For Book Clubs
Hi, and welcome to my book club page. If your book club
has included one of my books in its selections, thank you!
I'm thrilled! I’m happy to conduct an on-site or a telephone
discussion with your book club, if you like, as your location
and my schedule permits. To explore this possibility, begin
by clicking here to email an
inquiry.
Free Press and I hope you enjoy the novel and the material
we’ve included in the back of the trade paperback edition,
including a list of suggested discussion
questions to get things going, an interview,
and an author
profile from the Nashville Scene written by Maria Browning,
published around the time Sufficient Grace debuted in hardcover.
Book clubs or reading groups are wonderful! They allow us share stories regularly
and more fully enjoy the experience of a book or come to
a deeper understanding of its meaning, and to get to know
each other better through literature. Whether we read stories
that resonate with our own experience or stories that open
a door on an experience foreign to us, we are enriched by
the books we read. That sharing of story with each other,
bringing in the varieties of compassion, judgment, sense
of humor, and narrative desire represented in a group of
readers increases our level of literacy by expanding a single
reading experience into a broader understanding of how stories
are read and interpreted through a variety of perspectives
and tastes. Through the characters and circumstances in
the stories we read we examine vicariously our human flaws
and potential for compassion and redemption, and sometimes
we can sit around and laugh at a wonderfully funny look
at the stumbling and fumbling and bumbling we do in this
life.
If you’ve selected Sufficient Grace or What Travels With
Us for your book club’s discussion, we’d love to include
a photograph of your group in our scrapbook. To send an
image along with a short statement about your club, click
here.
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“I would ask you to remember this one thing,” said Badger. “The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is how people care for themselves.”
—Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel
Human beings require stories to give meaning to the facts of existence . . . ever since we can remember, all of us have been telling ourselves stories about ourselves, composing life-giving autobiographies of which we are the heroes and heroines. If our stories are coherent and plausible and have continuity, they will help us to understand why we are here, and what we need to pay attention to and what we may ignore.
—Neil Postman, media theorist
We turn to fiction for some slight hint about the story in life we live.
—Robert Penn Warren
Things don’t often look the way you think they do. Pay them the simple honor of watching their lines and shadows till they tell you their secrets.
—Bridge Boatner in Tongues of Angels,
a novel by Reynolds Price
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