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.
Unsurprisingly, stories featuring the circumstances of child or teenage protagonists during World War II tend to appear prominently in the category of young adult literature, with classics like Lois Lowry's Number the Stars existing as staples of historical fiction in schools and libraries all over. But as is the case with Jennifer Rosner's Once We Were Home, which follows grown-up characters reckoning with how they were displaced away from their Jewish families during the Holocaust, some books written for adults also center the specific viewpoints of those who experienced the war as children. Below are just a few.
What activities does your book club enjoy, aside from reading and discussing books? While many groups stick to these basics, some who have the time and inclination take things a little further, whether that means extending their love for books to food, games and travel, or simply taking pleasure in being together in different settings. In our annual book club survey, we asked people about what their clubs like to do. Answers covered a variety of pastimes both inside and outside of regular book club meetings, book-related and otherwise.
Looking for ideas or inspiration to enhance your own group's time together? Just curious about what other book clubs do? Check out our summary of the results below.
