Welcome back to In The Club, a newsletter of resources to keep your book group well-met and well-read. Let’s dive in.
This newsletter is sponsored by The House on Foster Hill by Jaime Jo Wright.
Weaving a tale of mystery and romance, this promising author’s critically acclaimed debut is a dual-time narrative about an abandoned house and two women, a century apart, changed by the deadly secrets it holds. Can they unravel its mystery and find a renewed hope before any other lives—including their own—are lost? “With sharp dialogue and plenty of scares, this is a gripping tale that never loses sight of the light.” –Foreword Reviews
Do you want a bunch of great books? We’re doing another giveaway! It’s a stack of our 20 favorite books of the year, and you can click here to enter.
There’s no time like the end of the year to think about rebooting your book club, and Tara has some suggestions as to how.
Tis the season for best-of lists! These can be great for deciding what you’ll be reading in the coming months; many of the books will be headed to paperback editions, they’ve been vetted and read and reviewed, and there’s (usually) a decent variety of themes to pick from. And this year’s pickings are particularly good:
Vulture has declared their top 10 best comics of 2017, as did the AV Club. Some overlap here, but not as much as you might expect. I am woefully behind on my comics reading, so I’ll be bookmarking these to start remedying in 2018.
Huffington Post has their 10 best fiction up (including a bit of sci-fi, but mostly literary fiction), as does The Guardian. I really love HuffPo’s list in terms of books I’m excited to see get press. The Guardian’s is more of a surprise in terms of the picks, because I’m not familiar with quite a few of them!
The Guardian also picked their favorite mystery/thrillers of the year, and they’ve got quite a few Book Riot favorites in there. (Attica Locke 5ever.)
NPR’s Best Of includes 350 (!!!) books that their staff loved from the past year. You could spend hours filtering through it all (if you haven’t already), especially since some of these characters are thematic rather than genre. For example: Ladies First; Rather Short; Rather Long.
The Book Riot contributors decided to make up new awards categories for some of this year’s best books — please enjoy the results. My personal favorite is the “What The F*** Just Happened,” for perhaps obvious reasons.
We also picked our favorite queer books of 2017, and it’s a long and wide-ranging list in terms of both genres and representation!
Also in themed best-ofs, here’s Rebecca’s take on the best genre-bending nonfiction of the year.
And here are our official, voted-on, Best Books of 2017 across all categories!
And that’s our show: Happy discussing! If you’re interested in more science fiction and fantasy talk, you can catch me and my co-host Sharifah on the SFF Yeah! podcast. For many many more book recommendations (including the occasional book club question!) you can find me on the Get Booked podcast with the inimitable Amanda.
Your fellow booknerd,
Jenn
More Resources:
– Our Book Group In A Box guide
– List your group on the Book Group Resources page