What Should We Read in March?

Hello fellow readers!

Now that the Sister Reads Book Club is up and live, it’s time to decide on our first book! I’ve come up with three possibilities that I’ll ask you to vote on. I’ll keep the vote open until Thursday, and announce the chosen book on Friday March 3rd, so we’ll all have time to get the book, and read it before the book club meeting that will start on March 27th. The timing on this first month is a bit tight, but it will be longer going forward.

Here are the three books! Click each title to read more.

The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas

This is a new release (available tomorrow!) that has already received rave reviews from advance readers on Goodreads.

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.

Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.

But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.

Ed King by David Guterson

This is on my TBR, and chosen because I loved his previous book Snow Falling on Cedars. See reviews on Goodreads

In Seattle of 1962, Walter Cousins, a mild-mannered actuary takes a risk of his own and makes the biggest error of his life: He sleeps with Diane Burroughs, the sexy, not-quite-legal British au pair who’s taking care of his children for the summer. When Diane becomes pregnant and leaves their baby on a doorstep, it sets in motion a tragedy of epic proportions. The orphaned child, adopted by an adoring family and named Edward Aaron King, grows up to become a billionaire Internet tycoon and an international celebrity—the “King of Search”—who unknowingly, but inexorably, hurtles through life toward a fate he may have no way of reversing.

Sweeping, propulsive, and darkly humorous, Ed King re-imagines one of the world’s greatest tragedies—Oedipus Rex—for our own era, bringing contemporary urgency to a tale that still has the power to shock and inform.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

To be honest the idea of this book scares me, but it keeps coming up in my radar. See reviews here

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year’s Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

Now that you’ve taken a look at the three books, cast your vote below. Then check back on Friday for my February book reviews, and to find out which book we’ll be reading!