Recent years have seen increased awareness of the ongoing trauma created by historical residential schools for Native children in North America, which were operated by government bodies and churches beginning in approximately the mid-1800s, and lasting until the 1960s in the United States and the 1990s in Canada. Hundreds of thousands of children were forcibly removed from their families and taken to these institutions, where they were subject to mistreatment and abuse, including being stripped of their cultural practices and languages. In 2021, the buried bodies of 215 children were found at Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, prompting new mainstream consciousness of the scope and severity of this historical phenomenon, as well as an investigation by the United States Department of the Interior into the US's own role in maintaining hundreds of schools that "deployed systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies to attempt to assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children."
If you love reading books about animals, you're not the only one! Animals can evoke a sense of both the familiar and the otherworldly. As children, many of us read books featuring cute anthropomorphic cats, dogs, rabbits, bears, birds and other furry or feathered friends living through relatable circumstances. Many of us also read books full of fascinating facts about wildlife, or about extinct creatures that roamed the earth millions of years ago. In adulthood, we can continue using reading to celebrate our connections with animals as well as to explore the details of how they exist in the world.
Below are recommended books from recent years, both fiction and nonfiction, to bring you a little closer to all the other beings with whom we share the planet. Some of them inhabit an animal point of view, while others consider how much people may be able to learn from living alongside animals. These also make great choices for book clubs.
For book lovers, reading about magical libraries can have a special appeal—a place that, in the real world, already feels enchanted and full of possibility can literally be so in fantasy. Below are six books set in extraordinary enchanted libraries.
In addition to browsing by genre, time period, setting and a wide range of themes, BookBrowse offers specialized reading lists in our "beyond the book" section. These lists are curated by our professional reviewers to accompany featured works, and they can help you familiarize yourself with many fascinating niches of the book world.
Below are just a few examples of the hundreds of articles available in our Reading Lists category.
At the start of each year, we ask BookBrowse subscribers to look back on the previous year and tell us which books they most enjoyed discussing with their book group. The 2022 Top 10 includes some favorites from previous years and some new arrivals!
Coming-of-age plots are a staple of YA books, as the changes of adolescence and the transition to adulthood have special relevancy to the teenage perspective. But adults can benefit from coming-of-age stories too. Gaining some distance from your own experience of growing up provides a place from which to reflect more deeply on the experiences of others, and any thoughtful story that leads readers through the inevitable, pivotal changes we all encounter in certain early stages of life is likely to give book groups something relatable and interesting to talk about. Plus, we never really stop growing, and "coming of age" is a murky concept that can stretch well into adulthood. Luckily, there's no shortage of evocative and insightful coming-of-age books for adults, and we've put together a list for you containing some of the best from recent years.
All the books below have been rated five stars by our reviewers, and they all come with reading guides to help you organize quality conversations with your book club. They feature a range of young people, from children to 20-somethings still struggling to find their place in the world, across a wide variety of life circumstances and settings.
