“The Reading Cure”  by Arthur Blaustein, published in Mother Jones — with observations about the importance of good books in living a fulfilling, meaningful life and preserving democracy, along with tips about how and why to form a book club

“As a reading group participant, you will find yourself involved in a perpetual search for stimulating books. So I’ve provided a balanced list of thirty-five novels by contemporary authors that I believe will enliven the mind and nourish the soul. The novels I recommend are a healthy antidote to living in Entertainment Nation – and reflect that the best in our character is carried in our literature.” 

• Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (Dutton). An unsparing, passionate, and gritty work about a young girl growing up in poverty. Resonates with integrity and empathy.
• Lisa Alther, Original Sins (Knopf). Set in the South, this intelligent and absorbing story details the challenges, dreams, and follies of the 1960s. Transcends the differences between races in an insightful and generous manner.
• Russell Banks, Continental Drift (Ballantine). An absorbing story about a frost-belt family that moves to Florida to find the good life. Instead, they find a nightmare.
• Charles Baxter, Shadow Play (Norton). The assistant city manager of a small, depressed town in Michigan sees his life fall apart when the chemical plant he lured to town turns out to be an environmental disaster.
• Saul Bellow, Herzog (Penguin). Keen insights into what it takes to maintain one’s individuality and civility while corporations dominate our culture and politics, and critical thinking gives way to the demands of social conformism and consumerism.
• Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack (Harvest). Remarkable and graceful. Explores the life of an aging Appalachian farmer amid America’s changing values.
• Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (Knopf). A poignant coming-of-age novel, with unforgettable characters, set in the Latino section of Chicago.
• E.L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (Plume). The most important political novel about the Cold War, the arms race, red-baiting, and McCarthyism.
• Michael Dorris, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (Warner). Compassionate and psychologically complex, this novel spans three generations of Native American women in the Pacific Northwest – on and off the reservation – who share a fierce independence and a love of family.
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Vintage). A powerful classic about race, individuality, and identity. A southern black man moves to New York and learns the many ways whites are unable to see him.
• Gretel Ehrlich, Heart Mountain (Penguin). Explores the experience of Japanese Americans exiled to a World War II relocation camp in Wyoming and their relationship with local ranchers.
• Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster (Algonquin). An exhilarating and endearing tale of an eleven-year-old orphan who calls herself “old Ellen,” and who moves from one woebegone situation to another with spirit and determination.
• Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River (Scribner). In a typical small town, the ordinary and secret lives of people and their relationship to politics disclose the quandaries and conflicts that allowed the greatest crime of the 20th century.
• Ernest Hebert, The Dogs of March (New England Press). Brilliant, sensitive, and funny. Captures what it was like to be unemployed in the 1980s. Set in New England, it’s the American dream gone belly-up.
• Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit (Ivy). A magical and compelling story about whites robbing the Osage Indian tribe of their oil wealth in Oklahoma.
• John Irving, The Cider House Rules (Bantam). A fine writer brings his incisive storytelling gifts to fruition with this excellent novel about choice, class, and Yankee common sense.
• William Kennedy, Ironweed (Penguin). A Pulitzer Prize winner’s shrewd study of the diceyness of fate. This modern Dante’s Inferno about life on skid row is especially poignant as homelessness continues to cast a shadow across our land.
• Susan Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees (Penguin). A stunning and lush story of race and gender set in South Carolina. In the struggle between bigotry and love, the latter wins out.
• Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (Harper Perennial). A wonderful tale of multiculturalism in Arizona. Explores themes of authenticity, community, integrity, and truth.
• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Vintage). A brilliant portrayal of the Chinese American experience. Kingston’s account of growing up Asian and poor adds a cultural richness to the landscape.
• Alan Lightman, The Diagnosis (Vintage). A Kafkaesque tale that questions America’s compulsive love affair with modern technology, efficiency, speed, money and “making it.”
• Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Bantam). This enduring masterpiece, set in small-town Georgia, is a compassionate study of how people confront the problems of poverty, race, class, and gender – and how they handle the conflicts of the human condition.
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (Plume). Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, this is a powerful story of the legacy of slavery. The central theme, the relationship between slave and master, illuminates the tragic complications underlying our historical experience.
• Faye Ng, Bone (Harper Perennial). In a clear and emotionally powerful novel, Ng takes us into the heart and inner secrets of a family in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
• John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War (Ballantine). Reveals how the economic and political “shell game” is being run on ordinary Americans. Part of the author’s New Mexico trilogy, it is a contemporary Grapes of Wrath, leavened with Mark Twain’s down-home humor.
• Ruth L. Ozeki, My Year of Meats (Penguin). A feisty Japanese American filmmaker takes on the beef industry, chemical corporations, and commercial advertising. Muckraking, witty and provocative.
• Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams (Dutton). A chronicle of middle-American family life, from the Depression to Vietnam, about identity, shifting values, and the ironies of a rapidly changing America.
• Phillip Roth, American Pastoral (Vintage). An unsparing story of the political excesses of the 1960s. How youthful idealism led to romantic, out-of-control, anti-liberal activism, which in turn laid the groundwork for the reactionary policies of Nixon and Reagan.
• Richard Russo, Empire Falls (Vintage). A passionate and rich examination of the working-class heart of small-town America, and the consequences of inequitable distribution of wealth in a de-industrialized society.
• E. Annie Proulx, Postcards (Collier). Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award. A remarkable story of the struggle of New England farmers to confront the loss of home and place in economic hard times.
• May Sarton, Kinds of Love (Norton). Three generations celebrate the American bicentennial in a small New Hampshire town. About truth, honesty, integrity – all those traditional virtues that have become unfashionable.
• Danzy Senna, Caucasia (Riverhead). Birdie Lee’s black father flees in the seventies, and her white, activist mother is forced to take the girl underground, where Birdie copes with adolescence and the complexities of her racial identity.
• Jane Smiley, Moo (Random House). The financial, academic, sexual, and political scandals of a Midwest university are laid bare in this satire of higher education.
• John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin). This classic novel of farmers forced to move West during the Great Depression electrified the nation and reminded us of our historical commitment to compassion, opportunity, and social justice.
• Alice Walker, Meridian (Fawcett). A powerful novel about civil rights activism in the South of the 1960s. Warm, generous, and complex, it challenges each of us to examine what it is to become a decent, responsible, and honorable person.