Hello readers! I have collected below all the suggestion from your fellow Persephoneers for the first book to read in our relaunched book club. Please vote on the title you want this weekend and I’ll announce the winner Monday. You can vote for as many as you’d like, but comments that say “all of them” will make me tear out my hair, so refrain. Unless you like bald-headed, weeping book club facilitators. Then go for it.
The first club “˜meeting’ will be the third weekend of March 17th-18th, so you’ll have a month to track down your book and read it. If you make excessively nerdy notes about things you want to talk about during that time, I promise no one will make fun of you. I’ll open a weekend-long thread on the 17th for discussion. That’s it! Easy-peasy.
The book club has previously tackled The Hobbit, Harry Potter, The Westing Game, and The Handmaid’s Tale, so they are not on the list. We’ll also slot the winner of Middlemarch Madness into a future month’s reading selection.
Suggestions:
1Q84 ““ Haruki Murakami
A Visit from of the Goon Squad ““ Jennifer Egan
Cleopatra: A Life ““ Stacy Schiff
Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books ““ Francesca Lia Block
Feed ““ M.T. Anderson
Going Bovine ““ Libba Bray
Half Broke Horses ““ Jeannette Walls
Holy Cow ““ Sarah MacDonald
How to Be Black ““ Baratunde Thurston
Just Kids ““ Patti Smith
Me Talk Pretty One Day — David Sedaris
Noughts and Crosses ““ Malorie Blackman
Pride and Prejudice ““ Jane Austen
Queen of American — Luis Alberto Urrea
Ragnar and Juliet ““ Lucy Woodhull
Running with Scissors — Augusten Burroughs
Sloppy Firsts ““ Megan McCafferty
Sub Rosa ““ Amber Dawn
The Astonishing Life of Octavia Nothing ““ MT Anderson
The Big Over Easy ““ Jasper Fford
The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next Book 1) ““ Jasper Fforde
The Gift of Fear ““ Gavin de Becker
The Glass Castle ““ Jeannette Walls
The Hero and the Crown ““ Robin McKinley
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms ““ N. K. Jemisin
The Hunger Games ““ Suzanne Collins
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness ““ Michelle Alexander
The Sparrow ““ Mary Dora Russell
What Alice Knew ““ Paula Marantz Cohen
Will Grayson, Will Grayson ““ John Green
Looking for some non-directed reading selections? Try our Books tag – we have fantastic reviews for titles across a broad range of interests.
Update 12/20/12: We’ll be reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. IQ84 by Haruki Murakami and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin were also popular picks and will be scheduled in that order after the Middlemarch Maddness title, if you want to get a jump on your reading.
98 replies on “Persephone Book Club: Picking the Books (Updated)”
Do I still have time to vote? I pick
1. Cleopatra: A Life
2. IQ84
3. Sub Rosa
4. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.
Yep, you got them in in time. I’ll be counting up the votes over my lunch break.
So, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms would be cool – I just read that last month (finished the trilogy this wknd). Â And I’m still working through How to Be Black, so either of those would be great.
I’d really like to read Hunger Games! Even better if there’s people to talk about it with :)
Oooh, so many of those look interesting. I think my picks would be 1Q84, The Hunger Games, The Eyre Affair and Ragnar and Juliet.
I vote for 1Q84 or The Hunger Games!