Book Club

Hag-seed
Margaret Atwood

Anxious People
Fredrik Backman

The Vanishing Half
Brit Bennett

Personal Librarian
Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray

Sweetest Heartbreak
Heather Bentley

What's Mine and Yours
Naima Coster

American Dirt
Jeanine Cummins

White Fragility
Robin Diangelo
The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.
In this "vital, necessary, and beautiful book" (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and "allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to 'bad people' (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz

All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land
Anthony Doerr

My Favorite Thing is Monsters
Emil Ferris

Crossroads
Jonathan Franzen

Of Women and Salt
Gabriela Garcia

The Midnight Library
Matt Haig

The Four Winds
Kristin Hannah

Lilac Girls
Martha Hall Kelly

Ballad of Black Tom
Victor LaValle

Pachinko
Min Jin Lee

Lines
Geralyn Hesslau MacGrady

Dear Edward
Ann Napolitano

Little Fires Everywhere
Celeste Ng

Hamnet: a novel of the Plague
Maggie O'Farrell
Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family's land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens

The Dutch House
Ann Patchett

Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
V. E. Schwab

At the Edge of Haight
Katherine Seligman

A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles

The Amateur Marriage
Anne Tyler

Hillbilly Elegy
J. D. Vance
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.
But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.
A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Sing Unburied Sing
Jesmyn Ward

Saving Ruby King
Catherine Adel West

Educated: a memoir
Tara Westover

Harlem Shuffle
Colson Whitehead
