Many times, many places, many points of view: Announcing the writers book club selections

Dear friends and fellow readers,

The new round of the writers book club started a couple of weeks ago with a discussion of the sublime and moving novel and model of unreliable narration,The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. The group also selected all but one of the remaining books, a list I am thrilled to share. If you’re casting about for your next great read, consider these.

On May 9, we’ll discuss the award-winning and bestselling There There by Tommy Orange. This Pulitzer finalist follows a diverse cast of Native Americans living in contemporary Oakland and culminates in a set piece worthy of Zadie Smith. It’s a wonderfully voicey novel and a superb study in the balancing act of writing many points of view.

On June 13 we pivot to the classic The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, a first-person account of a walk through Suffolk that opens into a wide-ranging meditation on the past, with Sebald’s signature photographs interspersed. As with all of his work, the shadow of WWII looms over the narrator’s musings. Sebald’s work expanded the definition of the novel, and his influence on contemporary writers cannot be overstated.

We’ll take July off, giving the group time to read a slightly longer selection, The Overstory by Richard Powers. This Pulitzer-winner is one of my favorite books of the last decade. Another with a large cast and multiple points of view, it follows a band of tree-saving activists, while asking and answering the biggest questions concerning the future of the world and instilling in pretty much everyone who reads it a new, renewed, or deepened love of trees.

In September we’ll read another groundbreaking novel, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, set at the summer home of a wealthy family on a Scottish seashore, on two days years apart. It follows in the stream-of-consciousness style Woolf first developed in Mrs. Dalloway, but it also plays with time, dilating it to cover two days in exquisite detail, then contracting it to skim over the ten years in between and an entire world war (the first). The novel explores family and loss and art and the melancholy of war, in Woolf’s expert prose.

October’s pick is Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, a slim first-person novel about a woman working at The Hague as a translator after losing her father. Through deceptively understated encounters, the unnamed narrator accretes experiences and observations around women’s agency, personal power, and the nature of authentic intimacy. These ordinary encounters are in tension with the atrocities she hears and must translate for her work. As Dwight Garner put it, “Not a lot is happening, but as they say on airplanes, oxygen is flowing even though the bag may not appear to inflate.”

In November, we’ll discuss Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. Those of us whose usual fare is realist fiction often miss out on the treasure of the imagination-expanding and thought-provoking work of fantastical writers like Murakami. This novel alternates between two very different points of view — “of the young Kafka Tamura, a bookish 15-year-old boy who runs away from his Oedipal curse, and Satoru Nakata, an old, disabled man with the uncanny ability to talk to cats” — exploring metaphysical questions about the nature of the world and our place in it.

So much ground is covered in these books, both in the stories themselves and in the style of the writing: the kaleidoscope created by many points of view versus the introspective container created by one; the existential questions raised by world war and by environmental destruction; issues of power and subjugation based on race, gender, and religion; settings from around the world; and a huge range of prose styles, from realist to allegorical to fabulist, cooly reported to stream-of-consciousness to dreamlike. I’m really looking forward to the discussions.

Feel free to read along on your own. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any or all of these books. If you’d like to join the group, there are still a few spaces.

Happy reading!

Yours in all things literary,

Jennifer