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CURRENTLY READING

Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver
Average BBC Rating: TBD

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin
Average BBC Rating: TBD

PAST BOOKS

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
Average BBC Rating: TBD

Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was this book club’s first foray into a bonafide classic American novel. The story centers on Francie Nolan, a precocious girl growing up in a Williamsburg tenement, and the characters and experiences around her that paint a vivid picture of the hardships and simple pleasures of childhood in early 20th century New York. Although the Brooklyn we know today is vastly different from that of the novel, the story’s strong moral center and perspicacious look into the struggles of the urban poor reveal what made it such an immense success and a staple of public school reading lists to this day. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn provides a quintessential snapshot of American life that should remind us that some of the basic comforts and mores we take for granted today would seem like lavish luxuries to generations past.

The Devil’s Highway – Luis Alberto Urrea
Average BBC Rating: TBD

Up to this point our book club had not read more than one book by the same author. The Devil’s Highway, Luis Alberto Urrea’s masterpiece of nonfiction storytelling, is a more than worthy book to buck this trend. In 2001, the immigration crisis at the Mexico-U.S. border captured both nations’ attentions when a group of 26 migrants became lost while attempting to pass through a stretch of Arizona desert considered to be one of the most inhospitable places in North America. 14 of the walkers perished from hyperthermia and dehydration, with the survivors only making it thanks to a gargantuan effort of physical and mental perseverance and the expert rescue skills of the U.S. Border Patrol. Urrea’s personal experiences and family history on both sides of the border made him the perfect witness for this tragedy, and his storytelling skills and nuanced perspective are on full display as he recounts the systemic failures, poor decisions, and down right bad luck that sealed the victims’ fate in the desert. Reading this book more than 20 years on from the original events, one cannot help but despair at how the perils and predatory tactics that those trying to cross our country’s southern border fall victim to have evolved as the years have passed, while our increasingly divided political reality makes finding a solution as infeasible as ever.

The Midnight Library – Matt Haig
Average BBC Rating: TBD

Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you’d made different choices? Nora Seed, the protagonist in Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, spends most of her days regretting her past decisions and lamenting the lonely life she finds herself living. After taking a supernatural trip to the Midnight Library, Nora is given the chance to live an infinite number of her alternate lives housed in the books therein. Following a familiar story arc in the tradition of It’s a Wonderful Life, Nora returns from the library with a newfound appreciation for the original life she built for herself. In this sense, The Midnight Library is by no means groundbreaking, but Haig’s acute explorations of a theoretical multiverse and often poignant writing (“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it”) still make his novel an enjoyable read.

Deacon King Kong – James McBride
Average BBC Rating: TBD

In 1969, at a Brooklyn housing project community known as the Cause Houses, Deacon Cuffy Lambkin (aka Sportcoat) shoots Deems Clemens, the former star player of his baseball team turned drug dealer, in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses. At the docks not far away, a mobster known as the Elephant gets a tip from an acquaintance of his late father that sends him searching for a Paleolithic figurine stolen during WWII, which would fetch a fortune on the black market today. These storylines, as well as many, many others, converge in James McBride’s terrific novel Deacon King Kong. With paragraph-length sentences that will make your eyes dry out and enough tangential characters to fill a book of short stories, McBridge weaves a wonderfully intricate narrative that gives the reader a deep perspective on the history and culture of the Cause Houses and the lives of the characters that inhabit it. While most writers would struggle to bring such an ambitious endeavor to a satisfying conclusion, McBride does so with wit and grace. All the while, he paints a stark picture of the hardships endured by black and brown New Yorkers in the 1960s (and by many more still to this day) at the hands of racist and discriminatory policies. Deacon King Kong is a tour-de-force that will leave you both enraged at the injustices of our society and inspired by the human connections that bring us meaning like only a great novel can.

Homeland Elegies – Ayad Akhtar
Average BBC Rating: TBD

In Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar weaves major events of America’s recent past—9/11, the financial crisis, the election of Donald Trump—into a moving tale of a first generation American’s struggle to balance his family legacy with a sense of belonging in his country. The protagonist is the son of Pakistani immigrants whose experiences as a Muslim-American playwright offer countervailing portraits of the American promise, its imperial history, and the bigotry and inequalities that persist throughout the country. The book is classified as  “autofiction,” but although the protagonist shares the author’s name and much of the story mirrors events from his own life, to try to assess what in the novel is true and what is fiction would be to miss the greater point. Homeland Elegies incisively explores how the stories we inherit—and those we invent for ourselves—shape our lives into the intersections of religion, culture, and belief that form the ongoing American experiment.

Nothing to Envy – Barbara Demick
Average BBC Rating: TBD

If the extent of your knowledge of North Korea comes from pop culture caricatures of its leader Kim Jong-un, Barbar Demick’s Nothing to Envy will provide an eye-opening history lesson. Drawn from Demick’s years of experience as the Los Angeles Times’ Seoul bureau chief, Nothing to Envy traces the lives of six North Korean defectors who take varying paths to eventually emigrate to South Korea. Through these first hand accounts, Demick provides a robust history on the famines, rampant corruption, and human rights atrocities that have plagued the country’s history, and the cult of personality that has calcified around the ruling Kim family. By grounding the book in the lived experiences of ordinary North Korean citizens, Demick powerfully illustrates how pervasively groupthink and misinformation have permeated the national consciousness over the reigns of three dictators. Nothing to Envy offers a staggering glimpse behind the scenes of the world’s most mysterious nation.

Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens
Average BBC Rating: 0.664/1.000

Kya Clark is known to the residents of Barkley Cove, a remote North Carolina coastal town on whose outskirts she lives, only as “Marsh Girl.” Abandoned by her family when she is still just a girl, Kya learns to survive by foraging from the estuaries and woods around her house and selling mussels in town. As she ages into an intelligent and beautiful young woman, several of the boys from town take an interest in Kya, which brings her the human contact she yearns for, but ends in heartbreak and a mysterious murder for which Kya is a leading suspect. Delia Owens imbues Where the Crawdads Sing with intricate scientific descriptions of the coastal ecosystem (no doubt drawn from her decades-long career as a wildlife scientist), which lay a cinematic landscape over a relatively straightforward story. However, the novel is more than just a page-turner: Owens’ evocative writing brings the novel to life while exploring racial and class divisions that existed in pre-Civil Rights Movement North Carolina and persist today. What makes this all the more impressive? Where the Crawdads Sing is Owens’ debut novel at the fine age of 72.

Know My Name – Chanel Miller
Average BBC Rating: 0.700/1.000

Many Americans had heard the name Brock Turner, but to most, Chanel Miller was known only as Emily Doe, his anonymous victim in a 2015 sexual assault on Stanford University campus that became a national story. Turner was ultimately found guilty, but his lenient sentence — coupled with Miller’s jarring victim impact statement — became a case study of the prevalence of sexual assault injustice and a landmark moment of the #MeToo movement. Turner’s crime may have linked him and Miller together indelibly, but Know My Name marks Miller’s emergence from the shadow of victimhood as a talented writer and inspiring advocate for victims of sexual assault. Miller recounts the trauma of the event and the ensuing trial, laying bare the mental health challenges that upended her otherwise normal post-college life and shining a light on the inadequacies of the legal and justice systems that affect far too many victims. Know My Name earns a rare universal recommendation: everyone should read this book–it is a challenging but crucial read. We look forward to following where Chanel Miller’s journey takes her next.

The Nickel Boys – Colson Whitehead
Average BBC Rating: 0.709/1.000

Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys is a magnificent work of fiction that reveals the horrific extent to which racism poisoned the social and political systems of the Jim Crow south. Elwood Curtis is a bright and promising black teenager with dreams of joining the civil rights movement when he is wrongfully implicated in an automobile robbery and sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school in 1960’s Florida where students are poorly educated, savegely beaten, and even murdered. Elwood’s idealistic belief in the goodness of people—inspired by his hero Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—is juxtaposed with the realism of his friend Turner, whose response to the cruelty and suffering that envelops Nickel is to accept the wickedness of men and survive by any means amidst it. Only a writer as skilled and insightful as Whitehead could tie the boys’ fates together through a story that brutally exposes the depravity of America’s racist history while inspiring us to look for hope in the bleakest of circumstances. The fact that the Nickel Academy is based on the true story of the Dozier School, which operated for over 100 years and where the graves of at least 55 students have been found, makes the impact of Whitehead’s novel even more powerful. The Nickel Boys is a book that will stay with you, and adds to the impressive canon of one of America’s most important living writers.

Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction
– David Sheff
Average BBC Rating: 0.664/1.000

“It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm’s way, shield him from pain. What good are fathers if not for these things?” This Thomas Lynch quote, which serves as the opening for Beautiful Boy, heartbreakingly encapsulates a tragic theme from David Sheff’s memoir about his son Nic’s decades-long struggle with drug addiction. At once a vivid portrait of how addiction can consume a family and an examination of the systemic failures that helped enable the U.S.’s opioid crisis, Beautiful Boy is written from the perspective of a father who finds himself powerless to prevent his son’s decline to rock bottom. Although the Sheff family’s story ends relatively happily (Nic is 10 years sober and has written a best-selling memoir of his own), the book invokes examples of many parents who lost children to drug addiction, and the author constantly ponders what he could have done differently to prevent his son’s near-demise. The root cause of Nic’s addiction is unidentifiable, which doesn’t stop his father from blaming himself but leaves the reader wondering how our words and actions can unintentionally influence the lives of those around us. When considered from the perspective of a parent, this question invokes the lyric from the John Lennon song which lends Sheff’s book its title: “Before you cross the street, take my hand. Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Average BBC Rating: 0.610/1.000

The opening pages of The Secret History reveal what the book is about — a group of students at a small New England liberal arts college murder one of their friends to cover up an earlier crime they committed — but the narrative complexities and nuanced characters of Donna Tartt’s debut novel make the ensuing story anything but predictable. Told from the perspective of Richard Papen, a transfer student who comes to the college friendless and enrolls in a Classics curriculum in which the only other pupils are a small, insular set of friends, the story follows Richard as he integrates into the group and discovers some disturbing mysteries along the way. Chock full of classical Greek allusions that were over all of our heads, The Secret History was a thought-provoking examination of the nature of friendship and morality cleverly wrapped up in a page-turning detective story.

The Sympathizer – Viet Thanh Nguyen
Average BBC Rating: 0.591/1.000

History books are written by the victor. As we’ve seen time and time again, so are works of fiction, non-fiction, and everything in between. As Americans, we are used to a particular lens through which to view the Vietnam war. A lens that typically casts America as the protagonist, and the Vietnamese as bit players in their own story. The Sympathizer robustly turns this convention on its head. Here is a novel that tells the story of  the life of a double agent caught in the throes of not just the war itself, but the expatriate years in America that follow. A stirring journey through the life of one protagonist that shows us all of the hideous contradictions and hypocrisy, the pain and suffering that war bring about. But the novel delves further, into questions of cultural identity, loyalty, and personhood, seeking to explore how a people caught in a terrible war and its aftermath go on living.

Asymmetry – Lisa Halliday
Average BBC Rating: 0.567/1.000

A towering work of meta-fiction, based on the real life relationship between the author and Philip Roth. This book explores not only gender roles and the power dynamics within relationships, but the place the author in connection with the story he or she tells. The book is told in two asymmetrical halves, part of what gives rise to the title of the novel (as well as the asymmetries that inevitably arise in the power dynamics between two individuals, especially two lovers). The first half is a love story (in a way) told of the relationship between Alice, a young book editor, and Ezra (based on Philip Roth) a famed author. The second half of the book explores the life of a young Iraqi man, stuck for a seemingly interminable time in Heathrow airport, awaiting the specter of rejection upon entering the United Kingdom. One reviewer commented, “Asymmetry poses questions about the limits of imagination and empathy—can we understand each other across lines of race, gender, nationality, and power?”

Educated – Tara Westover
Average BBC Rating: 0.821/1.000

There are some books that open your eyes to another perspective, culture, or way of life. There are others that make profound observations about our society at large. Tara Westover’s Educated is one of those rare books that does both exceedingly well. The daughter of Mormon survivalists, Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a household intentionally isolated from formal education and modern medicine. Against countless odds, she earns a degree from Brigham Young University, a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, and a PhD in intellectual history from Trinity College, Cambridge. The innumerable challenges she faces along the way—while working in her father’s junkyard, at the hands of her abusive brother, and due to her own mental health struggles—threaten to thwart her pursuit of self-determination through education, yet her overcoming of these tribulations gives her the strength to ultimately succeed. Educated introduces Westover as an individual who has something important to say and knows how to say it. This reader is excited to see where her journey takes her next.

The Power – Naomi Alderman
Average BBC Rating: 0.737/1.000

An apocalyptic global struggle, female bands of raping and pillaging terrorists, and women who can shoot electricity out of their fingers. What sounds like the beginning of a good sci-fi story is also the setting for Naomi Alderman’s The Power. In an alternate reality that begins with a society seemingly identical to ours, women around the world suddenly develop “the power,” which makes them physically dominant over men and sets off a chain of events that culminates in every traditional gender role being turned on its head. Although this context, along with Alderman’s well-balanced characters and nuanced narrative structure, does make for an exciting read, The Power is far more than just a page-turner. The central question of the novel—what would happen if the traditional balance of physical power between men and women was flipped?—is both ingeniously simple and trenchant. Alderman doesn’t assert that things would automatically be better if women were the dominant gender, she instead provides readers with a framework through which to consider how our own assumptions about the nature of power and gender roles shape our daily lives.

The House of Broken Angels – Luis Alberto Urrea
Average BBC Rating: 0.617/1.000

The House of Broken Angels is an ambitious novel infused with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor, poignant drama, and thought-provoking familial interactions through author Luis Alberto Urrea’s poetic prose and ebullient imagery. When Big Angel, the de la Cruz family’s current patriarch and novel’s main character, learns of his mother’s death, he — already knowing that he himself has terminal cancer and weeks to live — decides to gather his sprawling Mexican-American family at his San Diego home for a weekend-long funeral/celebration/farewell party. While the story unfolds into an intricate web of plot lines that unveil the various family members’ complex histories on both sides off the border, Urrea manages to keep the novel centered on core themes such as ethnicity, family, and identity. What culminates is an indubitably intentional middle finger raised in the direction of the anti-immigration ethos gaining increasing prominence in America of late.

Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward
Average BBC Rating: 0.564/1.000

Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing invokes the tradition of the itinerant American family novel to paint a harrowing portrait of life in the impoverished Mississippi Delta region. The novel’s protagonist, Jojo, travels with his mother (who is black) and baby sister to pick up his father (who is white) upon his release from Parchman prison (now Mississippi State Penitentiary). Along the way, Jojo displays maturity beyond his years to care for his sister and protect them from the ugliness they encounter in their journey across the state. Infused with supernatural encounters that symbolize how the ghosts of our pasts are always with us, Sing, Unburied, Sing is nonetheless rooted in the vivid human relationships that Ward artfully paints, and reveals the complicated racial dynamics at play in a region of our country where the memories of slavery remain much more alive than many of us would know.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia – Mohsin Hamid
Average BBC Rating: 0.529/1.000

Most self-help books guide the reader through a series of clearly defined steps that lead to success, riches, physical prowess, etc. Most self-help book readers learn that actualizing the promised prosperity is not as easy as the book’s instructions suggest. In his novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamid cleverly uses this framework to convey the grit, dedication, and sheer luck required to accomplish the objective of the book’s title. The novel follows an unnamed protagonist—referred to only as “you”—in his journey from rags to riches in the setting of an undefined emerging South Asian metropolis. The lessons “you” learns along the way are embodiments of the age-old adage: money can’t buy happiness. This theme is nothing new, but thanks to Hamid’s highly original style and trenchant language, the novel is anything but banal: it paints a picture of the limits of capitalistic pursuits that is at once ironic and profound.

Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Average BBC Rating: 0.769/1.000

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah centers on the lives of Ifemelu and Obinze, two lovers whose varying fortunes guide their paths apart from and across one another’s in and out of their native Nigeria. Ifemelu becomes a successful blogger in America, where her incisive social observations find her a loyal following, while Obinze’s efforts to gain citizenship in England end in deportation back to Nigeria. Countless authors have written of the American “melting pot,” yet few have so beautifully rendered the intricacies of the individuals whose experiences and cultures bleed into the country as Adichie does in Americanah. This accomplishment is one of the great strengths of the novel, yet its reach is far broader—Adichie explores the immigrant experience on three continents while examining the role of race, gender, privilege, and politics in today’s global reality. The result is a wonderfully satisfying novel by a supremely talented storyteller, which contains lessons that all of us can draw from to become more empathetic towards our fellow man.

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Average BBC Rating: 0.667/1.000

A worldwide hit that has topped bestseller lists in three continents; The Shadow of the Wind tells the story of a mysterious book that intertwines the lives of several people in post-Spanish Civil War Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the 10-year-old son of a bookstore owner, by chance discovers a rare but enthralling book by the obscure author Julian Carax. Possessing the book takes on an increasingly all-encompassing role in Daniel’s life as he grows up, revealing to him dark secrets of Barcelona’s past and bringing him into contact with shadowy characters such as a murderous police inspector and a disfigured man who wishes to take the book from him. The novel unfolds into a captivating tale of deceit, heroism and forbidden love, which manifests ultimately as an homage by author Carlos Ruiz Zafón to the wonder and power of literature.

The Sellout – Paul Beatty
Average BBC Rating: 0.603/1.000

“One if by Land Cruiser. Two if by C-class Mercedes. The bougies are coming! The bougies are coming!” So exclaims King Cuz, a surprisingly introspective gangbanger, in one of The Sellout’s countless moments of parody of America’s clichés and traditions. Paul Beatty’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel is a satirical stampede through race, politics, and culture in our country. The nameless protagonist—a native of the “Agrarian Ghetto” of Dickens, a forgotten municipality in the outskirts of Los Angeles—aims to put his hometown back on the map (both literally and figuratively) through creative means such as taking a slave and segregating the local middle school. These antics land him before the Supreme Court (where he gets stoned prior to appearing before the justices) in a case that becomes a national phenomenon. While it fluctuates from clever to side-splittingly funny, labeling The Sellout solely as a comedy diminishes its import as a powerful critique of the hypocrisies and inequities that are omnipresent in America.

Freedom – Jonathan Franzen
Average BBC Rating: 0.843/1.000

Jonathan Franzen has a reputation for writing smart, funny, engaging, and immensely popular novels that offer sharp analyses of our culture by examining the lives of everyday people. Freedom, which centers on the saga of the Berglunds, an ordinary family of four from the Minneapolis suburbs, is no exception. Franzen guides us through the tumultuous family history of Walter, Patty, Jessica, and Joey Berglund with deft and perceptive prose that turns a looking glass onto the reader’s own experience. Reading Freedom amidst a culture inundated with tales of exceptional characters presented with extraordinary circumstances begs the question: What is it about Franzen’s writing, with its analysis of quotidian American life, that strikes such a chord with readers? You won’t find the answer in Freedom, but you may find aspects of yourself and those who matter most in your life on its pages. For this reader, that is enough cause to eagerly await Franzen’s next novel.

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace – Jeff Hobbs
Average BBC Rating: 0.619/1.000

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace presents a thorough examination of the life of a man whose tremendous intellectual and social promise foretold a far more auspicious future than one that ends with him killed in a drug-related murder in a Newark basement. Author Jeff Hobbs—also the eponymous subject’s former college roommate—traces Peace’s life from his origin in the projects of Newark, to his matriculation and graduation from Yale and into his post-college life, through meticulous research and interviews with dozens of Peace’s peers and family members. Peace’s life was indeed short and tragic, but surely there is more that we can take from his story. A search for “meaning” in his life leads us to an examination of the American judicial system, the punishing cycle of poverty in inner cities, the imbalanced access to opportunity at our great academic institutions, and the brutality of the drug trade.

A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan
Average BBC Rating: 0.650/1.000

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad offers a bold and innovative exploration of American life and experience during the digital age. Through an ambiguous hybrid of a novel and a collection of short stories, Egan deftly connects her characters together in myriad ways that belie the book’s achronological structure. A Visit from the Goon Squad displays Egan’s virtuosic storytelling abilities by mixing traditional and experimental narrative styles to create a work whose cultural significance will continue to deepen and evolve with our country in the decades to come.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North – Richard Flanagan
Average BBC Rating: 0.713/1.000

Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North provides a brutal, uncompromising glimpse into one of the most often overlooked atrocities of the second World War — Imperial Japan’s construction of the Burma-Siam “Death Railway” through the use of Southeast Asian civilian and Allied POW slave laborers. Flanagan’s personal connection with this experience is deeply embedded within the story — his father helped build the railway as an Australian POW — and his father’s influence informs the horror of the POWs’ experience that Flanagan so vividly paints in the novel. This devastating canvass makes painfully clear the extent of man’s brutality, but the most powerful aspect of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the impartial exploration of the nature of evil, heroism, and love that Flanagan guides the reader through with an elegant yet unflinching narrative voice.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
Average BBC Rating: 0.811/1.000

Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle tells the enigmatic story of Toru Okada, a young Japanese man who quits his job at a law firm amid a state of prolonged apathy. Originally tasked by his wife to find their missing cat, Toru’s life quickly evolves from a vapid suburban existence into a series of surreal experiences that delve into a transcendental Tokyo subculture and explore Japan’s Manchurian offensive during WWII. Saturated with poetically beautiful prose, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle often teeters on the edge of reality and fantasy, yet Murkami keeps the novel grounded in an incisive exploration of human emotion to leave at its core a character study of a man’s lost marriage and unrequited love.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America – Erik Larson
Average BBC Rating: 0.565/1.000

The Devil in the White City is a riveting historical account of the men who revolutionized architecture and enthralled the world through their construction of the grounds for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, intertwined with a tale of the exploits of sociopathic serial killer H. H. Holmes, who preyed on dozens of the young women flocking to the city from rural homes looking for work and excitement. Thoroughly researched, Larson pieces together dozens of memoirs, newspapers, and historical records into a thrilling package of history and mystery. Although none of the great “White City” constructed for the fair remains, Larson’s The Devil in the White City provides an enduring legacy of an event that precipitated the emergence of the idea of American exceptionalism , and serves as a reminder of the dark underbelly that lurks beneath the great cities of our country.

All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr
Average BBC Rating: 0.767/1.000

Anthony Doerr’s stellar WWII novel All the Light We Cannot See is an intricately crafted story that juxtaposes the lives of Marie-Laure, a blind French girl who is forced to flee her sheltered Parisian life, and Werner, a brilliant German orphan who enlists in an elite Nazi military academy to escape a bleak future. The reader follows the characters across war-ravaged Europe, from the Nazi’s failed eastern offensive to the Allied Forces’ invasion of Normandy, while Doerr deftly weaves together Marie-Laure and Werner’s stories into short, reader-friendly chapters without sacrificing the novel’s symbolism or thematic brilliance. Strikingly poignant and remarkably historically accurate, All the Light We Cannot See reminds us of the beauty that is hidden all around us, and the unseen connections that tie us together.

The World According to Garp – John Irving
Average BBC Rating: 0.789/1.000

Why do we sometimes laugh at things that aren’t remotely funny? What makes a woman a feminist or a man a misogynist? How do we live happily in a world encompassed by the inevitability of death? These are just a few of the sociocultural questions explored in John Irving’s unorthodox bildungsroman The World According to Garp. The novel tells the story of T.S. Garp, the bastard son of a world-renowned feminist author whose untraditional childhood transitions into a somewhat-traditional adulthood. Irrepressibly funny and culturally ubiquitous, The World According to Garp is a hallmark of American literature that reminds us to laugh at our imperfections and love each other for our idiosyncrasies.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
Average BBC Rating: 0.643/1.000

The first novel of Stieg Larsson’s hugely successful Millennium series, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a gripping murder mystery set in the ominous locale of the fictional Hedeby Island in northern Sweden. When magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist is commissioned by the patriarch of a wealthy Swedish family to investigate a decades-old family mystery, most do not expect him to actually solve the crime, let alone unearth a saga of conspiracy and corruption that stretches across the globe. Subsequently adapted into two film versions, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a thrilling story of deceit and malevolence that has enraptured millions around the world.

The Boys in the Boat – Daniel James Brown
Average BBC Rating: 0.656/1.000

What’s the hardest you’ve ever worked for something in your life? The collective story of nine working class American boys who shocked the world by winning the Gold Medal in the eight-oared crew competition at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, The Boys in the Boat combines biography and history with thrilling race summaries to produce an immersing read. At once an account of the hardships of destitute Americans during the Great Depression and a depiction of the carefully choreographed presentation of post-Weimar Republic Germany executed by Hitler’s regime, The Boys in the Boat is a testament to the power that sport holds to untie communities.