Book Club Bleg

September 17, 2007 6:50 PM

Help me choose some books to nominate for book club. No, no, no, this one's a tad more complicated. :)

Every month, one of my fellow book-clubbers is assigned to nominate three or four books. When we meet to discuss the past month's reading, we choose one of the nominees for the next month. Being something of an oddball, I like to organize my nominations around themes. The last time, for example, my theme was "Masters of Humankind." The books I proposed were No god but God (God), The Year of Magical Thinking (Death), The Time-Traveler's Wife (Time), and Moneyball (Money). (The club picked The Time-Traveler's Wife. The actual selection doesn't make much of a difference to me, because I plan to read all the books I propose, and I did.)

The theme can be oblique, clever, or straightforward. (In the straightforward camp, for example, I've been considering the four elements -- Cloud Atlas (Air), Snow (Water), American Prometheus or Dante (Fire), Coal: A Human History or Salt: A World History (Earth).) They can be either a prominent theme of the book or just a play on its title. We prefer books that have been out in paperback, and a nomination almost always goes unpicked if one of us has already read it. I aim for variety in the selection -- memoir, biography, journalistic non-fiction, literary fiction, magical realism, social history.

So, whaddya say? Help me out?

posted by grrarrgh00 to media & arts (3 comments total)

Math: An abundance of Katherines, Bringing down the house, Fermat's enigma, and Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. (I haven't read the last, but I plan to, and the others are all enjoyable, discussable books.)
posted by Margalo Epps at 7:25 PM on September 17, 2007

Are you on boldtype.com's mailing list? You should be! :)
Every month they send out an email of that month's books, based on a theme or idea. The books range (biographies to zines to novels to comics to photography etc.), as do the themes. Sometimes it's abstract (like "journeys") and sometimes not so much. You'll find lots of inspiration and recommendations there either way.
posted by iamkimiam at 9:52 PM on September 17, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

Since you're planning on getting your hands on all the books at some point, I think it'd be fun to bring along six options to present visually to the group. The only requirement is that each of their covers be dominated by a single color - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. Off the top of my head, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime is red, Me Talk Pretty One Day is green, A Short History of Nearly Everything is blue, and there's a whole collection of Hermann Hesse's works that come in plain solid colors. I'm sure you could work out the others on your own.
posted by vytae at 10:08 PM on September 17, 2007