(Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme brought to you by The Broke and the Bookish. Want to make your own list? Clicking the image will take you to this week’s post. Happy listing!)
One of the best things about books is their power to inspire community. Here’s ten books I think would be great to build a book club around.
1. Percy Jackson and the Olympians (Rick Riordan) – A great set of adventures with some fantastic themes.
2. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver) – Read this in a high school English class, and remember it provoking a lot of good discussion.
3. The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde) – The history (sort of)! The allusions! The humor! What’s not to discuss?
4. Lucy (Laurence Gonzales) – The ethics of genetic experimentation and ape-human hybrids. Where’s the line between ape and human, right and wrong?
5. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Anonymous) – The progenitor of all stories.
6. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) – A story to remind you of your inner child, and how to remember it always.
7. Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (Laura M. Carpenter) – A fascinating look at the concepts of “virginity,” “sex,” and more.
8. Warm Bodies (Isaac Marion) – Yes, it’s a little gory. But it certainly makes you wonder…
9. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (James W. Loewen) – This book covers it all, from Columbus to Helen Keller to September 11, 2001. Turns out writing and publishing a history textbook involves even more politics than we thought.
10. The Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (Geraldine Brooks) – I read this in college for a Psychology class, and loved it. In the book, Brooks “deftly illustrates how Islam’s holiest texts have been misused to justify repression of women, and how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once liberating faith” (Goodreads).
This may be the weirdest and best book club ever.
What books would you suggest to a book club?
Weird, sure, your choices seem to cover a lot of different areas, but all your choices sound interesting. At the very least you opened my eyes to some titles I am going to check out, Lucy sounds the most intriguing, and I thank you for that.
If you want you can check out my list at http://epiphanyrenee.blogspot.com/2012/01/top-ten-books-i-think-would-make-great.html
A lot of areas, yea. But as I’m going back over them again, it’s more about the themes: faith, education, ethics, personal beliefs…
I’m glad you find Lucy intriguing! I stumbled on it by accident, and though it was tough to read, it was really great.
Great choices. I remember reading Lies my Teacher told me. I thought it was incredibly interesting. I read it while taking AP history in high school after getting into a heated debate with the teacher about the civil war. Ha. I also love the Percy Jackson series. =)
I’m so jealous of you, Megan! I would never have had the courage to have a debate, heated or otherwise, with a teacher. I’m too chicken. :p I read Lies My Teacher Told Me in college, and immediately sent my high school US History/Government teacher an email thanking her for being such a great teacher — she taught about a lot of the stuff that Loewen laments most aren’t teaching.
Percy Jackson is such a great series! Adventure, mythology, a little romance…perfect. Thanks for stopping by my blog!
Weird indeed and I haven’t read them all but I can tell from the titles that they’d make great book club discussion books.
It’d have to be a specialty book club; like “Stitch n’ Bitch,” but with books. 🙂
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong sounds so good!! I am going to have to track it down!
Thanks for the awesome list!
It is really good — I stumbled across it by accident several years ago, and am glad I did!
I read The Little Prince now and then when I need a reminder of the important things in life.
Thank you for this great list!
Here is my Top Ten Books I Think Would Make Great Book Club Picks. I hope you will stop by!
The Little Prince is my husband’s favorite book. Another reason he’s the coolest person ever. 🙂 I’ll definitely be hopping over to your blog!
It’s impossible not to engage in conversation when someone brings up The Eyre Affair. What a perfect book club book! Also, any book with the title “Lies My Teacher Told Me” would have to make for great conversation… I’m going to check it out.
Someone else had The Eyre Affair on their list too, and I danced a little. It’s such a marvelous series!
Loewen’s book is great, definitely give it a shot. It sparked some interesting conversations in my set of pals in college.
Lies My Teacher Told Me should be required reading!
Hear hear!
These are all fascinating and fantastic picks. No. 7 and No. 10 areespecially intriguing.
They are indeed! I read Virginity Lost much more recently than The Nine Parts of Desire, so I’m tempted to recommend that one first. It was really, really interesting.
Along those lines, I just heard about The Sex Diaries Project: What We’re Saying about What We’re Doing. Need to check it out more, but it sounds cool too.