In partnership with The Neverending Bookshop, we are pleased to share with you our book club, In Someone Else’s Shoes! Through a variety of literary styles, we will read a book each month which is written by an author from a culture and point of view that are underrepresented in our literary landscape in the US. These points of view will be explored in a variety of genres and writing styles. The books will be voted on by poll on the Facebook group and presented at each meeting.
The book club meets at The Neverending Bookshop on the 3rd Sunday of each month at 2 PM. We also record the meetings over Facebook Live in our group, so you can join us from all over the world! You can find the current book description in the calendar here and on our Facebook group. Everyone is welcome, however the subject matter of some of the books is more appropriate for older teens and adults.
Our current selection for the meeting on SUNDAY June 16th at 2 PM is Skippy Dies by Paul Murray.
“Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel ‘Skippy’ Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the frisbee-playing siren from the girls’ school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest – including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and official school psychopath. . .
A tragic comedy of epic sweep and dimension, Skippy Dies scours the corners of the human heart and wrings every drop of pathos, humour and hopelessness out of life, love, Robert Graves, mermaids, M-theory, and everything in between.”
Here are some of the books we have read and discussed in previous months:
- Some Dream for Fools by Faiza Guene (Algeria/France)
- The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa (Japan)
- I Want to Get Married!: One Wannabe Bride’s Misadventures with Handsome Houdinis, Technicolor Grooms, Morality Police, and Other Mr. Not Quite Rights by Ghada Abdel Aal (Egypt)
- Silver Bullets by Élmer Mendoza (Mexico)
- Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal (UK/India)
- Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Korea/Japan)
- Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria/USA/UK)
- In the Country by Mia Alvar (The Philippines)
- The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (Chile)
- Celia’s Song by Lee Maracle (Canada – First Nations)
- Waiting by Ha Jin (China)
- Deathless by Catherynne M Valente (Russia)
- Eucalyptus by Murray Bail (Australia)
- City of Saints and Thieves by Natalie C. Anderson (Kenya)
- The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak (Turkey)
- Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn (Japan)
- The Seamstress by Frances de Pontes Peebles (Brazil)
- The Devourers by Indra Das (India)
- The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez (USA)
- Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Nigeria)
- No Knives in the Kitchens of This City by Khaled Khalifa (Syria)
- A Bitter Inheritance by Alka Kurian (UK/India)
- The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Vietnam)
- The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed (Somalia)
- The Country Under My Skin by Giaconda Belli (Nicaragua)
- The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (India)
