August Selection: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Spoiler Alert: This book is not little at all!).

At 736 pages, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is our biggest book in awhile.  Get started soon.  The New York Times doesn't much care for it, but Vogue (??) says it's awesome:

"At a time in which big books by women (Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries; Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch) have taken the publishing world by storm, Yanagihara’s achievement has less to do with size—though when her editor asked her to reduce it by a third, she refused—than with the breadth and depth of its considerable power, which speaks not to the indomitability of the spirit, but to the fragility of the self."

Slate has declared 2015 to be "the year of the very long novel."  Check out their article on big books here.

Is Franzen's new Purity (poised for September release) another biggie?  It may well be our September choice.
 

 

Non-Fiction July:: PBR meets PBS

Apparently the days of two-month PBR Book Club sprees of summer "big books" are a thing of the past. Have we become even lazier than you'd expect from a group of PBR-swilling readers?

But you can still read big books and talk about them:  I (Nog) just finished Mathew Thomas' powerhouse We Are Not Ourselves (600 pp) and B-Suit is raving about Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life (700 pp).  We'll talk to you about them.

But the official topic of July's meeting is Steven Johnson's 2014 How We Got to Now.  So far I've only read the intro, which is good and has a funny shout-out to the short-lived beauty of Betamax.  

If you're feeling extra lazy, just watch the PBS series based on the book.