Underread when possible. Literary always. One call per month, first Tuesdays at 7:30pm ET.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Three friends grow up together in an idyllic English boarding school — and slowly come to understand what their lives are actually for. A quiet, devastating novel about the lives we're handed, the choices we don't make, and what it means to reckon with that too late.
Gen X was told to be practical. Follow the path. Don't expect too much. Most of us did. Now we're fifty and some of us are asking: did I live the life I actually wanted? Kathy and Tommy and Ruth ask that same question — under impossible circumstances we'll never face. But the question is the same. And Ishiguro never answers it, which means an hour of conversation won't be enough.
Percival Everett
Jim — renamed James — is no longer the backdrop. He's a fully realized man with an inner life, a secret language, and his own moral compass navigating the Mississippi River, antebellum America, and a freedom that could be taken from him at any moment. Huck Finn retold from the perspective of the person who was actually at risk. Pulitzer Prize, 2024.
We all read Huck Finn in school. We were told it was about freedom and friendship and a white boy learning to do the right thing. Nobody asked us what Jim thought about any of it — because the story wasn't about him. He was the backdrop. Percival Everett spent his career asking the question we weren't supposed to ask: what is happening inside the people who aren't given an inner life? James answers it. It won the Pulitzer. We have a lot to say.
Susan Butler
Susan Butler spent years in the archives piecing together the full Amelia Earhart — not the myth, the woman. Record-breaker, deliberate risk-taker, feminist before it was a comfortable word, and someone who made being unconventional look like common sense. The definitive biography of the aviator who planted herself in a generation of girls who couldn't quite explain why she mattered so much.
A lot of us read about Amelia Earhart as kids — whatever was on the library shelf — and couldn't quite articulate what she meant to us. She was brave. She flew planes. She disappeared. That was the story. But Butler found the woman underneath the myth: the calculated risk-taking, the complicated marriage, the deliberate construction of a public life on her own terms. Why did Amelia matter to us at eight? And does she mean something different now that we're old enough to understand the choices she was actually making?
Emma Straub
Alice turns forty, goes to sleep, and wakes up sixteen — in 1996, in her childhood bedroom, with her father alive and well downstairs. A time-travel novel that isn't really about time travel. It's about getting one more ordinary Tuesday with someone you're about to lose. 310 pages. Content warning: the engine of this book is a dying parent — grief and terminal illness are on the page.
1996 is not a costume in this book, it's a place, and we are the only people who can actually go back there. But that's not why it's on the list. Most of us are now the age Alice is when the book starts, doing the arithmetic on our parents. Straub wrote the fantasy we've all had at 2 a.m. — what would you do with one more regular day, knowing what you know — and then refuses to make it tidy. Come with something to say about what you'd change, or what you'd deliberately leave alone.
Sara Donati
1880s New York. Two women doctors navigating immigration, abortion rights, and a gilded city that doesn't particularly want them practicing medicine.
Underread, beautifully researched, and more relevant than it has any right to be. Two women fighting for the right to practice medicine in a city that keeps putting up walls — and the walls aren't just about gender. 1880s New York is flooded with immigrants, and the medicine of the era has very clear opinions about who deserves care and who doesn't. Sound familiar?
Liz Moore
Summer, 1975. A thirteen-year-old girl disappears from the Van Laar family's Adirondack summer camp — the same camp where her older brother vanished fourteen years before. Two timelines, a decades-old family secret, and the class divide between the old-money Van Laars and the people who work for them. A literary thriller that uses 1975 as a mirror.
We were the generation that grew up with stranger danger. Milk carton faces. The sudden mid-70s conviction that children were not safe. Liz Moore sets this novel in exactly that moment — 1975, a summer camp, a missing girl — and underneath the thriller is something that will feel very familiar: what it was like to be a child in the era when we learned the world wasn't as safe as we'd been told.
Ceone Fenn
November is yours to pick. Novelist Ceone Fenn joins us live on the December call, and we're reading one of her two books — you choose which. Option one: It Happened at Whisper Lake, present-day Northern Wisconsin, where a celebrated college coach is arrested for crimes at his lakefront camp and his wife loses everything she had nothing to do with. Option two: To Reap the Finest Wheat, Saskatchewan 1925, where a woman trades her life in L'viv for an arranged marriage and finds a grieving stepson and a husband who is respected in public and dangerous at home. Both are heavy. Both are about the people left standing next to the disaster. The vote is open on Substack.
Neither of these is the book its title suggests. They're serious, uncomfortable, and exactly the kind of story a room full of Gen X women has things to say about. Ceone Fenn — a friend, and a 30-year counseling veteran before she turned to writing — joins us live for Q&A on whichever one wins.
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