LAVA Discussion Book Candidates for 2025

These book candidates come from mostly from suggestions by LAVA members and from Bookmarks magazine, which summarizes book reviews in major periodicals.  Other sources include lists of award-winning books, favorites of other book clubs, the Harvard Bookstore’s best-seller list, literary blogs, etc.  Several were carried over from the previous voting list.  There are 19 books on this list, but we will choose only 8 of them in this balloting, which unfortunately means that many worthwhile books will be excluded from next year’s reading schedule.  As before, the most popular runners-up will be included in the next list of candidates.  LAVA members are encouraged to research these book candidates in bookstores, libraries, on the web, etc. 

Why do we need to choose only 8 books to cover 12 meetings?  We don’t read a book for January because that month is occupied with choosing the next list of books.  In the fall, we read the book chosen by Writers and Books for their "Rochester Reads" program.  We do not have book discussions in July and September.  That leaves us 8 books to choose from this list.

Bring this list and your thoughts to our annual potluck and business meeting on Friday, January 10, which will be devoted to sharing information and opinions on these books (and sharing good food).

After the January meeting and prior to the voting deadline of Sunday February 9, please "mark your ballots" and return them to Bill.  First review the guidelines for choosing LAVA discussion books, which reflect some of the things we have learned about choosing books over the years.  Then, using a system like the one used in the Olympics, rate each book individually on a scale of 1 to 10, using 10 to indicate books that you think would generate the best Lava discussions. This is also similar to the way classroom papers are usually graded: you grade each one individually based on its own merits, not on how it compares with others.

The system works best if you provide a rating for every book on the list.  Members often rate each book during the January meeting and turn their votes in before they leave.  I will also email a list of the candidate book titles to everyone after the meeting.  If you haven't already voted by then, you can enter your rating for each book into that email and return it to me.

Candidates for Regular Meetings (fiction)

Animal Farm by George Orwell, about 125 pages, depending on the edition.  In this classic satire of the Soviet Union written by a democratic socialist, animals on a farm rebel against the farmer and attempt to create a free and equal society.  They end up instead under the control of a dictatorial pig and are worse off than before.  This novella is number 31 on the Modern Library’s list of the best 20th-Century novels, and it is a selection in the Great Books of the Western World series.  Wikipedia article. Suggested by Ted.  More than 20 copies in the library system.

Banyan Moon by Thao Thai.  327 pages, 2023.  Publisher: “A sweeping, evocative debut novel following three generations of Vietnamese American women reeling from the death of their matriarch, revealing the family’s inherited burdens, buried secrets, and unlikely love stories.”  New York Times: “Readers will find something pleasurably atmospheric about the Banyan House ... Strongest when exploring the unique blend of contempt and fury that can exist between mothers and daughters … Urges readers to consider whether it is best for some truths to remain hidden — whether deceit can ultimately be an act of love.”  Washington Post: “Thai often blends the mundane and the magical, from the book’s title, derived from a Vietnamese fable, to descriptions that liken characters to witches.”  Reviews.  Suggested by Diane.  20 copies in the library system. 

Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, 394 pages, 1980. Bookmarks: “In this tragicomic novel, Ignatius J. Reilly, a junk-food addict and medieval scholar, rebels against the modern age.  In search of justice, he decides to act on his beliefs – whether it entails working in a New Orleans department store or a hotdog stand.”  The Chicago Sun-Times described the protagonist as a "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures."  The Washington Post: “A corker, an epic comedy, a rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book.”  This novel won the Pulitzer Prize.  Review in Kirkus Reviews.  Suggested by Diane.  Held over from last year.  16 copies in the library system.

Hang the Moon by Jeannette Walls, 346 pages, 2023.  According to a review in the Historical Novel Society’s website, “The plot of this Prohibition-era tale borrows heavily from the real-life history of the Tudor court. The Elizabeth I figure is the spunky heroine Sallie Kincaid, who rises to power in a small Virginia town. Her father, the Duke, is a charismatic Godfather-type who controls a number of the town’s businesses, including bootlegging … Once the reader grasps the Tudor parallels, it becomes obvious that Sallie will eventually take over the bootlegging business. The question is: how will she carve her own path in the shadow of her larger-than-life father?”  New York Times: “A rip-roaring, action-packed novel set during prohibition filled with head-spinning plot twists and enough dead bodies, doomed romances, and sudden betrayals to make you wonder if George R.R. Martin had decided to ditch fantasy for Southern Gothic."  LAVA read Walls’ The Glass Castle in 2011.  Reviews.  Many copies in the library system.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, 381 pages, 2023.  The story revolves around a skeleton found at the bottom of a well in 1972 in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in a dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side.  New York Times: “With this story, McBride brilliantly captures a rapidly changing country, as seen through the eyes of the recently arrived and the formerly enslaved … And through this evocation, McBride offers us a thorough reminder: Against seemingly impossible odds, even in the midst of humanity’s most wicked designs, love, community and action can save us.”  The Atlantic referred to, “McBride’s spitfire dialogue and murder-mystery-worthy plot machinations; his characters’ big personalities and bigger storylines; his wisecracking, fast-talking humor; and prose so agile and exuberant that reading him is like being at a jazz jam session … Reading McBride just feels good—we are comforted and entertained, and braced for the hard lessons he also delivers.” This novel won the 2024 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and was listed as one of the best books of the year by several newspapers.  Reviews. Many copies in the library system.

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, 1935, 380 to 420 pages depending on the edition.  Amazon describes it as, “A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.  Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.”  Here is an undated but recent review from the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, a short review by Kirkus Reviews written in 1935, and a 2017 review in the New York Times.  Suggested by Ted.  16 copies in the library system.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, 386 pages, 2022.  Amazon’s description: “Set in 1960s California, this blockbuster debut is the hilarious, idiosyncratic and uplifting story of a female scientist whose career is constantly derailed by the idea that a woman's place is in the home, only to find herself as the reluctant host of America's most beloved TV cooking show.” Times (UK): “Garmus’s earlier career as a copywriter specializing in technology serves her well. Here, scientific theory becomes sparkling, sprightly entertainment. A delight of her rip-roaring, funny book is how it bonds familiar plot and character elements with the unexpectedly unconventional.” Washington Post: “At the center of the novel is Elizabeth Zott, a gifted research chemist, absurdly self-assured and immune to social convention.”  Kirkus Reviews: “A more adorable plea for rationalism and gender equality would be hard to find.”  Suggested by Patricia, a guest at the November meeting.  Reviews.  Held over from last year.  Many copies in the library system.

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips, 276 pages, 2023.  (PB Feb 2025).  Amazon: “Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia … They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.”  Wall Street Journal:  “A story of trauma and restoration in the aftermath of the Civil War … Goodness is a real thing in this novel—a verifiable force—and the question posed is whether we still have the sensitivity to discern it.”  Washington Independent Review of Books:  “There are dozens of passages in Night Watch that deliver moments so vivid, so full of sensory awareness, that they demand both immediate rereading and the folding down of the appropriate page’s corner so they can be revisited.  Read this book for those passages. Read it to learn a history you didn’t know you didn’t know.”  This novel won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for literature.  Reviews.  23 copies in the library system.

North Woods by Daniel Mason, 369 pages, 2023.  Amazon: “A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries … This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope … It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?”  The Guardian: “A brave and original book, which invents its own form.  It is both intimate and epic, playful and serious.  To read it is to travel to the limits of what the novel can do.”  San Francisco Chronicle: “A treatise on forest management (and mismanagement), a hallucinatory dream sequence, and an anthropologist’s life’s work all rolled into one. North Woods fires on all cylinders by engaging all the senses as it transports readers through history.”  This novel was listed as Top Ten book of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post, and it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Reviews.  Many copies in the library system.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, 207 pages, 2023.  This novel imagines a day in the lives of six astronauts from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan as they orbit the earth.  This novel won the 2024 Booker Prize.  Booker Prize judges: “Moving from the claustrophobia of their cabins to the infinitude of space, from their wide-ranging memories to their careful attention to their tasks, from searching metaphysical inquiry to the spectacle of the natural world, Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life.”  Boston Globe says that this book, “contains on almost every page sentences so gorgeous that you want to put down the book in awe … The sense of wonder and delight conveyed by Harvey’s elegant prose and philosophical musings makes this a deeply pleasurable book for serious fiction lovers.”  The New Yorker: “Orbital is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it’s barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare.”  This novel won the Booker Prize.   Reviews.  11 copies in the library system.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, 309 pages, 2023.  Amazon: “In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. They beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake.  As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.”  Boston Globe: “A searching reflection on the relationships between theater and life, romance and realism, Tom Lake is perhaps Patchett’s finest novel yet.”  Los Angeles Review of Books: "Tom Lake is about love in all its many forms. But it is also about death and the ephemeral and how everything goes by so damned fast.” LAVA read Patchett’s The Dutch House in 2021, Truth and Beauty in 2016, State of Wonder in 2014, and Bel Canto in 2010.  Reviews.  Many copies in the library system.

Candidates for Regular Meetings (non-fiction)

1000 years of Joys and Sorrow: A Memoir by Ai Weiwei, 369 pages, 2022.  Ai is a Chinese artist and critic of the Chinese government who lives in exile in Europe.  New York Review of Books: “As I read 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, I felt as if I’d finally come upon the chronicle of modern China for which I’d been waiting since I first began studying this elusive country six decades ago. What makes this memoir so absorbing is that it traces China’s tumultuous recent history through the eyes of its most renowned twentieth-century poet, Ai Qing, and his son, Ai Weiwei, now equally renowned in the global art world.”  San Francisco Chronicle: “…a clear-eyed account of two artists working against convention, buffeted by the whims of absurdist politics.”  Time: “It’s a fascinating sociopolitical history, and a behind-the-scenes look at how one of the world’s most significant living artists became who he is.”  Reviews. Held over from last year.  12 copies in the library system.

Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America by Nicole Eustace, 337 pages, 2021.  White fur traders killed a Seneca hunter in Pennsylvania in 1772 just before a major conference between colonists and Native Americans.  The colonial government was prepared to execute the fur traders if they were found guilty, but Native Americans insisted on a style of justice based on community, forgiveness, and reparations.  This book won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in history.  Chicago Tribune: “Drawing repeated distinctions between rigid, albeit unfairly applied, British law (perpetrator-focused, reprisal-oriented, punishment driven) and the justice of the Haudenosaunee (victim-focused, restitution-oriented, harmony-driven)... Eustace manages to maintain the narrative tension.... formally documenting a more humane, healing vision of what justice could be – and once was – in this country." Reviews.  Held over from last year. 14 copies in the library system.

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler, 239 pages, 2022.  Amazon:  “A queer, mixed race writer working in a largely white, male field, science and conservation journalist Sabrina Imbler has always been drawn to the mystery of life in the sea, and particularly to creatures living in hostile or remote environments. Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such creature.”  Amazon also says it explores, “themes of adaptation, survival, sexuality, and care, and weaving the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family, relationships, and coming of age.”

Washington Post: “I found both solace and hope in Imbler’s ability to portray a world so foreign it’s barely legible to humans, and to bring forth the myriad ways of being that we might draw on to imagine our way forward through the depths.”  Los Angeles Review of Books: “Imbler mixes careful fragments of biography with selected bits of marine science to produce a unique and powerful debut, an alluring series of metaphors to describe what it means to be young and trans … the result is a mixture of excellent science reportage and affecting memoir.”  This book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology. Reviews.  12 copies in the library system.

The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos by Jaime Green, 272 pages, 2023.  (PB March 2025)  Washington Post: “The Possibility of Life is the kind of book that makes you exclaim 'Wow!' out loud while reading on the bus. To some extent, that’s because Green packs the book with fascinating facts ... Even more mind-blowing, though, is Green’s ability to make us rethink everything we thought we knew about life on Earth.”  New Republic: “Green’s most important insight in The Possibility of Life is not... that when we embark on our Quixotic search through the cosmos, we’re really searching for ourselves.  What she most uniquely apprehends is why.”  Columbia Magazine: “Green effortlessly moves from discussing the origins of life and the physics of stellar evolution to the politics of Star Trek and the evolutionary biology of Avatar.”  Reviews.  11 copies in the library system.

Longer Books (suitable for August and October)

We read no more than two books in this category per year, and we reserve these for our August and October discussions, which gives us two months to read them.  This does not imply that our August and October books must come from this section: if all the top choices are shorter books, that is what we read all year.

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris, 458 pages, 2022.  This historical novel imagines a manhunt in the wilds of seventeenth-century New England in search of two Englishmen involved in the execution of King Charles during the English Civil War.  That war had put the parliamentarians temporarily in control of the country, but royalists had regained power and were seeking revenge.  Toronto Globe and MaiI: “You can read Harris as a mystery author or a fine historian with equal pleasure, or you can just read him for the sheer joy of it, as I do. This will definitely be one of my best books of the year."  Times Literary Supplement: “Harris is a master of historical fiction, a compelling author who brings to life the recent and ancient past.”  Wall Street Journal: “Act of Oblivion delivers a galloping adventure, with a novel of ideas craftily packed into its saddlebags.”  Irish Times: “What Harris does here is nothing short of masterful.” Reviews.  16 copies in the library system.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, 423 pages, 2024.  In New Zealand, control over a large farm isolated by a landslide is contested by a guerrilla farming collective whose actions can be both criminal and generous and by an American billionaire who wants to build an end-of-times bunker.  The latter is intrigued by the woman who runs the collective, but it isn’t clear who can be trusted.  Amazon says the book is, “Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit.”  New York Times: “A rollicking eco-thriller that juggles a lot of heady themes with a big plot and a heedless sense of play.”  The Economist: “A rare accomplishment: an intelligent and elegant thriller that is also a damn fine read.”  The Atlantic: “A sincere interrogation of the relationship between morality and the ability to bring about positive change.”  The author won the Booker Prize for a previous book.  Reviews.  23 copies in the library system.

The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn, 556 pages, 2022.  A twelve-year-old orphan creates a theater from the rib cage of a whale’s skeleton on the English coast with the help of other colorful characters, including her brother, the heir to the manor.  The theater helps them cope with their unpleasant stepparents.  Later, during World War II, she and her brother engage in play-acting of a different type when they are sent to occupied France on separate secret missions. Times (London): “Slightly alarmingly, it is Joanna Quinn’s debut—how on earth is she this good?”  Sydney Morning Herald: “Far and away my favorite novel of the year.” Sunday Times (London): “The Whalebone Theatre is one of those books that has you hooting with laughter one minute and feeling absolutely floored the next. …  An absolute treat of a book, to be read and reread.”  Washington Post: “What’s remarkable, especially for a first novel, is Quinn’s deft way of depicting this lost world—whether a subsiding seaside aristocracy or a training school for British agents or a Parisian theater in wartime.” Reviews.  21 copies in the library system.

The Wide, Wide Sea: Captain Cook’s Final Voyage by Hampton Sides, 432 pages, 2024.  The story of Cook’s third exploratory voyage in 1776, which took him from England to South America, Australia, Alaska and Hawaii, where he was killed while trying to take the king hostage.  In 2002, the author won the PEN Award for non-fiction for another book. Washington Post: “Armed with extensive research and terrific writing, Sides re-creates the newness of the experience, the vast differences in and among Indigenous cultures, and natural phenomena that were as terrifying as they were wondrous.”  Wall Street Journal: “Sides has perfected a brisk narrative style.  Befitting his work as a writer and editor for Outside magazine, he has a special talent for rendering the natural world.” The New York Times named this book as one of the ten best of 2024.  Reviews.  Suggested by Ted.  16 copies in the library system.