Dennis Lehane's "The Given Day"

 

Crime writer Dennis Lehane's ambitious 2008 novel The Given Day may not be for every book club due to its length (it's over 700 pages long) but it certainly is worthwhile whether you read it for a club or just for your own pleasure.  It takes place in Boston which is the setting for other Lehane novels including the acclaimed Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone.  It features Danny Coughlin, an Irish police officer who gets involved with the 1919 police strike.  Babe Ruth and other historical figures weave seamlessly throughout the book.  It's the story of two families, one white and the other black, as they struggle to find a place in a quickly changing world after World War I.  Lehane "unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future".  

The Given Day makes an excellent addition to your reading list if your interest has been piqued about the early 20th century.  While the lords and servants of Downton Abbey are coming to terms with the new century, the people of Boston and other big cities in America were also struggling to make their way during the time between the two great wars.

One Big Business List of 100 Books You Should Read

Amazon recently released it's list of 100 books that you should read in your lifetime.  It is interesting to note how many of them you've read.  It also makes a good "go-to" list if you are in need of a book club title. 

The list seems to include many more modern titles than one would have thought.  Also, with apologies to Gillian Flynn, I don't think I would be any less well off if I"d never met up with the two psychopaths from her "Gone Girl" but that's just one opinion.

Amazon's list of 100 books to read in a lifetime:

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
4. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
5. A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning: The Short-Lived Edition by Lemony Snicket
6. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
7. Alice Munro: Selected Stories by Alice Munro
8. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
9. All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
10. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt
11. Are You There, God? It’s me, Margaret by Judy Blume
12. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
13. Beloved by Toni Morrison
14. Born To Run – A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
15. Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
17. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
18. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
19. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
20. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown
21. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1 by Jeff Kinney
22. Dune by Frank Herbert
23. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
24. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
25. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
26. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
27. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
28. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond
29. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
30. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
31. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
32. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
33. Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
34. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
35. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
36. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
37. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
38. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
39. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
40. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
41. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
42. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
43. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
44. Moneyball by Michael Lewis
45. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
46. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
47. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
48. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
49. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
50. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
51. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
52. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
53. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
54. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
55. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
56. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
57. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
58. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
59. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
60. The Color of Water by James McBride
61. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
62. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
63. The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
64. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
65. The Giver by Lois Lowry
66. The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
67. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
68. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
69. The House At Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
70. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
71. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
72. The Liars’ Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr
73. The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1) by Rick Riordan
74. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
75. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
76. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
77. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
78. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
79. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
80. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
81. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
82. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
83. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
84. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
85. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
86. The Shining by Stephen King
87. The Stranger by Albert Camus
88. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
89. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
90. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
91. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
92. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
93. The World According to Garp by John Irving
94. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
95. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
96. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
97. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
98. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
99. Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
100. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Most titles are available at your local library so check one out!