Bath House Book Club

The Bath House Book Club was founded in January 2014 and has been going steady(ish) ever since. Originally the book club was made up of several of my roommates in the Bath House: Age, Jess, Hil, me, and our friend Vanessa. With the ever shifting composition of the book club, we keep things up these days on a Facebook group and meet up with everyone who lives locally. The format, however, remains unchanged—we rotate choosing the book and hosting the accompanying discussion, so over the two years we've read a wide breadth of things!

Below is a chronological list of the selections of the BHBC, with a couple quotes thrown in for good measure:

Cheryl Strayed | Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

"It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave."   Colum McCann | Let the Great World Spin  also quoted here

Brian Doyle | The Wet Engine  quoted here

Jeannette Walls | The Glass Castle

Kim Edwards | The Memory Keeper's Daughter (full disclosure: I read about the first 30 pages and wasn't a huge fan so I didn't actually finish this book)

Katie Heaney | Never Have I Ever

"There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined. I feel like this is an important idea, one of those ideas that your brain must wrap itself around slowly, the way pythons eat."   John Green | Paper Towns

Sue Monk Kidd | The Secret Life of Bees

C.S. Lewis | Till We Have Faces  quoted here

David James Brown | The Boys in the Boat

"In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it has a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. . . . Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valley of misery but also how the story works out as a whole."   Atul Gawande | Being Mortal

Susannah Cahalan | Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

currently reading: Malcolm Gladwell | David and Goliath

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Have you ever been in a book club or are you in one? What have been your favorite things to read with a group? I think there is definitely an art to choosing a good book club book, and I always love to hear more ideas!