10 More Great Book Suggestions for your Book Club

Earlier I wrote the hub 10 Great Book Suggestions for your Book Club. Now I have read some more books with my book club, I am sharing another list of 10, with my opinions about them.

Many times I read a book and want to share it with someone. The benefit of belonging to a book club is that you can share it with others who have read it at the same time.

Sometimes books that we read together become movies, then it's nice to go and see the movie together, as a group, and then discuss the movie.

Here are 10 more books that I have enjoyed in my book club, so if you are looking for books for your book club, please browse this list.

by Diane Setterfield

Not a straightforward plot, but two stories told one on top of the other. Set in England at the start of the twentieth century, and paralleled to a time nearer present day, the book involves strange family mysteries set in a big house. It is an incredibly well written story about book lovers, both writers and sellers, with many quotes from other books. For some of us, there were slightly too many characters to keep up with, but the plot is suspenseful and main plots are interwoven with sub plots.

I listened to this on CD, and it is a really well recorded version. The story is told by two narrators and between them they do the varying English accents, which for me made the book even more enjoyable. If I'd read the book instead of listening to it, I think I would have just read on and on and nothing much would have got done in my life until I'd finished it. As it was, I only listened to it when I was driving and when I was not driving I was thinking about the plot and wondering when I could next go for a drive.

There are a lot of references in the book to Jane Eyre and other classics, there are some similarities in the story to the plot of Jane Eyre. It is very much a book for book lovers and one of the most gripping I have read in a long time.

by Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge is a story told in short stories. Set in Maine, every other chapter has Olive in it and the alternating chapters are about the people in the town where she lives. It took a while for me to decide that Olive wasn't really a nice person. She's a retired math teacher and involved in the lives of the people around her. Olive Kitteridge is an ordinary story about an ordinary person, spanning about 30 years.

by Philippa Gregory

Of the wives of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn gets the most attention, but this story is of Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon. She was previously married to his older brother, Arthur, who died a few months after their marriage. Then she married Prince Henry, later Henry VIII, a marriage which made Katherine (or Catalina as she is in the book) Queen of England.

This is historical fiction and all the historical facts point to the fact that Katherine's and Arthur's marriage was never consummated, I found that fact alone tended to put me off the reading of the book.

I did find all the references to her love for Arthur a little tedious. However, the book did improve in the second half.

by Johanna Moran

The plot of this book was of an English family who, during the 19th Century, went to New Zealand. The mother and children were captured by Maori's and when they were never found were declared dead. Henry Oades decided to move on with his life and, feeling he couldn't return to England, moved to California. It takes him a while, but 6 years after his wife went missing, he married again.

Soon after, Henry's first wife arrives in California and produces a moral and legal problem. Henry is loving and accepts both wives, but when I realized bigamy in California in the 19th Century was a hanging offense, and that this was based on a true story, the plot suddenly became more interesting.

by Abraham Verghese

The setting for this book was unusual, an Indian doctor at a mission in Ethiopia. Most of the main characters were doctors or training to be doctors. The author is a doctor of Indian descent who was born in Ethiopia, so the book is somewhat biographical.

There are a number of operations that are described in detail, including the first liver transplant from a live donor, which really happened in 1989. Also mentioned in the book are fistula operations for young brides who leak urine, and also female circumcision.

The story starts with a pregnant nun who dies in childbirth giving birth to twins and a father who abandons them. The description of that day's events were so riveting, I was hooked into reading the rest of the book. It is rare that doctors write fiction, and for that reason, I enjoyed the book.

by Jason Wright

The Wednesday Letters starts with the mom and dad dying on that same night. The grown up children congregate and discover their dad had written a letter to their mom every Wednesday. While going through their things, the siblings read the letters and discover family secrets about past and present.

by Lisa Genova

Alice is a successful psychology professor at Harvard when she discovers she has early onset Alzheimer's. The book takes us through the diagnosis and the reactions and help of her family members. The author describes very closely what it is like to have Alzheimer's and I imagine if someone you know was recently diagnosed, you would want to read this book.

Not knowing anyone with Alzheimer's, and seeing the book as fiction, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. By the end of the book I felt Alice was a real person and that I was part of her family.

Before I read the book I was a little nervous as I expected the book to have a certain bad ending. Nevertheless, I'm enriched for having read it.

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Not your typical book club book, but set in a world where clones are made purely to harvest body parts. The book is set in England through the 1970s and 1980s. It's the sort of book I join a book club for, one I wouldn't have read otherwise (as it's not my type of book), but one which I enjoyed immensely. It led to a great discussion on life and morals.

A movie has been released, which was incredibly true to the book. In fact, everything in the movie was exactly as I imagined it would be from having read the book.

by Laurie Fabiano

Based on true family history, Elizabeth Street is the story of Italian immigrants at the start of the 20th Century. From the grandparents, born in Italy, to life in New York, marriage, children, business and fitting into the local community.

Once started, I found it difficult to put down and it was definitely a favorite in my book club.

by Rebecca Skloot

What an amazing story! Cells from Henrietta Lacks were preserved and led to major scientific discoveries, but she and her heirs had no knowledge of what had happened. The author did an amazing amount of research in writing this book. She worked with the Lacks family for 10 years in order to research the book correctly, and quite frankly, it shows. The story is true, yet it reads like fiction. In my opinion a book like this should be required reading for people to be properly educated.

If you know of any great books to read in a book club setting, please let me know in the comments section below.