What We're Reading (According to Each Other)
Our first annual Recommended Reads Mashup — twenty-two books, four themes, and one very long reading list.
Reading time: About 4 minutes.
This May, my book club tried something new for our monthly meeting. Instead of all reading the same book, we each showed up with three titles we love — the kind you’ve secretly hoped someone would ask you about.
The Dickens Chicks have been meeting for about fifteen years. We have a soft spot for the classics — the books that have already proven themselves — though over the years we've expanded our definition to include books we suspect might earn that status someday. As individuals, we also enjoy exploring books outside of the literature hall of fame, so the list you'll find below has some range to it, which is part of what makes it fun.
We called it the Recommended Reads Mashup. We ended up with twenty-two books between us, and I left with a longer reading list than I arrived with, which is exactly the point. We loved it so much we’ve already decided to make it an annual thing.
I’m not going to tell you who recommended what — that’s our business — but I can tell you why these books made the cut, which feels like the more useful thing anyway. Each title is a link to Goodreads, so if you’re interested in learning more about a book, you can click it and find out.
Books that stayed with us long after we finished
These are the ones people brought because they couldn’t stop thinking about them — sometimes years later.
My Friends by Hisham Matar — Three Libyan men in exile in London, and the friendship that becomes the closest thing to a country of one’s own. Quiet and achingly beautiful.
North Woods by Daniel Mason — A single house in the Massachusetts forest across four centuries. Surreal, unpredictable, and full of characters that linger.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers — Long, and worth every page. A dual-timeline epic about a Black family’s history that someone in our group wished were even longer.
The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander — A poet’s memoir after the sudden death of her husband. Less about grief than about the extraordinary life grief is mourning.
Books that made us laugh, or at least grin
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue — Two best friends making a spectacular mess of their early twenties in Cork, Ireland, 2008. Every single character is a delight.
Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult by Maria Bamford — The comedian’s honest, hilarious memoir about her mental health. Get the audiobook. Trust me on this.
Strip Tease by Carl Hiaasen — Fast, satirical, wonderfully absurd. The bad guys always get what’s coming to them, which is satisfying every single time.
Books that taught us something we didn’t know we needed
How to Be Sick by Toni Bernhard — Buddhist wisdom about chronic illness that turns out to be about something much broader: accepting the life you have instead of spending your energy resisting it.
The Place of Tides by James Rebanks — A remote Norwegian island, an elderly woman, and a centuries-old tradition of harvesting eiderdown from wild ducks. A quiet book that doesn’t leave you.
Death March by Donald Knox — First-person accounts of Bataan, told from multiple perspectives. What stays with you is how differently each man experienced the same event — and what happened after they came home.
Bears in My Kitchen by Margaret Merrill — A city girl marries a forest ranger in the 1930s and finds herself at Yosemite in the earliest days of the National Park Service. Warm, funny, and genuinely adventurous.
The classics someone finally convinced us to read (or reread)
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende — Described by one of us as the most complete story she’s ever read. Family, history, politics, forbidden love — all of it.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak — Nazi Germany, a young girl, and Death as narrator. Philosophical, punny, and unlike anything else.
Animal Farm by George Orwell — Someone brought this because it feels urgently relevant right now. It does.
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather — A bishop traveling the 19th century American Southwest, with the landscape itself as a character.
My Ántonia by Willa Cather — “Little House on the Prairie, but desert.” Intimate and quietly devastating.
The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky — Short, vertiginous, and you’re never quite sure what’s real. There’s a 2013 film adaptation that captures the atmosphere beautifully.
Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers — A 1933 mystery set in an advertising agency. Sayers actually worked in advertising, and it shows in the best possible way.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen — Vivid characters, a keen eye on American life, and the particular ache of leaving people behind when a book ends.
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson — The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a serial killer, running in parallel. Nonfiction that reads like a thriller.
This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel — A family with a transgender child, written by someone who knows this territory from the inside. Honest and full of heart.
The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali — A friendship between two women spanning decades of Iran’s upheavals, from the 1950s through 2022. Deeply moving.
That’s twenty-two books. We meet again in June for James by Percival Everett — I’m only partway through it, but so far it has all the signs of being a book I’ll want to press into people’s hands. Ask me again in a few weeks.
Note: all book titles link to Goodreads.
