Book Club Picks for May 2021 By Gilcy Aquino | May 12, 2021
Just as April showers brought the gift of May flowers, we’re bringing you the long-awaited book club picks for this month. Whether you’ve started to feel antsy stuck at home or feeling in need of a change because the path you’re on isn’t the right one for you, these book club picks are sure to keep you
Fully Booked.
by Nancy Jooyoun Kim (Park Row)
Recommended for: Those of us with immigrant parents who wonder what their lives might have been like before settling down in America with a sprinkling of murder mystery thrown in for good measure.
CBS News
The Book Report: Reviews from Washington Post critic Ron Charles (May 9)
By Washington Post book critic Ron Charles
With summer on the horizon, you may be looking for a new book to savor over vacation. Here are just a few you might enjoy: Penguin Gold Diggers (Penguin), a debut novel by Sanjena Sathian, has already been picked up by Mindy Kaling for an upcoming TV series. This effervescent social satire is about the children of Indian immigrants who are determined to succeed in America while honoring their parents culture.
The narrator is a high school boy who discovers that the Indian American girl next door has figured out a magical way to melt down gold jewelry and drink it to ingest all the dreams and hopes invested in that shiny bling.
CBS News
Book excerpt: Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian
Read an excerpt below: Penguin
My vigils over the Dayals were interrupted by library trips, where I was stuck researching the upcoming debate topic. A bunch of high schoolers would spend the year discussing the fossil fuel crisis, something that felt distant, even invented, from my perspective amid Atlanta s gas-guzzler-crammed highways, where all seemed quiet, the apocalypse staved off in the comfort of concrete suburban stasis.
My parents had feared debate at first, because of the tournaments that took students out of town on weekends. Surely my mother imagined
nonsense playing out beneath the noses of the chaperones in Howard Johnson hotels. But they relented when talk at Indian parties centered on the clarity of purpose that debate offered you have one job, and it is not to tell the truth about the fossil fuel crisis. It is simply to win. Debate gave children ambition, the Indian parties concluded. Ambi
The Vox Book Club spent April reading Akwaeke Emezi’s
The Death of Vivek Oji, a ferocious and kaleidoscopic novel about the mysterious death of a young man in Nigeria. And at the end of the month, we met with Emezi live on Zoom to talk the whole thing through. Together, we discussed who Emezi thinks of themself as writing for, how the love story of
Vivek Oji came together, and why Emezi currently has a list of
17 books to write. (One of them is a romance novel!)
You can relive our full conversation in the video above (click the “cc” button at the bottom right corner of the player to turn on captions). And to keep up with what’s ahead for the Vox Book Club as well as general book news, sign up for our newsletter, which goes out roughly twice a month. Next up, we’re getting ready to talk about our May book, Sanjena Sathian’s
This May, the Vox Book Club is reading Sanjena Sathian’s assured and immersive debut novel,
Gold Diggers. It’s got alchemy, heists, and diaspora politics, and it’s the kind of book that makes me have a lot of thoughts about Jonathan Lethem’s 2003 novel
Fortress of Solitude.
We’ll be talking about the whole thing with Sathian live on Zoom on
Wednesday, May 19, at 5 pm Eastern, with audience questions encouraged. We’d love to see you there, so go ahead and RSVP right here. In the meantime,
subscribe to the Vox Book Club newsletter to make sure you don’t miss anything, and come back on Friday, May 14 for our on-site discussion.