For nonfiction: A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhurst
Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream – as we all dream – of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away?
Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But in June 1972, Maurice and Maralyn set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves.
What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive in the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests. Although they could run away from the world, they can’t run away from themselves.
I think this would inspire some lively conversation in a book group.
For fiction: Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original.
Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.
This might sound overly political, but the message is about faith and hope in spite of everything, and I think that might be a nice thing for a book group. It's also short.
I've only read 7 of them - plus 3 more that I started and never finished (Bel Canto - didn't like; The Overstory - keep meaning to return to; Lincoln in the Bardo - ok but not that compelling). The ones that have been turned into films, I haven't even seen the films!
being a very low-brow, genre fiction reader, neither list really resonates with me. Though I will allow that Persepolis is awesome.
