Yesterday was a big voting day in our country, but in my world, today the voting is much more important. It is time for my book club to make its selections for what we’ll read from July of this year to June of next year.
Solving a Book Club Dilemma
Many book clubs struggle with selecting books month to month, and ours did too at one time. Making book club selections like this has solved several problems:
- No more month-to-month book selections
- We know way in advance what is coming, so we can get a jump on longer books if needed
- We are reading better quality books – books that ultimately get higher ratings by our club
- Everyone has a say in the selection process
Our Process in a Nutshell
We take a month off of reading when we’re pitching books. That gives everyone time to do the research or review their last year of non-book club reading to decide what they want to pitch.
- Each member pitches 2-4 books, explaining why they think it would be a good selection. They also disclose if they’ve read it or not. (We had a couple of years of horrible selections that we finally figured out was because we picked books that had been heavily marketed.)
- The full list goes into a Google Form, and members select 10. The books with the most votes make the cut. Sometimes we need a run-off to get to 10.
- Once we have our 10, we’ll go ahead and schedule the full year. If there is a sensible tie-in with the seasons, we’ll schedule books that way. Sometimes we will put certain books back-to-back if we think the comparison will add to the discussion.
2026-2027 Long List
So, without further adieu, the long list from which we’ll make our selections.
| Buckeye by Patrick Ryan |
| Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life by Henri Nouwen |
| East of Eden by John Steinbeck |
| Echo Chamber by John Boyne |
| Everything a Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri |
| I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman |
| Long Island by Colm Tóibín |
| Mad Wife by Meagan Church |
| Milkman by Anna Burns |
| Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie |
| My Friends by Fredrik Backman |
| Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt |
| Revolutionary Summer by Joseph Ellis |
| The 100 Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin |
| The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel |
| The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett |
| The Glass Room by Simon Mawer |
| The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer |
| The Path Between Us: An Enneagram Journey to Healthy Relationships by Suzanne Stabile |
| The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett |
| The Sideways Life of Denny Voss by Holly Kennedy |
| The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides |
| The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard |
| The Widow by John Grisham |
| Theo of Golden by Allen Levi |
| There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone |
| Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li |
| This Is Happiness by Niall Williams |
| Whistler by Ann Patchett |
| Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte |
If you’ve read any of these, let me know which of these books you think we should vote for or which books you would vote for if you were in the SOC Book Club!
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