Engaging Books: A Book Club for the next 4 years

Summer wildflowers by E.A. Schneider

Salutations, dear pond readers! Today, I am excited to launch a new project at Technicolorlilypond just in time for Summer. This project is a book club for the next four years that I’m calling “Engaging Books.” The election for the 45th president of the United States has made the world an extra tumultuous place and stirred up a lot of feelings in people. I think that if we could all be on the same page of the same book engaging in the imaginative exercise together, and then sharing thoughts on it in a polite way, that that would make the world a little bit better place right now with a little bit brighter future. What can I say? I’m the child of librarians; I can’t help but think that books are the best place to start when faced with crises.

Ring-tailed Lemur hugging its tail by E.A. Schneider

Engaging Books is designed with three specific goals. Goal #1: pierce our self-made bubbles of knowledge and, by so doing, achieve Goal #2: foster consideration for each other as human beings whilst doing Goal #3: read some amazing books. In short, the ultimate goal is to become a more engaged, informed, and polite member of society. Our self-curated bubbles of information have highlighted our polarized political climate in the United States as well as contributed to a crumbling sense of community. There is data to support this belief and there is no shortage of evidence that we are more likely to believe that the “other” is a subhuman enemy when we don’t know anything about them personally. I’m hoping that reading these books and works will help us all see the world with more compassion.

Like a lot of others in the USA, I felt a little blindsided after the November elections and I want to read up on points of view that I’m now aware I knew nothing of as well as perspectives that I might have mistakenly taken for granted.  A lot of thought went into this list of books. The books are a mix of fiction and non-fiction and every book is less than 600 pages long.

Because this is the Internet, everybody reads at different paces, and there’s this pesky thing called Real Life that rudely interrupts one’s ability to read, I have some guidelines for how this is going to work. Naturally, these are subject to revision as things develop. The books are listed below in the rough order I will aim to read them in. There are 60 books on the list which works out to 15 books a year for the next four years. As I read, I will post thoughts on the books here on my blog as well as on Goodreads in the Engaging Books Group. If you are reading along, please post your thoughts. If you’ve already read something on the list, feel free to post your thoughts on the work even if it’s way down on the list. However, all people posting will need to put SPOILER warnings on their comment where applicable and always be politely respectful in their remarks.

The books on this list are purposefully challenging. I fully expect many of them to contain content that is disturbing, offensive, graphic, and emotionally affecting. That is the point. Again, we all curate bubbles for ourselves regardless of facts to protect our identities. It is our nature. However, we can and should challenge that nature to stretch because that is how we learn and grow.

This isn’t a class. There are no grades and no credit beyond the personal. All I can offer is my own written commentary, some cute animal pictures, and the truth that when you read a book, you’re going to learn something you didn’t know before. Personally, I think that reading these books is a worthwhile endeavor and I hope you do too. On to the list!

Relaxed Seal by E.A. Schneider  Seals are one of the cutest animals around!

 

Engaging Books: The List  

# / Title / Author / [page count]

1. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood [311]
2. Tracks by Louise Erdrich [226]
3. News from Nowhere by William Morris [167]
4. The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher [272]
5. Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed [274]
6. Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance [272]
7. It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis [400]
8. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler [345]
9. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley [288]
10. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglas [160]
11. Bus Girl: Poems by Gretchen Josephson [107]
12. The Irony of American History by Reinhold Neibuhr [174]
13. We by Yevgeny Zamayatin [225]
    

    Diving sea turtle by E.A. Schneider

14. 1984 by George Orwell [322]
15. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond [418]
16. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood [400]
17. The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank [200]
18. Selected Poems by Langston Hughes [320]
19. Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston [243]
20. Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Hothschild [288]
21. Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt [527]
22. Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach [181]
23. Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg [308]
24. Muslims and the Making of America by Amir Hussain [150]
25. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine [160]
26. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot [370]
27. Waist-high in the World: A life Among the Non-Disabled by N. Mairs [224]
28. I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai [352]
29. Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver [436]
30. Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson [240]
    

    Summer wildflowers at dusk by E.A. Schneider

31. Prophesy Deliverance! by Cornel West [188]
32. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks [243]
33. The Dictator’s Handbook by Bueno de Mequita [352]
34. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury [249]
35. Fight Club by Chuck Palahnuik [218]
36. Coyote by Allen Steele [436]
37. The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force by Eliot A. Cohen [304]
38. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins [374]
39. The American Jeremiad by Sacvan Bercovitch [256]
40. High-Rise by J. G. Ballard [204]
41. An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine [291]
42. V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd [296]
43. Caesar’s Column by Ignatius Donnelly [278]
44. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks [174]
45. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer [240]
46. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin [349]
47. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman [208]
48. The Long Walk by Richard Bachman (pseudonym of Stephen King) [384]
49. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson [448]
50. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt [528]
51. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli [140]
52. Animal Farm by George Orwell [112]
53. The Wave by Morton Rhue and Todd Strasser [143]
54. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez [120]
    

    Coneflower by E.A. Schneider

55. Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson [433]
56. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 by Ida B. Wells-Barnett Jacqueline Jones Royster (Editor) [288]
57. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels [48]
58. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse [320]
59. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama [585]
60. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis S. Collins [294]

Thank you for reading to the end! I am going to intersperse my reading of this list with other lighter works and hopefully I will blog about those, too. I’ve already read a couple of these and will be posting my reviews sometime soon. Hopefully, this will help you launch your Summer Reading with some fascinating books and dynamic thinking. Any thoughts? Concerns? What are you reading now? Please, share below, happy Summer reading, and thank you for stopping by the pond today, dear reader.

Onward by E.A. Schneider