Are You Looking For a Fabulous Book?

October is National Reading Group Month and Great Group Reads (GGR) has posted their list of books for 2015.  Publishers, hoping their book will make the coveted list, submit novels and memoirs to the committee early each year. Throughout the winter and spring, the committee reads approximately 100 books narrowing it down to the best 20 for book clubs. This year we had so many incredible titles that we chose 21.  Please go to the website, www.nationalreadinggroupmonth.org, and click on Great Group Reads to find the 2015 list. We all know you can't judge a book by its cover, or its title, so there is also a short synopsis for each book.

Not only are these novels and memoirs perfect for book clubs, they are delicious reads. They'll make you want to sink into a comfortable chair and devour the beautifully written words, meet characters you think you know or wish you did - even some you'll be glad you don't. Some books will carry you to distant lands or distant times. In others, you'll be ensconced in a foreign world and smell the air and taste the foods, feel the textures.  You'll find yourself in a mountainous village in Yemen in the 1920s or on a distant planet inhabited by earthlings or in a restrictive Hasidic Jewish Community in New York, even a remote Appalachian coal town. You'll walk through rural western Canada and become part of life in Mississippi in the 1950s or New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, and you'll experience childhood in a Jewish orphanage in New York City in the early twentieth century with all its repercussions. You'll shift between an Islamic home in Pakistan to college life in New England and enjoy a rare look into a closed society in North Korea where contact with the outside world is strictly forbidden. All are a reader's treat.

To celebrate National Reading Group Month, the Women's National Book Association will be having special events, featuring authors, in twelve cities across the U.S.  All are listed on the website: www.nationalreadinggroupmonth.org/events_chapter.html Find one in a city close to you. Each promises an exciting evening.

And since I am the Literary Leotard, I must put in a little of the leotard side: After spending wonderful hours with these new characters and settings, get up and take a walk. I know you won't want to put the books down, but you must stay active. Move your body. Then sit back down and turn those pages.