I’m very fortunate that here DGLM we are a book club of our own. However, I’ve also been thinking that I’d like to join other book clubs, but where is the TIME!?! 

 This is where digital book clubs come in. If you can’t make the time to physically join a book club, or maybe you hate speaking in front of strangers, there is always another option. With digital book clubs, you get the benefits of being in a book club, but with the luxury of participating from wherever.

 There are tons of digital book clubs out there. I’m sure everyone knows about Oprah’s Book club. I very recently discovered Emma Watson’s feminist book club called Our Shared Space on Goodreads. Watson, who is a UN Woman’s Goodwill ambassador by day (Hermione Granger by night), is using this space to encourage us to have conversations, ask questions, and learn more about gender equality and feminism. There is no pressure, just an avenue to learn and make great friends.

 So if you have been looking for a book club, now’s the time to find one. And honestly, if you can’t find one you like, start your own!

 Good luck with your search and please share if you know about some amazing digital book clubs out there.

When I began in publishing, there was a certain truism that books on death don’t sell. When I was an editor, I looked at worthy proposals that were, according to conventional wisdom and my ed-board, simply too hard. Certainly there had been exceptions—books by Elizabeth Kubler Ross, Jessica Mitford, Sherwin Nuland—but they just proved the rule. For the most part, the book industry reflected our entirely human propensity to avoid thinking about our own inevitable ends.

That Gawande’s BEING MORTAL—a work of such signal intelligence, readability and compassion–has sold so extravagantly, hitting #1 on the NYT bestseller list, is a sign that perhaps we’ve turned a corner. When my fellow DGLM-er Eric found out that I was reading BEING MORTAL, he told me it should be required reading for everyone. And he’s right. Funny, too, because all sorts of books are billed as universally relevant. But Being Mortal really, truly is.

In addition to weeping on commuter trains over my recreational reads (belated apologies to the dismayed lady sitting beside me), I also represent authors whose works engage mortality. Medical Humanities historian Brandy Schillace’s book, Death’s Summer Coat: What Death and Dying Can Teach us About Life and Living, which was reviewed today in the New Yorker.Com, is a wide-ranging and fascinating look across cultural approaches to death, while forensic pathologist Judy Melinek, co-author of the memoir Working Stiff, chronicled her work as a speaker for the dead. Another client, archaeologist Nicholas Reeves is at work on an excavation that aims to find a particularly ancient and famous corpse, Nefertiti (the ancient Egyptian approach to death, or the royal one, anyway, being that you can take it with you.) And I’m reading a proposal from author and neurosurgeon Richard Rapport on How We Don’t Die.

In any event, none of this has yet helped me with the particular challenges of explaining the certainty of death to my children. My younger son recently requested a pet hamster, one who (in contrast to his cousin’s late and much-mourned Hamchop) would not die. When I patiently explained that all living things die eventually, even people, he looked at me for a beat and retorted, “Yes, Mom. I know. All except my hamster.”

As longtime readers of our blog know, we have an office book club that meets once every couple of months.  I’ve also mentioned a time or twenty that I’m a member of a neighborhood book club in my town.  Clearly, I’m a fan of book clubs—and not just because of the wonderful marriage they broker between literature and wine.  I find that I learn a great deal from the opinions of other readers.  Even when I am convinced that they are tragically wrong in those opinions (Sharon Pelletier and Michael Bourret’s wrongheadedness about The Goldfinch comes to mind), the points of view expressed generally reveal something new and different (about the work, about the person championing it) to me.   Books are the most efficient and effective repositories of ideas mankind has ever come up with, in my opinion, and only good things can come from people discussing those ideas in a respectful* and thoughtful way.

Which is why I’m so excited about Emma Watson’s feminist book club, Our Shared Shelf.  In an era when there seems to be a great deal of ambivalence, at best, and disdain, at worst, for feminism, I think Ms. Watson’s mission is excellent.  For all the important gains the founding mothers of the feminist movement achieved (our own Phyllis Chesler among them), we still have a long way to go in attaining equality and, in many cultures, basic human rights for women.

How cool is it that Hermione Granger’s alter ego is spearheading this movement?  I’m totally fangurling!

*Not always the case at DGLM gatherings, I confess.

That’s why I chose The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell to read this winter. I found this novel off the shelf of my local bookstore, immediately attracted to the cover, which features lots of snow and wolves (creatures I inaccurately associate with winter). It takes place in the deep, icy woods of Russia, and follows a girl as she stands up for the wolves her and her mother reintroduce into the wild after their neglectful lives in captivity.

Last year, I read George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones because Jon Snow says, “winter is coming.” In the past, I read Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials for the polar bears and northern lights, and Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak for the sleigh rides (there are a lot of them).

It may be a weird tradition, but it has inspired me to read a lot of wonderful books I might not have read otherwise. What winter books will you read this year and what makes you read them?

My book club has never had an author visit like this, though we have a few times gone to author events for a book that we read. It’s always a lot of fun to chat with an author about their work, and I imagine even more of a thriller for readers who do not have the pleasure of working in publishing and meeting authors all the time! On the other hand, my book club has often had lively discussions when a couple of us strongly disliked a book – and that certainly can’t happen if the author is present (unless you’re a fan of awkward moments…).

But the really fascinating thing that Nomi Eve experienced was the snowball effect:

What happened was that for every book club I visited, I got invited to another. A book club member’s sister, or cousin, or neighbor, or sister-in-law heard about my book club visits and invited me to their book club. So when I had 20, I really had 40; when I had 40, I really had 80, and so on and so on.

That’s some powerful word-of-mouth when you consider that a book club visit likely means 8-10 books purchased. So 20 visits turning into 40 visits is like 200 books sold turning into 400 books sold!

If you’re in a book club, what do you think about author visits? Ever had one? Authors, would you enjoy meeting with book clubs or would you find it nerve-wracking?

Over the last several years we have all heard a great deal about Young Adult books and what seems to work and what doesn’t.  And we at DGLM represent a bunch of bestsellers in this category.  One of the interesting things in this category is the crossover market that has developed with books like THE HUNGER GAMES series and titles authored by John Green and James Dashner.  And I have been fortunate to represent a number of significant new YA authors.

When we were looking to choose a category for our next book club meeting, Jim McCarthy wisely came up with the concept of all of us reading a recently published Middle Grade book and I loved this idea as this is a category I am just now dipping my toe into.  The potential market is huge since the Harry Potter series put the genre on the map and obviously crossed over into an adult market.

To prepare, I have studied the category a bit.  I know that the age range of readers is between 8 and 12 and the average length of books is 100 pages or less.  Here is a piece I found that clearly describes this category and its traditional market.

Middle Grade classics include the previously mentioned Harry Potter titles, Charlotte’s Web, Matilda and our own Chris Grabenstein’s Mr. Lemoncello’s Library and The Island of Dr. Libris.

So I chose as my book club title (with Jim’s help) Ratscalibur by Josh Lieb.  And my thought is that I will read this and then give it to my seven-year-old granddaughter, Elena, who is a terrific reader, to see what she thinks.  Stay tuned for our thoughts.

I’d also love to know what your experiences are with Middle Grade and what you (and your children) have enjoyed reading in the category.

In the end, the book was fine—I enjoyed it enough, but it was forgettable in the way some books are. I’m still interested in watching the show, but I guess, now that I know how it ends, it won’t be as fun. It got me thinking, though, about book adaptations in general.

Why is it so much more natural for a book to be turned into a very good (or at least entertaining) TV show or film, but not the other way around? You could say, I guess, that the wealth of material in a book can be expanded, cut, intensified, used as inspiration for a spin etc. But then, if there’s less material, say, in a 100 minute movie, isn’t that a writer’s job to add the depth and extra detail to make it a good book, too? If readers are allowed to be outraged by a less than stellar film adaptation, while those that have not read the source material look blithely on, wouldn’t avid movie buffs allowed to do the same if they went on to read the book?

Maybe. But I just don’t see it happening as much. And I don’t see readers getting excited about literary versions of their favorite movies or TV shows the way they would about their cherished books getting a shot at the silver screen.

I remember as a kid reading scads of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Alex Mack books, but that was only because I wasn’t allowed to watch any channels other than PBS for quite some time. The only way I could know about these super cool characters was to read about them. I’m sure the books themselves lacked something found in the TV shows and I can say with relative certainty that the writing quality was not quite up to par with other books I was reading at the time. Still, I loved them. But I don’t think the genre (can we call it a genre?) of book adaptations would really spark my interest at all any more—no matter how much I loved a show.

There’s a difference in the way one connects to a character on screen and on the page. Some things are better seen, some are better read. What about you? Agree? Disagree? If you’re in the latter camp, what are some good book adaptations you’ve read?

Yet without naming names, the book came from a Big Six house, edited by a top editor, and was the author’s tenth novel. It came armed with tons of blurbs from major authors, and I could find only one review that took issue with the premise. To which I say… really? But while I sit here feeling like I’m taking crazy pills with Mugatu from ZOOLANDER, the book did make me think about plausibility in general.

I’m sure plausibility is a question  for all writers, but especially ones who write in plot-heavy genres like thriller, sci-fi, fantasy, kids books, etc. It’s hard enough to come up with inventive plots, character and voice, yet do it in a way that readers will buy–even if your story is about, say, zombie kittens from Mars. So if you’re wrestling with plausibility issues, check out this essay from Steve Almond in Writer’s Digest, which ably dissects the various plausibility traps writers often fall into (I’d say the premise of my Book Club book falls under the Factual/Logistical umbrella). Or, for an elegant summation of how to think about plausibility, it’s hard to beat this letter from Ursula K. LeGuin.

How many of you have run into problems with plausibility? And how have you found your way out of the traps?

Given that book club is an extracurricular activity for all of us and that, ironically, none of us has a lot of free time for reading, our picks are a hotly debated (sometimes hostilely so) subject.  If you’ve been following this blog for a while, it won’t surprise you that the most vituperative battles usually erupt between Jim McCarthy and myself.  I like to think that’s because we are the most passionate about book club.  Our co-workers think it’s because we’re the most immature.

But I digress.

It’s time to select our next round of titles and we decided (as we usually do at this time of year) to choose from the “best of the year” lists.  Jim forwarded a link to the New York Times Notable Books of the Year and I perused it with a gimlet eye.  Like the Academy Awards, the paper of record seldom goes for fun over (heavy) substance when it crowns its winners.  Its year-end list is always full of unimpeachably good-for-you books, and if you’re looking for the literary equivalent of junk food, you’re out of luck.  So, I went hunting and found the Goodreads list (via Buzzfeed), a more, shall we say, democratic round-up of the year’s best.  After looking at the offerings there—Rainbow Rowell! Stephen King! Anne Rice!—I ended up choosing from the Times list after all.  The Goodreads titles are must-reads by excellent authors, sure, but the Sarah Waters novel on the Times list looks like it’s going to be both healthy and delightful in a Downton Abbey sort of way.

What list are you choosing your holiday reading from?  Or are you going to ignore both the cognoscenti and the rabble and go your own way, picking your next book from a clever flap copy or an arresting cover?

I remember finding this book absolutely enthralling and hilarious as a child, probably in part because of my membership in a family of 6+ children that, like the Herdmans, left a wake of havoc wherever we went. (I’d like to think I was a little better behaved than Imogen Herdman – I know I did a better job keeping my wild brothers in line than she did.)

As an avid re-reader of childhood faves, I’m often surprised to discover deeper meanings in stories that were lost on younger me, who raced through the pages gleefully as the Herdmanns rob the penny bank and say the H-word during rehearsal. Little did I realize that Ms. Robinson was sneaking in a lesson about compassion, about suspending judgment, about being grateful for our blessings and sharing them with those who are less fortunate. An important lesson to learn at the holidays…and to remember all year round!

Do you have any favorite books to read at the holidays? Ever re-read a book from your childhood and were surprised to learn what it’s really about?