Reese’s book club pick: We will be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo

From a fearless, internationally acclaimed activist, We Will Be Jaguars is an impassioned memoir about an indigenous childhood, a clash of cultures, and the fight to save the Amazon rainforest and protect her people.

I can’t remember the last time Reese picked a memoir of this kind. It’s different from her usual picks, and might just be interesting enough for me to pick up.

GMA book club: The blue hour by Paula Hawkins

You might remember Hawkins’ bestseller “The girl on the train” which was also filmatized with Emily Blunt in the lead. I tried her book “Into the water, but found it hard to follow with 14 different pov’s. I skipped her last book A slow fire burning, but I saw this one in the books store the other day and put it on my future to buy – but now that it’s a book pick I might speed that up.

Welcome to Eris: an island with only one house, one inhabitant, one way out. Unreachable from the Scottish mainland for twelve hours each day.Once home to Vanessa: A famous artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared twenty years ago.Now home to Grace: A solitary creature of the tides, content in her own isolation.But when a shocking discovery is made in an art gallery far away in London, a visitor comes calling.And the secrets of Eris threaten to emerge….

Read with Jenna: This motherless land by Nikki May

Quiet Funke is happy in Nigeria. She loves her art teacher mother, her professor father, and even her annoying little brother (most of the time). But when tragedy strikes, she’s sent to England, a place she knows only from her mother’s stories. To her dismay, she finds the much-lauded estate dilapidated, the food tasteless, the weather grey. Worse still, her mother’s family are cold and distant. With one exception: her cousin Liv.

Free-spirited Liv has always wanted to break free of her joyless family. She becomes fiercely protective of her little cousin, and her warmth and kindness give Funke a place to heal. The two girls grow into adulthood the closest of friends.

But the choices their mothers made haunt Funke and Liv and when a second tragedy occurs their friendship is torn apart. Against the long shadow of their shared family history, each woman will struggle to chart a path forward, separated by country, misunderstanding, and ambition.

Moving between Somerset and Lagos over the course of two decades, This Motherless Land is a sweeping examination of identity, culture, race, and love that asks how we find belonging and whether a family’s generational wrongs can be righted.

Service 95: On earth we are briefly gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

I read this about four years ago and it still lingers in my subconsious. my review of it was five stars:

This is a letter to an illiterate mother from her grown son, and all the things he never could tell her or make her understand.

There wasn’t a page in this book that didn’t fill my eyes with tears, both of known pain and unexpected joy. It’s original and poetic as it travels through the whole world through one voice and what is caught in the net of that one heart.

“We try to preserve life – even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.”

It can be both tender and hard and sometimes even at the same time. It’s sweet and a little bitter, sad but hopeful. As a mixed race child in a land that felt foreign to my own mother growing up, this struck a nerve in me that vibrated through my whole body. Literature like this is what helps the minority standing with their face to their shoes turn their gaze back to the world, because someone understands their very pain.

Vuong also has several references of time that kicks us into a moment of our own time and brings back waves of emotions. Where were you when the bullets rained in Orlando? Can you sing along to 50 cent? The title as well as the book brings about a nostalgia about the life we’re still living. I’ve pressed this book so hard against my chest so many times that it has penetrated it’s way through my chest and into my heart. I cannot recommend this enough! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Oprah’s bookclub: From here to the great unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough

In 2022 Lisa Marie asked her duagher to help finally finish her memoir. A month later, Lisa marie died and the world would never know her story in her own words. But she left behind tapes she had recorded for the book.

Riley used the tapes and her own voice to weave together a beautiful and moving story from inside the gates of Graceland. From the unique perspective of two generations. This book is a must read, for more reasons that the obvious ones.

A father’s fight by Robbie Parker

“Taking on Alex Jones and reclaiming the truth about Sandy Hook”

On December 14, 2012, Robbie Parker’s daughter, Emilie, was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in an unthinkable tragedy that changed both Robbie’s life and our country forever. By December 15, Alex Jones was live on air telling his listeners that the shooting was a hoax.

I can’t think of anything more infuriating and hurtful than this. These are the type of non-fiction books I always pick up. Already on my way to the bookstore!

The city and it’s uncertain walls by Haruki Murakami

We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.

Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves.

I’ve never read any of Murakami’s fiction books (only his “What I talk about when I talk about running) but I’ve heard they are of an aquired taste. I feel like I need to do some research before I dive into his world, so I don’t try to climb the tallest mountain on the first try.

She’s always hungry: stories by Eliza Clark

A woman welcomes a parasite into her body.

A teenager longs for perfect skin.

A scientist tends to fragile alien flora.

A young man takes the night into his own hands.

Unsettling, revelatory, and laced with her signature dark humor, Eliza Clark’s debut short story collection plumbs the depths of that most basic human feeling: hunger.

The sunflower house by Adriana Allegri

Family secrets come to light as a young woman fights to save herself, and others, in a Nazi-run baby factory—a real-life Handmaid’s Tale—during World War II.

In a sleepy German village, Allina Strauss’s life seems idyllic: she works at her uncle’s bookshop, makes strudel with her aunt, and spends weekends with her friends and fiancé. But it’s 1939, Adolf Hitler is Chancellor, and Allina’s family hides a terrifying secret—her birth mother was Jewish, making her a Mischling.

Guilt and Ginataan by Mia P. Manansala

This book is part of a cosy mystery series that I so desperately want to love. I tried reading the first book – Arsenic and adobo, but I could not get into it. I broke my heart. Following the alphabet, were already at G – but I’m going to try again – starting at A and follow the alphabet.

Autumn is in full swing for the town of Shady Palms—the perfect time for warm drinks, cozy cardigans, and…dead bodies?

The annual Shady Palms Corn Festival is one of the town’s biggest moneymakers, drawing crowds from all over the Midwest looking to partake in delicious treats, local crafts, and of course, the second largest corn maze in Illinois. Lila Macapagal and her Brew-ha Cafe crew, Adeena Awan and Elena Torres, are all too happy to participate in the event and even make a little wager on who can make it through the corn maze the fastest—but their fun is suddenly cut short when a dead body is found in the middle of the maze…and an unconscious Adeena lies next to it, clutching a bloody knife.

The lake of lost girls by Katherine Greene

It’s 1998, and female students are going missing at Southern State University in North Carolina. But freshman Jessica Fadley, once a bright and responsible student, is going through her own struggles. Just as her life seems to be careening dangerously out of control, she suddenly disappears.

Twenty-four years later, Jessica’s sister Lindsey is desperately searching for answers and uses the momentum of a new chart-topping true crime podcast, Ten Seconds to Vanish, that focuses on the cold cases, to guide her own investigation. Soon, interest reaches fever pitch when the bodies of the long-missing women begin turning up at a local lake, which leads Lindsey down a disturbing road of discovery.

In the present, one sister seeks to untangle a complicated web of lies.
In the past, the other descends ever deeper into a darkness that will lead to her ultimate fate.

Variation by Rebecca Yarros

Before she wrote fourth wing, she wrote several romcom books I’ve heard, and with this she returns to her chicklit. I have only read fourth wing, and it wasn’t really to my taste, but maybe I should try one of her romance books before I write her off.

Elite ballerina Allie Rousseau is no stranger to pressure. With her mother’s eyes always watching, perfection was expected, no matter the cost. But when an injury jeopardizes all she’s sacrificed for, Allie returns to her summer home to heal and recover. But the memories she’s tried to forget rush in and threaten to take her under.

I love a good ballerina story! Sign me up!

Brightly shining by Ingvild Rishøi

This is a translated book from Norwegian called “stargate”, I personally don’t see why they had to change the name because stargate was the name of the bar where the father in the story would go. (And a famous one under a bridge in Oslo.)

I remember reading this back when it came out and I found it lacking in diversity for the area where it’s supposed to take place. But it is a “girl with the matchsticks” type of christmas tale about a girl selling christmas trees living with an alcoholic father. It’s definetly worth a read. And now it got traction being posted by dua lipa.