12 Book Club Picks for July

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Friday at last! Look busy while you catch up on bookish news.

This month there is a wide range of books selected offering a wonderful reading list, and certainly at least one book is a great fit for you. What have these 12 book clubs chosen this month? There’s an emotional YA novel set in California, a queer horror novel set in the ’90s, a sex therapist’s sexuality guide, a novel by an author who writes in a different genre each book, and a take-down-the-patriarchy reimagined fairy tale!

The data on book bans shows precisely the themes and topics that are being targeted and that have been targeted since early 2021 in this most recent wave of censorship. Among them are books by and about LGBTQ+ people, people of color, books that explore social and emotional learning, and books that explore sexuality and puberty. But there’s another segment of books targeted that has not been as deeply explored as the others–indeed, while PEN America’s data notes that books about health and wellbeing were the second most frequently banned in schools in the 2022-2023 school year, that category is so broad that it fails to specify that many of those books are about disability.

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Related: libraries are under siege.

Have you ever read nonfiction that reads like a thriller or like the most immersive novel? That’s narrative nonfiction! Narrative nonfiction uses various craft elements to create a story, not merely a reporting of events. The prose is usually written in a compelling, descriptive literary style, while still preserving the facts of the story.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Into Thin Air are perfect examples of this, along with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. All of these are true stories, but when you read the book, the authors are pure storytellers, allowing you to lose yourself in the book. They’re great books to read when you’re not sure what you want or if you need to break out of a reading slump.

If true crime is more your flavor, here’s a recommendation for you.

Before I dive into this week’s book recommendation, allow me to get personal for a moment. There’s a reason I’m thinking about this book in July. July is my brother’s birthday month, and I’m missing him a lot this year. I read this book a few years after my brother died from leukemia, and I immediately felt a really deep, personal connection with a lot of the specifics of this story. I think a lot of people will.

This book is one of my all-time favorites for a reason. It hits at some really rough emotional truths that had me sobbing, but there were also moments of real humor, believe it or not. I can’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t love this one. If you haven’t read it, please do!

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