I honestly cannot believe the year is coming to an end and we are about to start our final book in our year-long reading challenge! The group started as a random idea I had with a friend because we are both avid readers who loved to discuss books but never aligned our readings so we could discuss the same book at the same time. Initially, we decided to read one book a month together just for the sake of discussion. Then we figured a few more of our friends would like to join in. After a lot of excitement from our group of friends and more and more people expressing interest, I decided to make it an open Facebook group where people could join in as they pleased. I never imagined that I would make it through a whole year of running the club but I am so happy I have. Even if no one else is reading along with me (although I really hope you are!) I have come to appreciate the self-placed responsibility I have to finish books, post discussion questions and keep the challenge alive. I hope you have enjoyed being a part of the group! I definitely want to continue the book club into 2014 but maybe incorporate some twists, like theme months, rotating discussion leaders, etc. I will post about this in our Facebook group in the coming weeks so we can come up with a new challenge for the new year!
For now, discussion for I Am Malala is now open and I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Our December book has also been chosen:
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz is our final book pick for 2013. Diaz is an amazing author who writes complex and interesting characters. I am definitely excited to read his latest gem! Here is the summary from Amazon:
"Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz’s first book, Drown, established him as a major new writer with “the dispassionate eye of a journalist and the tongue of a poet” (Newsweek). His first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was named #1 Fiction Book of the Year” byTime magazine and spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, establishing itself – with more than a million copies in print – as a modern classic. In addition to the Pulitzer, Díaz has won a host of major awards and prizes, including the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award.
Now Díaz turns his remarkable talent to the haunting, impossible power of love – obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love. On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a man buys his love child, his only son, a first baseball bat and glove. At the heart of these stories is the irrepressible, irresistible Yunior, a young hardhead whose longing for love is equaled only by his recklessness--and by the extraordinary women he loves and loses: artistic Alma; the aging Miss Lora; Magdalena, who thinks all Dominican men are cheaters; and the love of his life, whose heartbreak ultimately becomes his own. In prose that is endlessly energetic, inventive, tender, and funny, the stories in the New York Times-Bestselling This Is How You Lose Her lay bare the infinite longing and inevitable weakness of the human heart. They remind us that passion always triumphs over experience, and that “the half-life of love is forever.”
December book pick: This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
Discussion opens: December 24th
Happy Thanksgiving!
