Min Jin Lee

Lee’s stunning novel, her second, chronicles four generations of an ethnic Korean family, first in Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century, then in Japan itself from the years before World War II to the late 1980s. Exploring central concerns of identity, homeland and belonging, the book announces its ambitions right from the opening sentence: “History has failed us, but no matter.” Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen.

Read our review of “Pachinko”

Grand Central Publishing. $27.


Fiction

The Power

By Naomi Alderman

Alderman imagines our present moment — our history, our wars, our politics — complicated by the sudden manifestation of a lethal “electrostatic power” in women that upends gender dynamics across the globe. It’s a riveting story, told in fittingly electric language, that explores how power corrupts everyone: those new to it and those resisting its loss. Provocatively, Alderman suggests that history’s horrors are inescapable — that there will always be abuses of power, that the arc of the universe doesn’t bend toward justice so much as inscribe a circle away from it. “Transfers of power, of course, are rarely smooth,” one character observes.

Read our review of “The Power”

Little, Brown & Company. $26.


Fiction

Sing, Unburied, Sing

By Jesmyn Ward

In her follow-up to “Salvage the Bones,” Ward returns to the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Miss., and the stories of ordinary people who would be easy to classify dismissively into categories like “rural poor,” “drug-dependent,” “products of the criminal justice system.” Instead Ward gives us Jojo, a 13-year-old, and a road trip that he and his little sister take with his drug-addicted black mother to pick up their white father from prison. And there is nothing small about their existences. Their story feels mythic, both encompassing the ghosts of the past and touching on all the racial and social dynamics of the South as they course through this one fractured family. Ward’s greatest feat here is achieving a level of empathy that is all too often impossible to muster in real life, but that is genuine and inevitable in the hands of a writer of such lyric imagination.

Read our review of “Sing, Unburied, Sing”


Nonfiction

The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us

By Richard O. Prum

If a science book can be subversive and feminist and change the way we look at our own bodies — but also be mostly about birds — this is it. Prum, an ornithologist, mounts a defense of Darwin’s second, largely overlooked theory of sexual selection. Darwin believed that, in addition to evolving to adapt to the environment, some other force must be at work shaping the species: the aesthetic mating choices made largely by the females. Prum wants subjectivity and the desire for beauty to be part of our understanding of how evolution works. It’s a passionate plea that begins with birds and ends with humans and will help you finally understand, among other things, how in the world we have an animal like the peacock.

Read our review of “The Evolution of Beauty”


Nonfiction

Grant

By Ron Chernow

Even those who think they are familiar with Ulysses S. Grant’s career will learn something from Chernow’s fascinating and comprehensive biography, especially about Grant’s often overlooked achievements as president. What is more, at a time of economic inequality reflecting the 19th century’s Gilded Age and a renewed threat from white-supremacy groups, Chernow reminds us that Grant’s courageous example is more valuable than ever, and in this sense, “Grant” is as much a mirror on our own time as a history lesson.

Read our review of “Grant”


Nonfiction

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

By James Forman Jr.

A former public defender in Washington, Forman has written a masterly account of how a generation of black officials, beginning in the 1970s, wrestled with recurring crises of violence and drug use in the nation’s capital. What started out as an effort to assert the value of black lives turned into an embrace of tough-on-crime policies — with devastating consequences for the very communities those officials had promised to represent. Forman argues that dismantling the American system of mass incarceration will require a new understanding of justice, one that emphasizes accountability instead of vengeance.

Read our review of “Locking Up Our Own”

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.


Nonfiction

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

By Caroline Fraser

Fraser’s biography of the author of “Little House on the Prairie” and other beloved books about her childhood during the era of westward migration captures the details of a life — and an improbable, iconic literary career — that has been expertly veiled by fiction. Exhaustively researched and passionately written, this book refreshes and revitalizes our understanding of Western American history, giving space to the stories of Native Americans displaced from the tribal lands by white settlers like the Ingalls family as well as to the travails of homesteaders, farmers and everyone else who rushed to the West to extract its often elusive riches. Ending with a savvy analysis of the 20th-century turn toward right-wing politics taken by Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, Fraser offers a remarkably wide-angle view of how national myths are shaped.

Read our review of “Prairie Fires”

Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company.
$35.


Nonfiction

Priestdaddy

By Patricia Lockwood

In this affectionate and very funny memoir, Lockwood weaves the story of her family — including her Roman Catholic priest father, who received a special dispensation from the Vatican — with her own coming-of-age, and the crisis that later led her and her husband to live temporarily under her parents’ rectory roof. She also brings to bear her gifts as a poet, mixing the sacred and profane in a voice that’s wonderfully grounded and authentic. This book proves Lockwood to be a formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.

Read our review of “Priestdaddy”

[Virginia]

Thank you Linda. I have Pachinko and I might like Sing Unburied Sing. There are a couple of others that might be interesting to me.

[agate]

Thank you, Linda! I would like to read a number of those titles too, especially the new biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read another biography of her a while back, and just now I'm reading her letters.

There has been quite a controversy about her ever since one scholar came up with evidence that her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, may have ghost-written many of the Little House books.

[agate]

Linda, Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, was on the PBS Newshour tonight as you may know. After hearing her talk about it I'd like to read the book. Unfortunately I didn't see you among the people asking questions. I'm sorry your input wasn't selected!

[Lazarus]

Linda, Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, was on the PBS Newshour tonight as you may know. After hearing her talk about it I'd like to read the book. Unfortunately I didn't see you among the people asking questions. I'm sorry your input wasn't selected!

They did use my video! It was the first question in the online interview Jeffrey Brown did with the author that was the extra!
Interesting, there were four questions in the online video but the videos were not as ‘pretty’ as the ones they used on tv. But, I think all of us in the online video came across as more real. And, they cut off the first lines where we introduce ourselves! No fame and fortune for me. (But I am the first questioner. I asked about which character most annoyed her)

Oh wait! I looked at it again and they do have my name and town printed below my video! I have to admit it is a neat experience.

[Sunshine]

Congratulations!

Do you have the link?

[agate]

I found it--on a Facebook page. I don't know if this link will work. Nice to see you, Linda! Good question too!

Only registered and activated users can see links., Click Here To Register...

[Virginia]

Great to see you Linda. Good question.

Agate, I am into this book now and loving it so far. You will be glad if you read it.

[Sunshine]

Great job Laz!
And thanks for the rec. am about 70% into book.

[Virginia]

Linda, finished Pachinko. I loved it, but will not critique it here due to many spoilers. I couldn't stop reading day before yesterday and then when I picked it up last night I didn't put it down until I went to bed at 1:40AM.

[Sunshine]

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