This week, we’re sharing some options if you like community reads or belong to a book group. (If you don’t belong to a book group, join one of the Library’s regular monthly adult groups. We’d love to see you!
Below, find titles selected for May by celebrity book clubs, and, much more locally, by our own librarians. Each of the selections below offers something intriguing, thought-provoking, inspiring worth talking about.
I’ve been a librarian here in Pasadena, myself, for 20+ years, and led a few different book groups during that time. So, I’m also including some of my favorite book group reads–older, perhaps off the beaten path titles–that groups enjoyed and that engendered wonderful discussions.
For all things book group related at PPL, visit our Book Groups web page.
The Immortal Woman by Su Chang 2025
PPL Online Book Group: Saturday, May 24
By turns wry and lyrical, a generational story of identity and freedom that reveals a rarely seen insider’s view of China’s contemporary history.
The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean 2006
Structured like a “memory palace,” Dean’s debut novel is a lovely, contemplative work. It wafts between the present-day life of Marina, a Russian-American woman in the Pacific Northwest with Alzheimer’s, and the WWII Siege of Leningrad, which Marina (barely) survived, living in the cellar of the Hermitage, where she was employed as a docent. An elegy on life and death, memory and forgetting, pain and peace.
The Eyes & The Impossible by Dave Eggers 2023
West Pasadena Book Group: Saturday, May 17
Free dog Johannes’ job is to observe everything that happens in his urban park and report back to the park’s three bison elders, but changes are afoot, including more humans, a new building, a boatload of goats, and a shocking revelation that changes his view of the world.
Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry 2025
Reese’s Book Club
Reese: “The plot follows two journalists competing for the chance to interview a prominent socialite who has been missing for 30 years. What unfolds between them? I won’t give away any spoilers, but trust me, it’s so good!”
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey 2012
A stunningly beautiful book, based on an old Russian fairy tale of the same name which figures in the plot. It has its magical elements mixed in with a very beautifully-written story of a middle-aged couple making a go of farming in Alaska in the early 1920s. Ivey’s prose is gorgeous; her writing evokes the cold, lonely, and hard life as well as the glittering, brilliant beauty of the setting. The author is from Alaska, and the sense of place–her knowledge of the nature there–is a vital part of this novel’s strange, sad beauty.
Audition by Katie Kitamura 2025
Dakota Johnson’s Tea Time
Tea Time: “One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love. You’ll never be the same after this one.”
The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei 2024
Octavia E. Butler Science Fiction Book Club: Saturday, May 31
Maya Hoshimoto was once the best art thief in the galaxy. For ten years, she returned stolen artifacts to alien civilizations–until a disastrous job forced her into hiding. Born off-world and infected by an alien virus from a young age, she receives the occasional vision of the future. Now she just wants to enjoy a quiet life on Earth as a graduate student of anthropology. Until an old friend comes to her with a job she can’t refuse: find a powerful object that could save an alien species from extinction.
The Names by Florence Knapp 2025
Read with Jenna
Jenna: “We watch these three different realities take place over a lifetime. We watch a family who comes together, grows apart, and we meet this boy whose name, in three different ways, predicts who he will be. It’s a book about second chances. It’s a book about family, it’s a book about hope.”
Matriarch: A Memoir by Tina Knowles 2025
Oprah’s Book Club
Oprah: “A fascinating memoir of Tina Knowles’s journey to become the global figure she is today.”
Twist by Colum McCann 2025
Emma Roberts’ & Kara Priess’ Belletrist
A haunting, globe-spanning novel about two men repairing the world’s broken internet cables while confronting the deeper fractures in their own lives, love, and histories.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng 2017
Allendale Book Discussion: Saturday, May 10
From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Our Missing Hearts comes a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa 2009
What a lovely, lyrical, quietly intriguing novel. A very simple plot, about a housekeeper (a single mother of a young boy)and the man she goes to work for (a retired math professor). This housekeeper (who never finished high school), her son, and the professor (who has severe memory problems from brain damage sustained in a car accident many years before) develop a beautiful loving relationship to one another, and pretty much all of that relationship is expressed and navigated via numbers, mathematical principles and philosophies. Such a beautiful story about love, memory, and family.
The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei 2025
Good Morning America Book Club
In this dazzling debut, Stegner Fellow Jemimah Wei explores the formation and dissolution of family bonds in a story of ambition and sisterhood in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.