Haruki Murakami’s parallel worlds epic 1Q84 has received 21 mentions to date, putting it in a tie for the best reviewed book in the speculative fiction category. It follows a young woman who begins noticing oddities in her world and a young writer working on a mysterious ghostwriting project. As their worlds unravel, the reader discovers connections between their experiences. The 925 pages of this novel (it was published in three parts in Japan) make it a challenging choice for book groups, but those who persevere will experience a poignant romance, a hearty dose of dystopia, and enough mental gymnastics to keep their minds spinning for some time to come. This is probably the masterwork by one of our most important contemporary writers.

Erin Morgenstern has also received 21 best-of-the-year mentions for The Night Circus, a novel about two young magicians, each surrogates for a powerful behind-the-scenes figure, who compete in a magical battle in the black-and-white tents of Le Cirque des Rêves. Marco and Celia fall in love, which creates complications as the contest proceeds. Written in a highly descriptive style and with many viewpoint characters, this will appeal to readers who like lush, poetic language and beautiful, creative images but may prove frustrating for those who demand linear storytelling.

Stephen King’s latest 11/22/63 is in third place with 14 best-books mentions so far. It’s the story of a high school teacher who finds a portal back to 1958 and becomes involved in a plan to prevent the Kennedy assassination. At 849 pages, this is another tough one for book groups to crack, but it is King, and that means that the pages go quickly, full of romance, Americana, and thrills. The many pop culture references to the early 1960s will make the novel especially fun for groups with readers who remember the time period.

The fourth book in the speculative fiction list is George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, just one mention behind King’s book with 13 votes to date. We’re five books into A Song of Ice and Fire, and this latest is 1016 pages. While the series is a personal favorite, book groups can’t tackle its length easily or jump into this fifth book without having read the first four. Instead, if you want to try it, I recommend that you address the series as a whole. Each reader can focus on the spot where they currently are in the series, or even just sample the HBO series Game of Thrones which is relatively loyal to the first book (though perhaps more focused on its tawdry aspects). You’ll find plenty to talk about in discussing Martin’s style without needing to divulge many key plot points.

More analysis of this and other categories from the ABBC will follow throughout the month of February. Stay tuned as I keep working to compile the votes.

January: In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia  Alvarez–This book has been so popular there are no copies left for the facilitator to read! And it’s not available as an ebook, either. I see this as a good thing. Everyone is eager to read this book and they’ll be talking so much, no one will notice I didn’t get to read the book.

February: City of Thieves by David Benioff–An official selection of the KCPL Adult Winter Reading Program Destination: Anywhere! I’ve discussed this book before and it has great appeal for men and teens. I wrote about it for BGB here.

March: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon–Another suggested title off the Destination: Anywhere! list. It has also been a book group favorite nationwide.

April: Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard–A great nonfiction choice with appeal to readers of all ages from a Kansas City author. I discussed this book in December with the Kansas City Star/KCPL FYI book group.

May: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain–One of the Downtowners’ suggested this title. This group likes to read historical fiction in the warm months. They enjoyed Loving Frank by Nancy Horan and this novel is a good readalike.

June: Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick–I will be encouraging some group members to listen to Philbrick read his own homage to an American classic.

July: A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse–This is the title that made the list because I want to read it.

August: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward–Downtowners will be the last of my book groups to read this year’s National Book Award winner.

September: Just Kids by Patti Smith–Another suggestion from a member of Downtowners. We like memoirs and this one is stellar.

October: The Turn of the Screw by Henry Miller–Just in time for Halloween, we’ll be reading this classic novella and watching the film version for a Read It/Watch It.

November: Tinkers by Paul Harding–Award winners are a favorite of this book group and one of the members campaigned for this indie fave novel.

Book Adventures is their offering for children in first through sixth grades to enhance the kids’ reading experiences and, hopefully, improve reading skills in school.

Each month the book group leader selects a theme and a book and the attending readers will discuss the book, play games, solve word puzzles, and/or make a craft (sometimes an edible one) related to the theme or the book. All the while the kids are talking about what they’re reading and how what they’re doing relates to the reading.

Read more about the program here in a news article from The Press of Atlantic City. Then think about ways to liven up adult book groups with some of the same activities.

Cutting for Stone is a novel about doctors written by a doctor, and as you would expect, it’s loaded with medical details.  This aspect of the book may work as both a plus and a minus — at least that’s what my group thought.  Some readers loved the authentic descriptions of diseases and ailments and their corresponding treatments , while others flinched at these passages and quickly skimmed over them.

Highlights of our discussion?  One participant felt that the author, a male, had trouble creating female characters that exhibited any real complexity.  Another admitted confusion about the complicated delivery of conjoined twins that begins the book: the babies are supposedly connected at their heads, yet the physician performing the delivery sees only one of the heads trying to emerge from the mother and subsequently damages the child — considering where the babies were connected, how could this happen?

Dr. Verghese feels strongly that practicing medicine is a noble profession — one that should be approached with great care and compassion.  This passionate philosophy comes through in his storytelling, despite some melodramatic elements in the novel.  This is one of those books where a son abandoned at birth by his father in Ethiopia still manages to encounter him many years later on the other side of the world, in America; where two brothers become romantically involved with the same woman; and where a man provides a life-saving organ for his brother, whom he once betrayed — etc., etc.

No denying there’s lots to discuss here.  Certainly no one in my group found the book boring.  And oh, I forgot to mention — the mother of the conjoined twins is a greatly revered nun!  How’s that for a real attention-grabber?

Art and Marion Fowler have been married for 29 years. But the emotional corrosion of affairs and unemployment and looming foreclosure has not helped their general outlook. We meet them at the end or at the beginning of something new. Art and Marion have different expectations of this last hurrah. One of them thinks that they are here to save their marriage while the other believes it is beyond being saved. Which of them is right?

O’Nan begins each chapter with an amusing or alternately depressing statistic like “Odds of a couple making love on Valentine’s Day: 1 in 1.4.” So often the odds are stacked against people, no matter how hard they try. You can live an honest life, play by the rules and still find yourself coming up short and staring down the barrell of bankruptcy. O’Nan doesn’t pull any punches with these truths. In this slim novel, O’Nan plumbs the odds so many face with compassion, wit and serious gravity. You wish the best for Art and Marion, whatever their personal desires may be. You want them to somehow figure out how to make it work. Because if they can’t how can anyone?

I, for one, am convinced of the power of O’Nan’s skills as a writer. His praises deserve to be shared widely. I know Neil has vouched for him here, too. The Odds is just more proof that O’Nan is a writer with courage, compassion and creativity on his side. As Ron Charles in The Washington Post said, “O’Nan is an author you learn to trust, no matter what he’s writing about.”  And the subjects and characters he explores are so timely, so in need of understanding and discussion.

Try Stewart O’Nan for your next book discussion. The odds are that your group will agree on one thing–O’Nan is one amazingly talented writer.

But when the book is Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, it is easy. 

The basic plot of this murderless detective novel, the tenth in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, is that Wimsey’s love of five year, Harriet Vane, has been steadfastly putting him off each time he proposes marriage.  When her old college of Shrewsbury at Oxford celebrates a gaudy and a character assassin goes to work, Vane decides to stick around and figure out whodunnit.

Proving to be more about other things then the actual investigation, this richly plotted, thick atmospheric novel takes its sweet time dealing with the state of women’s education, the stresses of academic life and the foolishness caused by romance.  In addition, because it is Sayers, it is also filled with ancient quotes, poetry, references to classical literature and other challenges to the reader that go unforgivingly unexplained. 

But the quotes from Sayers herself make her Dorothy Parkeresqe.  Here are some of my favorites from the book:

“Learning and literature have a way of outliving the civilization that made them.” p. 48

“That was the great possession in which–with all his limitations–the scholar could account himself blessed: the single eye, directed to the object, not dimmed nor distracted by private mote and beams.” p. 66

“Because, though nine-tenths of the mud might be thrown at random, the remaining tenth might quite easily be, as it usuall was, dredged from the bottom of the well of truth, and would stick.” p. 75

“The trouble is,” said the Librarian, “that everyone sneers at restrictions and demands freedom, till something annoying happens, then they demand angrily what has become of discipline.” p. 106

“If you learn how to tackle one subject–any subject–you’ve learnt how to tackle all subjects.” p, 163

“But now you have the age of national self-realization, the age of colonial expansion, the age of barbarian invasions and the age of the decline and fall, all jammed cheek by jowl in time and space, all armed alike with poison-gas and going through the outward motions of an advance civilization, principles have become more dangerous than passions.”  p. 339

However, the payoff quote for those who follow the series becomes:

“Placetne, magistra?”

“Placet.”

Now you have to spend a week reading the book to find out why.  Then you will want to discuss it with someone.

To me, this book strikes a nice balance between the boasting that ruins some memoirs and the transparent false modesty that condemns others to phoniness. Lithgow is proud of his achievement, but also acknowledges his mistakes and the many times when luck and good connections helped him advance. His story is framed by memories of his father, Arthur Lithgow, an actor, director, and theatrical producer who worked for many major repertory companies but never achieved anything like his son’s fame or stability. The relationship between father and son is complicated, sometimes distant but full of mutual admiration, often supportive but also a little competitive.

Lithgow also talks frankly about his failures as a husband during his heyday in 1970s theater, when he let the romance of the stage lead to a series of affairs, culminating with one with Liv Ullman that contributed to the demise of his first marriage. In fact, he confesses his failures in this book–highlighting the lessons that he learned from each–more often than he crows about his successes.

If you’re looking for stories about Lithgow’s best known films and television roles, look elsewhere. The focus here is on his learning curve, his early stage and film roles when he was still picking up his craft, not the years in which he’d already achieved success and stability. There are praises for some of his favorites: Mike Nichols, Meryl Streep, and several less famous early directors, but he refrains from taking cheap shots at others, concealing their identities when he doesn’t have something nice, or at least balanced, to say. What a reader will learn about both the highs and lows of the actor’s life will more than compensate for this shortage of dirt dishing.

If you’ve ever seen Lithgow’s reception from other actors at an awards ceremony or other occasion, you’ll know that he’s held in high esteem by his collaborators. After reading this memoir, I can understand why.

Tied for fourth place with 10 votes is Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility. Its a stylish, shimmery debut novel set in the high society of 1938 Manhattan, where Katey Kontent, an up-and-coming charmer with her aim set on conquering the publishing world meets Tinker Grey, a wealthy, enigmatic, and handsome businessman as the new year begins. The events that follow have drawn comparisons to The Great Gatsby, Edith Wharton, and Truman Capote, exploring the many conflicts between social rules, the success of relationships, and personal happiness. It’s a jazz- and art deco-filled valentine to another time that would make an excellent book group selection.

Also with 10 votes to date is The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. Fans of the recent Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris might enjoy exploring this fictional study of Hadley Richardson Hemingway, Hemingway’s first wife, who endured the Lost Generation years with him in 1920s Paris. The book has plenty of “Hem,” F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce, but the real focus is Hadley, and her struggle to maintain a sense of self while caring for her narcissistic and moody husband. This might be a fun book to pair with Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises or A Moveable Feast. Shake up a few cocktails and your book group will be ready to go.

Number three in historical fiction with 14 votes to date is The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. It’s an 1850s western featuring two brothers sent by the shady Commodore to kill off a pesky prospector. Charlie Sister is a whiskey-swilling, bullying killer. The narrator Eli Sister is a much more gentle man, pudgy and melancholic, who doesn’t know any other way but is beginning to question his life choices. The book captures the rowdy atmosphere of the San Francisco area during the Gold Rush, utilizing ornamental language that contrasts with brute behavior. Pair it with other classics of wry Western humor like True Grit, Little Big Man, or Roughing It.

Alan Hollinghurst has received 15 best-of-the-year nods for The Stranger’s Child. The book takes readers to the end of the Georgian era, to an English country house where poet Cecil Valence visits for a weekend with his Cambridge friend George Sawle and his sister Daphne. He writes a poem that immortalizes Daphne, then goes off to die shortly thereafter in WWI, but whom is the poem really about? The story works forward through almost a century of history, following the fallout from that weekend and the changing ways in which it is viewed as attitudes toward homosexuality, culture, and literary taste shift over time. While the book will draw comparisons to Atonement, Brideshead Revisited, and Possession among others, it’s an original work that should draw further attention to Hollinghurst’s distinguished body of work, all of which deserves book group attention.

The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje has the most best-of-the-year votes of all in historical fiction (and is tied for the third most mentions overall), with 18 votes to date. The title table is the one reserved for the least desirable passengers on the ship that carries the 11-year-old narrator from Ceylon to a new life in London in 1953. Michael and two other boys have adventures as they ramble around the ship, a curious mix of boyish hijinks and witness borne to some very adult events. In particular, they view a prisoner in chains, and the fate of this man continues to haunt Michael as he later ponders those 21 days on ship from an adult perspective. Ondaatje captures the way in which a short, intense period can continue to have impact throughout a life in this page turner that captures a child’s sense of wonder with perfect pitch.

Books like Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Mary Doria Russell’s Doc, and John Sayles’ A Moment in the Sun are among those that follow these frontrunners in the ABBC results in what can only be described as a strong year for historical fiction.

January: When She Woke by Hillary Jordan–the group read Jordan’s debut novel, Mudbound, last year and enjoyed it. They’re looking forward to her sophomore effort.

February: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot–Now that every book group in the states has finished discussing this compelling medical narrative, it’s our turn.

March: Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim–this title is an official selection of the KCPL Adult Winter Reading Program, Destination Anywhere! It will also be one of the Read It/Watch It series at KCPL.

April: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender–every year one book makes the list because it’s one I want to read and I’ll need to “assign” it to myself. This is that title.

May: Elegies for the Brokenhearted by Christie Hodgen–whenever possible I like to include a local author and Christie Hodgen’s quirky elegies was very popular with Kansas City readers.

June: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward–this is the time of year that all three book group start reading the same title.

July: A Pearl in the Storm by Tori Murden McClure–an inspiring adventure story that will rouse the readers in the middle of a sultry Kansas City summer.

August: The Tower, The Zoo, and the Tortoise by Julia Stuart–there’s always one book on the list that I’ve never heard of. This is that book.

September: The Rebellion of Jane Clarke by Sally Gunning–the group likes historical fiction with strong female characters who mix with real historical people and situations.

October: The Wilder Life:  My Adventures in the Lost World of “Little House on the Prairie” by Wendy McClure–Whenever we talk about favorite childhood books, Laura Ingalls Wilder is always mentioned. How fortunate this memoir was published recently.

November: The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon–a compelling story with a lively pace and interesting characters.

December: Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson–the last book of the year is always a stress-reliever. This sweet story about two older residents of a small English village is a good selection for a hectic time of year.

I am probably the only person on this site who has nor either read Cold Mountain or seen the film.  I have no excuses, just stating the facts. 

When I read the reviews for this novel, I knew the appeal factors contained within those raves made this book a perfect read for me.  This is a noir tale–and so much more.  There are many circles in this book and when the circles overlap things happen.  Luce is living in an abandoned lodge hiding from the town folk who remember how her inattentiveness in the past led to their town school being burnt to the ground.  The lodge has just been inherited by a man named Stubblefield who wanders into town unprepared for the effect of seeing his long fawned over beauty contest participant living on his property.  Luce has two children living with her, the mute twins of her dead sister Lily.  Lily’s ex-husband Bud has decided since a jury could not convict him of killing Lily, he might as well hunt down his kids and find his missing money.  All of these individuals come together in a town guarded by a deputy named Lit who had, has and will have a remarkable acquaintance with all the characters.

See those circles within circles?

Perhaps the plot would be enough to draw me in but Charles Frazier is a exquisite writer, able to make the best use of language while maintaining pace and tone in the novel.  The setting is bone chilling and the deep dark forest that provides the Nightwoods is as much a character as any person in the book.  His ability to translate a fairly tradition thriller-like plot into a work of literature makes this work able to be recommended to readers of James Dickey, Daniel Woodrell, Scott Phillips or James Lee Burke. 

Book discussion groups should be endlessly satisfied with this title.  It is so good it has made me vow to move Cold Mountain from the fiction section onto my TBR pile.