Books on the Nightstand, Episode 18 (21:13)
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It’s all about book groups in this episode. We begin by talking a bit about our jobs, something the folks over at our Goodreads group have been asking for. We’ll cover a little about our jobs at the beginning of the next few episodes. This time around it’s the presentations we give to book groups. Talking about books to fellow book lovers… how great is that?
In the second segment, we give you several titles we think would be good for any book group whether it’s made up of all women, all men or a mix. In addition to the four main books, we also mention six books we’ve discussed before (this list links to the original posts or podcasts where the book was discussed):
- Any Human Heart
- Miracle in the Andes
- Water for Elephants
- The Road
- Fraction of the Whole
- Anything by Ian McEwan
Lastly, we present our usual “Two Books We Can’t Wait For You to Read.” Ann discusses Blindspot, a fun, historical-fiction romp from two very well-respected academics. Michael geeks out over Fables, a long-running comic book, which has just released a pivotal trade paperback collection.
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I’m reading Fraction of the Whole right now and loving it. I think it would make a great book for a book club, if the members are ambitious. Sadly, the book clubs I used to belong to were more of the “if it’s more than 250 pages I don’t want to read it”, so they would never tackle something like this.
Yes! Totally agreed with you about Fable– luckily Bookswim carries the series, so I could afford to read it all the way through. Pillars of the Earth, though? Are you sure about a book set in medieval times that includes the line “Suddenly, Jack had a brainwave”?
I’ve been in a co-ed book group since 2004. I never thought about how the group’s co-ed nature affected our book selection. We have gone through periods of reading classic fiction, Nobel Prize winning fiction, & also read some contemporary fiction. We don’t pay any attention to whether an author is female or male in selecting.