Hello! I am in a book club with a bunch of ladies in their fifties and sixties.
I am an English Professor and really love classics, but sometimes my picks don’t land because this group isn’t too interested in reading anything particularly dense.
With that said, they have great discussions and are open to a wide variety of genres. Some books they have enjoyed include:
-Beautyland by Marie Helene Bertino
-The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
-Fried Green Tomatoes by Fannie Flagg
-11.22.63 by Stephen King
Some books that they did not enjoy were:
-The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (they understood why the themes were important but struggled to understand the book on a literal level)
-The Swerve by Stephen Greenblat (they found it too dense and boring).
I should also mention that most of the ladies are queer, so straight to romance novels, like Emily Henry books, don’t tend to interest them.
Let me know if you have any ideas! Thanks in advance.
by emilywildewendell
6 Comments
This post from 2 days ago feels ultra relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/s/FhbunivSP3
I feel like every woman I know who’s over 40 is obsessed with Kristin Hannah. So maybe one of her recent books? I haven’t read any of them so I can’t recommend specifically.
Check out Miranda July’s All Fours. Goes into monogamy, motherhood, sexuality, menopause, creativity. Very provocative book with so much to talk about.
Lollywillowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli. She wrote many other books, but this is the only one I read.
I’m in a book club that goes 1880–19 30 and we’ve read some very readable and enjoyable books that might please you and them – A Mirror for Witches by Esther Forbes is really reasonable and very feminist, from the 1920s, and I wouldn’t say it is dense.
We just read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and it’s only about 130 pages and it’s surprisingly readable, and Clarissa Dalloway turns out to have been rather gay in her youth, so that might interest them.