Book Club Reading Suggestions

Video Transcript

"My name is Jeanna Rock and we're talking about book club reading suggestions. Our group meets once a month. And so we have a whole month to read a novel. Sometimes over the summer, we may if particularly if we're going to be reading a long novel like Atlas Shrugged, we might not meet one month and have two months to finish our book because it's so long. But generally once a month is good and we have a book a month. Some of the books that we have really enjoyed in our book group are The Joy Luck Club. And we like to read that one in conjunction with Wild Swans. Which is a nonfiction story of a woman who grew up in China whose grandmother is a concubine and her mother was a member of the communist party. It was a fascinating story. And, of course, The Joy Luck Club also takes place in China. It was a good combination to have those two books read in the same time period. Another good combination that we read was Night by Ellie Wiesel and Man's Search for Meaning by Vicktor Frankl. Both of those are great Holocaust stories. They are both short so you can read them in one month. And they're really good because they have different outcomes. One man looses his faith in after the war and Vicktor Frankl, of course, maintains his faith. Other books that we really liked were A Prayer for Owen Meany, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. We also like reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe who is a Nigerian. And we paired that book up with Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. We like to pair those books together because Chinua Achebe's book is about the African experience with the colonization with Africa and Barbara Kingsolver's novel is about the Americans going in with missionaries and teaching during that same time period. So you got two different perspectives which was really interesting."