Top Books for Book Club Discussions

Reading Group Guides has published the results of its survey of the best book-club books of the year. Here are the overall Top Ten for best discussion. You can read the results of the other surveys (best memoir, best classics, etc., for book clubs) at their website. This site is an excellent source of questions to use to guide your book-club discussions.

1. The Help by Kathryn Stockett: A spirited debut that explores the Civil Rights movement through the relationships between a young white woman and two black maids.
   
   
2. Water for Elephants  by Sara Gruen: An elderly man reflects on his younger years as the veterinarian for a travelling circus during the Great Depression, and the many relationships he formed with man and beast alike.
   
   
3. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present.
   
   
4. The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls: Walls recounts her harrowing, nomadic childhood as the daughter of eccentric parents struggling with substance abuse and often flouting the law.
   
   
5. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert: Gilbert chronicles the end of her marriage and her year abroad in search of happiness, perspective, spirituality and love across Italy, India and Indonesia.
   
   
6. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows: A novel told in letters between an author and a resident of the small, British island of Guernsey detailing the German occupation of the island, and its aftermath.
   
   
7. The Secret Life of Bees    by Sue Monk Kidd: A teenager embarks on a quest to learn more about the mother she hardly knew, navigating the tumultuous racial landscape of the South during the 1960s.
   
   
8. Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay: A compelling portrait of France under occupation during World War II, revealing the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode even in today’s society.
9. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See: Two women form a lifelong friendship that is thrust into peril against 19th-century China’s rigid caste system and treatment of women.
   
   
10. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant: A rich interpretation of the little-known Bible story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah, and the life of ancient womanhood.