Literary Listicle: The Bookslingers

My Book Club's First 30 Reads (Of the 150 to Date)

A subset of the Bookslingers in the photograph that inspired our name. Circa 2013. That’s me, second from the right. (Credit to Anne Clark Photographs.)

“How many of you were offended by this book?” Sandy began our recent Zoom meeting to discuss her book club pick, The Wisdom Pattern by Richard Rohr. Most of us raised our hands. A lively and thoughtful discussion followed.

That’s how we Bookslingers roll.

Karen and Susan formed the book club sometime in 2011. The two criteria for being eligible to join: You had to be female and liberal. Susan, Peggy, Diana, and I have been in from the beginning. Over the years, women came on, some on and off, some just off, some moved away, and Sharon died. (See Debbie Does Digress, Writers’ Unpublished Treasures.) Our current lineup, in addition to the original four mentioned above, includes Kathy, Connie and Sandy.

Perhaps our most interesting and beloved on-and-off member was Casey. That’s her, first on the left in the photo above. She was Karen’s student at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). From China. When she first joined our group, she had a pocket translator that her fingers flew across during meetings. Translating our Southern expressions and universal curse words into Chinese was a challenge. She became quite fluent over her few years with us.

Casey is the reason we have a professional photo. She requested it as our graduation gift to her.

When we began, our routine involved meeting at a member’s house each month. For a meal and book discussion. The host provided an entrée, and the rest of us brought sides. Except for the person who chose the book that month. She brought the dessert. That routine evolved over the years to meeting just at Susan’s, then Kathy’s. We decided each month as to who brought what.

First Kathy moved away. Then Sharon. COVID moved in. Enter Zoom. We’ve been meeting online since then. From our own homes. With an occasional gathering at Bar Louie’s in Murfreesboro.

To date, we have read 150 books. That’s not quite 12 books per year. We skipped a month here and there. Usually Decembers. We weren’t diligent about keeping records in the beginning, so the list below may be incomplete/out of order. Over the years, we improved the process (Google doc), and future Bookslingers Literary Listicle posts will be spot on.

We take turns, in a specific order, choosing the month’s book. Our choices are eclectic. Deep to fanciful. Dark to life affirming. Difficult to easy, breezy. Fiction and nonfiction. I’ve read each one, whether I liked it or not. For all of us, it’s mutual respect and commitment to the process. That’s the magic. I learn something from every book, and I’m always glad I read it. Yes, Connie, even Hillbilly Elegy.

I don’t pretend to remember details about each book listed here as our first 30 reads. But I’ll give you a hint of what they’re about. And for the many that have really stuck with me, I’ll share my thoughts. Briefly.

• The Help by Kathryn Stockett
  Fiction. This was my pick. For dessert I brought fudge pie.

• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
  Nonfiction. It’s incarceration.

• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
  Fiction. Fascinating and unique. With a small change to the story, the main character, who died, lives instead. And the story goes in a totally different direction. Repeatedly.

• Lying by Sam Harris
  Nonfiction. White lies are just as damaging as the big ones.

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
  Nonfiction. Lacks’s cancer cells, taken and grown without her permission, changed medicine forever. But her family never knew until Skloot delved into the truth.

• Waiting for Soon by Debbie Mac
  Fiction. I wrote this novel and published it as a Kindle ebook. The inspiration was a real event when I worked as a newspaper reporter and received a death threat. A greeting card in the mail. With Deepest Sympathy for the Loss of Your Child. Signed: SOON. I took that and spun it into a fictional tale. Unlike reality, it was cathartic.

• An Invisible Thread by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski
  Nonfiction. Subtitle: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny. Don’t remember specifics, but sounds interesting, huh?

• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
  Nonfiction. Contains a revelation regarding crime in our country. One that I had never considered. You’ll have to read it to learn what it is.

• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
  Nonfiction. Deep. Not easy reading. Frankl survived the Holocaust by searching for the positive and personal meaning in everything he endured. He later used this insight to establish his own method of psychotherapy.

• How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
  Nonfiction, memoir. Hilarious and relatable journey through female-mess.

• Che by Jon Lee Anderson
  Nonfiction. A biography of the Latin American revolutionary, Che Guevara.

• The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
  Fiction. Everyone loved this book except me. It is a woman-affirming novel. I’ll certainly give it that. But Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love left a bad taste in my mouth, and I’ve never warmed to her work.

• Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
  Fiction. The author alone is reason to read this. I have struggled reading some of her books but never regretted the effort.

• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
  Nonfiction. The harrowing story of a left-behind Hurricane Katrina survivor.

• Facing the Music by Larry Brown
  Fiction. A book of short stories – brave, brutal, brilliant. Brown died too soon. In his 50s. I treasure everything he wrote.

• Saints at the River by Ron Rash
  Fiction. May be my absolutely favorite writer. And this is my favorite of his.

• The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
  Fiction. A young girl. Her personal slave. Each oppressed in very different ways. Or maybe not so different? How do they learn to fly?

• Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
  Fiction. A friend once told me that Huckleberry Finn was his favorite book until he read this one.

• The Illuminati by Adam Weishaupt
  Nonfiction. Basically, the history of the Illuminati.

• Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
  Fiction. The only Cormac McCarthy book I’ve read. I’m glad it was this one.

• Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden
  Nonfiction. The North Korean who got away. My confusion: North Korea does not have enough electricity to operate 24 hours a day. Even Kim Jong Un is plunged into darkness for a few hours each day. But the prison camps are wrapped in electric fences that are live 24/7? And they experience only occasional, isolated outages. Go figure.

• The Wayfinders by Wade Davis
  Nonfiction. Subtitle: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World.

• Push by Sapphire
  Fiction. Precious Jones, dismissed as a “Harlem casualty,” learns to write. By telling her harsh story, we come to love her. As does she.

• The Tenth Parallel by Eliza Griswold
  Nonfiction. Subtitle: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam.

• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
  Nonfiction, graphic memoir. Growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Her words and drawings are mesmerizing.

• Ruined by Lynn Nottage
  Nonfiction, play. A brutal drama about the brutal lives of women in war-torn Congo.

• I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
  Nonfiction, memoir. As funny and poignant as you would expect her to be. I didn’t know until I read this book that she was once married to Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame.

• Bossypants by Tina Fey
  Nonfiction, memoir. I now know how she got that scar on her face.

• It's Even Worse Than It Looks by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
  Nonfiction. Subtitle: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism. This was written in 2012. Enough said.

• The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon
  Nonfiction. All about depression. The first chapter begins, “Depression is the loss of love.”