instant-gratification book club
June 6, 2022 9:56 AM   Subscribe

Looking for books that will benefit from chapter-by-chapter discussion. My BFF and I are going on a two week vacation. We're both big readers, and are tickled by the idea of not just discussing our reads, but by the idea reading a book together, bit-by-bit. Any ideas for books that would be even better for this kind of close reading?

Our thoughts so far are short story or essay collections, because there is discussion fodder with each section - but we're open to other ideas.
Less excited by doorstopper-tomes or great-western-cannon; and hoping for reads that aren't an unrelenting bummer. Thanks!
posted by aint broke to Writing & Language (19 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Maybe some travel writing in the "Travels with Charley"/"Blue Highways" genre. Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent?
posted by kevinbelt at 10:06 AM on June 6, 2022


Arcadia by Iain Pears (you can try to work out how it all pieces together).

The Mystery of Right and Wrong by Wayne Johnston: The subject matter is quite heavy and maybe not suitable for a vacation, but in some ways it is a book to be savoured chapter by chapter for the language. There are many parts of the novel where the PROSE rhymes and has perfect meter (there's a reason for this, it's not just for the sake of being cutesy).

A Map of Time by Felix J. Palma. Again, all about working it out.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:09 AM on June 6, 2022


This is a difficult ask without knowing the kinds of books you like to read, and if the two of you read at the same pace.
I would think a mystery, the type with frequent cliff-hangers or plot twists, would be fun for a together read. If I were to pick one from my TRL it would be Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead, he has always entertained me.
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:15 AM on June 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


Some Stoppard plays, maybe? Plays generally are short on actual words and long on interpretation.

Two readable biographies of really unusual people: Mistress of Science and My Work is That of Conservation. Both people suffer personally from classism, racism, and/or sexism, but they are also loved and were successful at their callings.
posted by clew at 10:18 AM on June 6, 2022


Maybe something that was published serially, so that each chapter had to stand on its own (to some degree)?
posted by wenestvedt at 10:22 AM on June 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


I just read a novel called Under the Rainbow, by Celia Laskey. It's about a group of activists from a gay rights organization who identify and move to the "most homophobic town in America." It sounded a) a little gimmicky and b) like a terrible idea, but the book did an amazing job of taking it seriously AND acknowledging those things. It was a series of fascinating portraits of all kinds of characters, some likeable some not, some misunderstood, some hurting. It breaks very nicely into "stories," though they don't really stand alone as stories.

I liked it very much, and it's written from a different POV from each chapter. So it's the story of this town over the course of two years, and each section gets you a little piece of it, but you get the bulk of each person's story through odds and ends from the other chapters.
posted by gideonfrog at 10:39 AM on June 6, 2022


Jennifer Egan's newest novel The Candy House almost feels more like a linked short story collection, since each chapter has a different viewpoint character and sometimes a different formal structure, but there are also overarching themes that build throughout the novel which could add an interesting element to your discussion over time. It's a sequel of sorts to her Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, which could also work for this purpose for the same reasons. (By "a sequel of sorts" I mean that many characters overlap but there's no need to read them in the order written.)
posted by babelfish at 11:44 AM on June 6, 2022 [3 favorites]


This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. The POV alternates between two characters by chapter. You may enjoy reading bits aloud to each other. (I certainly enjoyed reading it aloud to myself!)
posted by esoterrica at 12:01 PM on June 6, 2022 [8 favorites]


Came to 2nd The Candy House/Visit from the Goon Squad. I read Goon Squad a couple years ago and just finished Candy House, which has prompted me to reread Good Squad. The stories are so intertwined it would be fun to be reading with someone and discuss how everything is fitting together. (or possibly not)
posted by snowymorninblues at 12:13 PM on June 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


I would try Oliver Sack's Uncle Tungsten.

I didn’t get through three pages of that incredibly rich and strange book without stopping and thinking 'wow, I wish there was somebody I could discuss this with!'.
posted by jamjam at 12:32 PM on June 6, 2022 [2 favorites]


It is probably too big for this but the structure of Richard Powers The Overstory would make for great chapter by chapter discussion.
posted by Pineapplicious at 12:42 PM on June 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


Ann Patchett's essay collection This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage could be perfect for this trip. Sure, there's something in there about marriage, but it's also about nuns, dogs, tryouts for the police academy, vacationing in an RV—with your ex. Short, fun, connected conversation starters!
posted by HalfInScribbly at 12:54 PM on June 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


My partner and I read Subcutanean chapter-by-chapter together. Each individual copy of the book is slightly different, so I got two copies (the paired version generated from different seeds) and we found it very fun to compare notes and try and figure out where things diverged.
posted by lhall at 2:03 PM on June 6, 2022


I came here to also recommend This is How You Lose the Time War also. In general epistolary novels might work. You read each letter/document and then talk about it.
posted by Hactar at 5:10 PM on June 6, 2022 [1 favorite]


Kind of meta: If On a Winter's Night a Traveler
posted by trig at 8:24 AM on June 7, 2022


Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions so far!
I deliberately didn't give genre, as we both read widely- non-fiction (science, biography, history, modern reportage), literary fiction, classics, young adult, mystery, scifi, poetry, humorous essays; whatever. I don't read romance, and neither of us reads much true crime, but for the right book, I think we'd both try anything.

I think a travel book would be great, especially if we could find something about where we're going which reminded me of this tool.

One or both of us has read "This Is How You Lose a Time War", "Candy House/Goon Squad", "This is the Story of a Happy Marriage"; but I'm adding the others to the list.
posted by aint broke at 9:03 AM on June 7, 2022


For essays: did John McPhee happen to write a book on your destination?
(Alaska, California, Switzerland, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, etc. etc.?) Or are you perhaps traveling by Uncommon Carriers?

Also, not quite essays, but Mary Roach's books tend to have chapters loosely strung together around a common roughly scientific theme. I'm currently working my way through Fuzz, her latest, but she is uniformly fascinating and hilarious.
posted by sigmagalator at 4:32 PM on June 7, 2022 [1 favorite]


Hah! Seconding Ann Patchett's This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

Also, pretty much everything I've read by Ali Smith seems like it would benefit from close reading together with another enthusiastic reader - specifically, I'm thinking How to Be Both, Artful, The Accidental, and There But For The. However, I think they all have rather long sections rather than short-ish chapters. (There But For The has 8 sections, most around 50-60 pages, but two are just a few pages long.)

This sounds like such fun!
posted by kristi at 8:27 PM on June 7, 2022


Response by poster: I had such high hopes for, like, line-by-line readings, of literature and discussions and we ended up going for easy and lighthearted, as we were both fried from the state of the world/work/life. Here is what we ended up actually reading:

1) Lindy West's Shit Actually, read out loud to each other, which caused actual cry out loud laughter, and prompted us to watch the Fugitive, perfect.

2) Hanif Abdurraqib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us; read an essay individually, then listened to the music together. This is such a great book, but not for instant gratification book club, as we ended up not having a lot to add- a great thinker wrote a thoughtful essay, and we read it and nodded.

3) Ross Gay's Book of Delights; listened to half the audiobook, read by the author. A great book, but not lighthearted enough for us on this exact trip.

4) the Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie; read in parallel asking each other if you've gotten to this part yet?????


As a concept, I would recommend instant gratification book club, and I would also recommend having several books on hand- we both read more than we were expecting, it was good to have a lot of options on hand.
posted by aint broke at 6:42 PM on August 4, 2022


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