Below are the topics for the most recent meetings of my local book salon. Each topic here includes a dozen representative books from the original lists of suggested books that were created to give people ideas about the possibilities for a given topic; however, participants are free to choose whatever book they believe fits the theme.
41: Witches Brew
Babayaga (Toby Barlow)
The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
The Daylight Gate (Jeanette Winterson)
A Discovery of Witches (Deborah Harkness)
The Hangman’s Daughter (Oliver Pötzsch)
Hollow Pike (James Dawson)
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
Lolly Willowes (Sylvia Townsend Warner)
Practical Magic (Alice Hoffman)
Wicked (Gregory Maguire)
The Witches of Eastwick (John Updike)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum)
42: Immigrants and Emigrants
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Michael Chabon)
Americanah (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
Angela’s Ashes* (Frank McCourt)
Breath, Eyes, Memory* (Edwidge Danticat)
Brooklyn (Colm Tóibín)
Cutting for Stone (Abraham Verghese)
Daughter of Fortune (Isabel Allende)
The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros)
The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)
The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri)
White Teeth (Zadie Smith)
43: The Art of the Possible
1876 (Gore Vidal)
Advise and Consent (Allen Drury)
All the King’s Men (Robert Penn Warren)
The Bostonians (Henry James)
Echo House (Ward Just)
His Excellency Eugène Rougon (Emile Zola)
I, Claudius (Robert Graves)
It Can’t Happen Here (Sinclair Lewis)
Lincoln: A Novel (Gore Vidal)
The Manchurian Candidate (Richard Condon)
Phineas Finn (Anthony Trollope)
The Prime Minister (Anthony Trollope)
44: Just the Perfect Blendship
Crossing to Safety (Wallace Stegner)
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Rebecca Wells)
The Group (Mary McCarthy)
Innocents and Others (Dana Spiotta)
A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara)
My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante)
The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
A Separate Peace (John Knowles)
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (Lisa See)
The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)
45: California Dreaming
Big Sur (Jack Kerouac)
The Black Dahlia (James Ellroy)
Daughter of Fortune (Isabel Allende)
The Day of the Locust (Nathanael West)
East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
L.A. Confidential (James Ellroy)
The Octopus: A Story of California (Frank Norris)
Oil! (Upton Sinclair)
Play It As It Lays (Joan Didion)
Ramona (Helen Hunt Jackson)
Two Years Before the Mast (Richard Henry Dana, Jr.)
46: Georgia On My Mind
The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
Deliverance (James Dickey)
Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers)
Jubilee (Margaret Walker)
Leaving Atlanta (Tayari Jones)
A Man in Full (Tom Wolfe)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (John Berendt)
Paris Trout (Pete Dexter)
Strange Fruit (Lillian Smith)
Tobacco Road (Erskine Caldwell)
The Underground Railroad (Colson Whitehead)
47: Sex, Spies, But No Videotape
Casino Royale (Ian Fleming)
Charlotte Gray (Sebastian Faulks)
Code Name Verity (Elizabeth Wein)
Eye of the Needle (Ken Follett)
The Human Factor (Graham Greene)
Journey into Fear (Eric Ambler)
Red Sparrow (Jason Matthews)
Restless (William Boyd)
The Secret Agent (Joseph Conrad)
Six Days of the Condor (James Grady)
Sweet Tooth (Ian McEwan)
The 39 Steps (John Buchan)
48: Cold Crime
The Bat (Harry Hole #1) (Jo Nesbø)
Before the Frost (Linda Wallander #1) (Henning Mankell)
The Boy in the Suitcase (Nina Borg #1) (Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis)
Burial Rites (Hannah Kent)
Echoes from the Dead (The Öland Quartet #1) (Johan Theorin)
Faceless Killers (Kurt Wallander #1) (Henning Mankell)
The Keeper of Lost Causes (Department Q, #1) (Jussi Adler-Olsen)
Gorky Park (Arkady Renko #1) (Martin Cruz Smith)
The Ice Princess (Fjällbacka #1) (Camilla Läckberg)
Last Rituals ((Þóra Guðmundsdóttir #1) (Yrsa Sigurðardóttir)
Mind’s Eye (Inspector Van Veeteren #1) (Håkan Nesser)
Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Peter Høeg)
49: Favorite Authors
50: The Great American Read: Debating Book Lists
Sly Wit 