Google Hangout Book Club

Photo from our book club meeting. A book, an adult beverage, and a laptop computer sit on a table.

Last night my Family Book Club met over Google Hangouts and it was just what my soul needed. After weeks of social distancing and after canceling our meeting, which was supposed to be last week, it was so great to see everyone and connect and talk about books and to just do something NORMAL. If you've been missing your book club, I recommend giving it a try!

Google Hangouts was pretty easy to manage, even for those who had not ever done one before. It did require some installation of apps and some troubleshooting for some of our members to get cameras all set up, so give yourself a little extra time when trying it for the first time. Go to hangouts.google.com and read this tutorial on starting a group conversation to get started. With Gmail, you can invite up to 10 people to a video call. To have a call with more than 10, it looks like you need to have a Google Business or Google Education account. 

You'll be able to see everyone at the same time with the person speaking being the main video and everyone else in thumbnails at the bottom of the screen. You can also click on one of the thumbnails to keep that video as your main video. That came in really handy when one of our club members gave us a tour of her new house! 

Now that we've got one Google Hangout under our belts, we're prepared for next month's book club meeting, should we need to continue meeting digitally. I realized that since I don't currently have access to my library and our digital copy of our next title has a hold list, I probably need to purchase the book. Support your independent bookstores, now more than ever!

While Amazon is taking weeks to ship stuff, your local stores are most likely going to be quicker and they need your support. I ordered our next book from my local indie, Carmichael's Bookstore, which is offering free shipping on orders over $50, plus free local delivery and free curbside pickup. 

Since I wanted it shipped, of course I had to add some storytime books to push it over the $50 limit. I've been FaceTiming with my 3-year-old niece for bedtime stories every night this week and I'm going to run out of picture books at some point, since I don't have access to my library. Now I'll be set up for another few days at least! 

It was so nice to do something that felt normal, to have my adult beverage in the comfort of my kitchen and to know that I'm being safe but I'm also getting to visit my friends. I hope you get to do something that feels normal (even if it's happening in an atypical way) this week. 

What My Book Club Read This Year

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2020's right around the corner and I got to thinking back on the books my book club has read in 2019. We're a multigenerational group, originally started in 2015 with my mom, my sister-in-law and her mom. We've now expanded to a group of eight women and we try to meet monthly, but sometimes skip a month here or there if things get busy. We tend to like books with strong female characters and tend to pick new releases because several of us are big readers and we try to pick books no one has read before. It's been a really fun group of ladies to get together with and we've read some really great books over the years.

If you're looking for even more suggestions of titles to try with your book club, check out last year's post with some of our top book club reads of 2018.

Here's what we read in 2019:

Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty (Flatiron Books, 2018). This was our January book and it made a great start to the year by sparking some great discussion. Liane Moriarty is an author that we generally enjoy, so this may have been a sure bet, but I actually enjoyed it more than I thought I would. When nine strangers meet at a retreat in the Australian desert, none of them could predict what happens. The quirky characters and mix of poignant and humorous tone made this one a winner for me, even if the plot does go a little off the rails.

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan (Little, Brown, 2018). This beautiful, surreal book explores a teenage girl's grief after her mother's suicide. Reeling from her mother's death. Leigh is visited by a large red bird she's convinced is her mother. The bird leaves her a box of things and instructions to visit her mother’s birth home Taiwan. As Leigh searches for the bird - her mother - in Taiwan, she gets to know the grandparents she never knew and learns things she never knew about her mom. She also ruminates on what happened with her best friend Axel, the boy she’s in unrequited love with, in the months leading up to her mom’s death. Throughout the book, surreal images and colors leap off the page. All the members of our book club agreed that the artistry and imagery in the writing was fantastic, although this was a little too heavy for some.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (Putnam, 2018). Yes, our book club, like every other book club, read this book this year. Our holds lists are a mile long for this book at my library! And I can tell you that it's a great read. Seven-year-old Kya is abandoned by her entire family except for her abusive dad in their shack in a North Carolina swamp. The story switches between two timelines - Kya's childhood and young adulthood in the 1950s and 60s as she copes with her abandonment and learns how to survive in the marsh - and 1969 when popular former quarterback Chase Andrews has died in the marsh and foul play is suspected. You know that Kya and Chase are connected and you find out how as the story slowly unrolls. Kya is an amazing character and I loved the nature writing in this book.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See (Scribner, 2017). This one was probably my personal favorite of the year. Li-yan and her family live in a remote Akha village in China, growing and selling tea to eke out a living. It's a harsh life and when Li-yan has a baby out of wedlock, she starts to explore life outside her village, eventually leaving for the city to get an education and build a business empire of her own. There are a lot of coincidences that stretched my disbelief at times, but I was enjoying the story so much that it didn't bother me. We talked a lot about the role of women in the Akha society (and society in general) when discussing this book. 

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper, 2018). Willa has arrived at middle age with a pile of problems to deal with. She and her husband have both recently lost their jobs, her adult son has recently lost his wife just after his baby girl was born, and they've inherited a ramshackle house that is falling down around their heads. Willa's last hope is to get the house put on the historic registry in hopes that there will be some money for preserving it, so she starts to research. Alternating chapters tell the story of science teacher Thatcher Greenwood who lived in the house in its heyday. Although most of us are fans of Barbara Kingsolver, I'm not along in thinking this one was a bit slow, although some really enjoyed it. 

The Library Book by Susan Orlean (Simon & Schuster, 2018). This one was my pick and unfortunately it was a dud for our group (although I know lots of other groups and readers who have LOVED this book. It was even the LibraryReads TOP pick of 2019!). This true crime book investigates the 1986 burning of the Los Angeles Public Library, presenting a history of the library along with the search for a suspect in this devastating crime. I personally did find the history of the library interesting (of course I did!), but I think most in the group were disappointed by the anticlimactic true crime angle. 

Whisper Network by Chandler Baker (Flatiron, 2019). This twisty turny #MeToo mystery is set in a high-powered legal department in Dallas where an anonymous list of "bad men" has started circulating among professional women. Sloane, Artie, Grace, and Rosalita have worked at Truviv, Inc. for years and they have each kept secrets. When the sudden death of Truviv's CEO means that their boss Ames will likely take over, whispers start spreading... this time the women have decided enough is enough. Our group often likes novels with a feminist viewpoint and this book encouraged lots of discussion about our experiences with sexism that we've experienced. 

The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware (Gallery Press, 2019). This was our October read and it was a perfect spooky mystery for that month. When Rowan Caine starts a new nannying job - a job she came across when she wasn't even looking for anything - it seems too good to be true. The salary is amazing and she gets to live in a high tech mansion in the Scottish Highlands. But she quickly changes her tune when her new employers leave her alone with the kids to jaunt off to an out of town job and truly spooky stuff starts happening in the house. This is a thriller with lots of twists and turns and we had a lot of fun talking about the twists we saw coming and those that were total surprises.

Defending Jacob by William Landay (Delacorte, 2012). Andy Barber is an experienced attorney, but this latest case has thrown him for a loop. A kid at his son's high school has been murdered in the park and Andy's son is a suspect in the case. This book really gets you thinking about how well you actually know the people in your life. As many of our book club members are parents, I think this book touched some nerves and we talking a lot about kids and parenting and whether we thought Andy was a good father. 

Our last meeting of the year was in November, so this is our complete list of 2019 books, but we've got the next two picked out. I haven't read them yet, but I'm looking forward to both of these:

Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton (Penguin, 2018) 

The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes (Pamela Dorman Books, 2019)

Here's to another year of great reading in 2020!

Are you in a book club? What books has your group enjoyed? And if you've read any of these, what did you think? 

An Awesome App for Your Book Club

Have you heard of the Book Club App by Book Movement? My book club started using it and it has been so super helpful and fun to use! 

(This is where I tell you that this is not a sponsored post - I just think it's a really neat app!)

Book Club is a free app available for Apple devices (doesn't look like it's available for Android). There are links within the app to purchase books via Apple iBooks or Amazon, but you can use the app for free. I learned about it on Book Riot and their post lists several other apps that might be great for using with book clubs. We decided to try Book Club and it's really worked for us. 

Here are the things I love about it: 

Schedule your meetings, RSVP, and remind everyone all in the app. No longer are we all emailing each other a few days before asking who's hosting book club or trying desperately to remember to send a reminder email out. When we schedule our next meeting, I put it in the app and everyone has access to the information (date, time, who's hosting) right on their phones. Bonus: Book Movement sends automatic reminders to everyone, so we no longer have to think about that. 

Discover books and keep track of potential books your book club might like to read. This was always a struggle for us: choosing our next book. We'd have lists and lists of suggestions one month and then the next month we couldn't remember what was on our lists. The app allows you to save possible future books AND to vote anonymously, making it easy to give everyone a vote without putting anyone on the spot. 

The app automatically keeps track of your past books and meeting dates. I input the older information from before we started using the app, but now as each date passes the books get recorded in our Past Books section. I get a lot of satisfaction of keeping track of what we've read and I love that this keeps the meeting dates, too. No need for a "book club historian" if you have this app.

We've been using this with my personal book club, but I think it has potential for library book clubs, too, particularly if you have a group of regulars that come very frequently. It could be useful even just as a tool for letting everyone know about upcoming meetings and upcoming books. Once you create a book club, you can email members or share a code with them so that they can connect to your particular book club. 

Do you use anything to keep your book club organized? What works for you? 

What My Book Club's Been Loving

Hey, I'm an Amazon affiliate, which means that if you purchase items after clicking the links on my site I get a small commission. 

Several years ago, my sister-in-law proposed starting a family book club. I posted about it way back in 2015 when we first started and we've been going strong, meeting nearly every month since then. Our book club has grown beyond strictly "family", but I consider them all part of my family, so we've kept the name.

We typically meet once a month and rotate who is hosting. Our meetings are typically on a weeknight evening and the host provides dinner and wine. Two of our ladies have young kids and they are always welcomed with joy - although we DO talk about books at book club, it's also a great time for us to get together and check in and snuggle babies and tickle toddlers.

As we've continued to meet, I think we've found out what types of books different book club members enjoy and what we all tend to gravitate towards. Our favorite books are stories of women and we often have conversations about feminism and female life. Some members prefer lighter books, some prefer heavier books, and I think we end up with a pretty good mix. Here are some of the books that have provoked the best discussions.

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover (Random House, 2018). This was our most recent read and we found it absolutely riveting. It's the true story of a young Idaho woman raised by off-the-grid end-of-days preppers with no schooling (not even homeschooling, really). Westover eventually realized that the only ticket out of her abusive family life was to go to college, so she taught herself to take the ACT, got into BYU and eventually earned a PhD from Cambridge. Our book club was amazed by her story and we talked for a long time about the difficulties she faced, the hardship of having no power as a woman in her family's culture, how schools might or might not "brainwash" students, what it would be like to life without modern medicine or hospitals, and more. 

Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain (St. Martin's Press, 2013). This was my first Diane Chamberlain, but it won't be my last. This is a historical fiction story based on real events. In the 1960s poor women were sometimes sterilized, sometimes without their consent, if they had real or perceived disabilities. Ostensibly for their own good, but also to keep the state's welfare bills down. This story follows a newbie social worker and a poor pregnant teen as they deal with the ramifications of this program. This one was a particularly good match for our book club because among us we have a social worker, a lawyer, a doctor, and two pharmacists. We all had lots of opinions to share about this little bit of American history. 

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (Penguin, 2017). This story, set in the planned community of Shaker Heights, OH, explores the concept of belonging (and not belonging) in many different ways. A custody battle over a Chinese-American infant threatens to split the town apart and we had a deep conversation about culture and nurturing children. Further reading for book clubs who discussed this book is the upcoming memoir All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung, adopted by a white couple in infancy, she decides to search for her Korean-American birth parents when she gets pregnant with her first child. 

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (Viking, 2017). Eleanor is, of course, NOT completely fine, but her truth is slowly revealed to the reader as we navigate her quest to meet and marry the man with whom she's fallen in love-at-first-sight. We talked a lot about the different characters in this book and how they related to Eleanor, as well as the reveals throughout the book and how they made us feel. This is a must for lovers of character-driven stories. 

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult (Ballantine, 2016). When African-American labor and delivery nurse Ruth Jefferson is requested to be reassigned by the white supremacist parents currently giving birth, things get complicated when the baby goes into distress and Ruth is the only one in the room. The baby dies and Ruth is accused of murder, starting a court case that will change her life and the lives of many others. This was a book that encouraged some deep discussion about race and privilege in our multigenerational, varying degrees of wokeness book club. 

What books have started the best discussions in your book clubs or among your friends or family?

Celebrity Book Clubs

Okay, I love me a celebrity book club... as long as their taste is similar to mine. When I was young and stubborn and first working in a bookstore, I eschewed Oprah's Book Club as a herd mentality way of choosing books. Of course, what Oprah's Book Club really did was spotlight literature and get generations of viewers interested in books, which I now recognize is totally awesome.

Lately, Oprah is joined by more and more celebrities using their power to spotlight their favorite reads. Of course, librarians know about Sarah Jessica Parker's ALA Book Club: SLJ Picks. Reese Witherspoon also shares her picks on Instagram in her Hello Sunshine book club.  Emma Watson has a feminist book club on Good Reads. And I'm sure there are more and more to come.

I'm particularly excited that a lot of the recent choices have been diverse titles by #ownvoices authors! I know they don't need any more publicity, but here are a few I have been digging recently:

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal (2017). William Morrow. 304 pages. Audiobook narrated by Meera Syal. Review copy provided by my local library.

Reese Witherspoon's latest book club choice is a story about a British-Punjabi new adult who, floundering about her career choices, starts teaching a writing class at a local Sikh temple. From the publisher copy: "Because of a miscommunication, the proper Sikh widows who show up are expecting to learn basic English literacy, not the art of short-story writing. When one of the widows finds a book of sexy stories in English and shares it with the class, Nikki realizes that beneath their white dupattas, her students have a wealth of fantasies and memories. Eager to liberate these modest women, she teaches them how to express their untold stories, unleashing creativity of the most unexpected—and exciting—kind."

I just started the audiobook of this title because I needed an audiobook that would REALLY COMPEL me to keep listening (otherwise I do no cleaning and get no exercise, so...). I think this one is going to fit the bill. I'm one chapter in and loving it so far. 

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (2018). Algonquin Books. 320 pages. Review copy purchased with my Book of the Month subscription - want to try it? Use my referral link here to get a free book!

I am in the middle of this one right now and pretty much all I want to do is stay home and read it. Oprah's latest Book Club choice is about an African American couple and what happens to their relationship when, after a year and a half of marriage, husband Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. It's totally character-based, which is my jam, and I'm just fascinated with where the story's going. It may have extra appeal for me as a wife coming up on our second wedding anniversary: what would I do if this happened? How would we handle it? 

Funny story: this book was available to preorder as "Oprah's Book Club Choice" before the title of Oprah's choice was announced. Of course I ordered multiple copies, knowing that a new Oprah pick would be super popular. I came in to the office one day to find four copies of this book on the processing cart and I said, "Oh, no, what did I do now? Why did I order four copies of this book?" only to find out that - of course - it was Oprah's pick. I was so happy because it had already been looking forward to this book. And I am enjoying it so, so much. 

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (2017). Penguin. Review copy purchased from Book of the Month. 

This one was a Reese Witherspoon pick from back in the fall and it's recently been announced that it'll be made into a series on Hulu. My family book club read this one last fall and had some great discussions around it; you can bet one of the book club ladies sent me the news of the new TV series as soon as she heard. 

Little Fires Everywhere tells the story of two families, intertwined by happenstance, who change each other's lives in dramatic ways. It also tells the story of a young Chinese mother who abandoned her baby, only to change her mind and fight against a white adoptive couple for custody of the child and how the fight divides their community. 

What do you think about celebrity book clubs? Any favorites you've discovered through celeb recommendations?

Family Book Club

This year, the ladies of my family are doing something we've been meaning to do for a long time: we've started a book club. The idea came about last year, but of course I couldn't commit to a book club during my Newbery year. Once my Newbery work was done, we decided to get started and it's been a lot of fun!

It's fun to have an excuse to put a social event on the calendar and make sure we get together. We're all book lovers and we're taking turns hosting the book club at our homes, so it's been fun to get together just to talk about books.

We typically read adult books (occasionally a YA book, too), which I love because it gives me motivation to pick up books that are not for work. Yes, even children's librarians deserve some time to read something that's not directly related to work (YES, we do). And since we try to share suggestions for our next book at our meetings, it encourages me to stay on top of what's coming out that I would be interested to read.

Since we're a new book club, we're still kind of feeling out the types of books that we all enjoy, so we've read quite an eclectic selection so far. Here's what we have all read and discussed:

• Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
• The Crossover by Kwame Alexander (of course!)
• The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan
• Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
• A White Wind Blew by Markert

And our next read coming up is The Book of Lost Things by John Connelly. 

So far, our biggest "problem" has been that it's hard to decide what to read next. We don't really like the idea of taking turns choosing because we're all wary of choosing a book that no one likes, so we have each been bringing suggestions. But then all the suggestions sound good or no one wants to choose. This last time, we wrote all the suggestions on slips of paper and drew one out of a hat!

Are you in a book club? What have been some of your group's favorite books to discuss?