Book clubs for seniors are a great way to keep your mind sharp and stay socially engaged with other seniors — or with book lovers of all ages. The easy part might be finding fellow bibliophiles in your neighborhood or senior living community. The challenging part can be coming up with great book club books to read.
Fortunately, we’ve put together a list of eight must-read books in 2022. It covers a wide range of topics and interests, and includes both fiction and nonfiction selections. With our list, you should have no problem choosing a few crowd-pleasing book club recommendations for your next senior book club gathering.
And if you live at a senior living community with oodles of services and amenities but with no senior book club, start one! Book clubs are just as well-known for their social opportunities as they are for the excellent books you’ll discover.
8 must-read books in 2022
Let’s start with a few nonfiction options — because there’s no rule at a book club that all selections must be fiction:
- “The Nineties,” by Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote “The Ethicist” column for The New York Times Magazine.
As one of America’s great chroniclers of pop culture comes this entertaining romp through the twilight years of the 20th century, considered the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional. Roving across flashpoints in movies, music and politics, Klosterman captures a world where apathy was the defining tone, art was experiencing a seismic shift, and celebrity culture was on the eve of a digital explosion. - “True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us,” by Danielle J. Lindemann. Have you ever been bashed for watching “Survivor” or “The Bachelor”? Pick up this definitive sociological guide to reality television, and the next time someone mocks your guilty pleasure, you’ll know exactly what to say.
In compulsively readable chapters on everything from “COPS” to Honey Boo Boo, Lindemann illuminates how reality television both reflects and creates us, while also codifying our deep conservatism and fragile hierarchies of power. “Reality television teaches us how the categories and meanings we use to organize our worlds are built on unsteady ground,” Lindemann argues. Reading “True Story” is like seeing the matrix — you’ll never watch Bravo the same way again. - “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” by Bob Odenkirk. Odenkirk’s memoir might have also been titled “Obscurity Obscurity Obscurity Fame.” He was a cult favorite of comedy fans in the late 1990s for his work on the sketch-comedy series “Mr. Show,” but his supporting role in “Breaking Bad” and his starring turn in the show’s prequel, “Better Call Saul,” made him a household name. His memoir charts his dogged and unlikely path from Chicago comedy clubs to leading man.
- “Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library,” by Amanda Oliver. Library-goers have long labored under a romanticized portrait of libraries as sacred spaces. In “Overdue,” a former librarian explores the importance of demanding better from what we love.
Through the lens of her time as a librarian in one of Washington D.C.’s most impoverished neighborhoods, Oliver illuminates how libraries have long been vectors for some of our biggest social ills, from segregation to racism to inequality. Now, as unhoused patrons take refuge in libraries and librarians are trained to administer Narcan, our overlapping mental health care and opioid crises come to a head in these spaces. At once a love letter and a call to action, “Overdue” dispels mythology and demands a better future. You’ll never see libraries the same way again.
Many senior book club members pick fiction books for the sheer escapism of novels about time travel, parallel worlds, even family drama (which we read with glee because it’s not our families’ drama!). Here are a host of excellent fiction choices that are must-read books for 2022. Share these recommendations with your senior book club:
- “Light Years from Home,” by Mike Chen. If your group has never tried science fiction before and has goals in 2022 to branch out of your comfort zone, Mike Chen is a perfect author to start with. He writes sci-fi that doesn’t feel like sci-fi, and his newest book is about a family struggling to stay together and communicate. And they also happen to have had an encounter with aliens. It’s a little bit adventure, a lot of family drama, and a great choice for your book club to discuss anything and everything in between.
- “The Leopard is Loose,” by Stephen Harrigan. For book groups who enjoy historical fiction, this book about a young boy in the 1950s is a great pick for discussion on growing up and trying to make sense of the world. Grady is just a kid and doesn’t really understand what the war was all about, but he knows it was something big for the grown-ups in his life. His father never came home, and his family seems elsewhere. His first glimpse of fear, though, comes in the form of a leopard that escapes the Oklahoma City Zoo, and he starts to learn about safety and the things that matter.
- “Yinka, Where is Your Huzband?” by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn. A fun and uplifting book club book for 2022 is “Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?” This part-romance, part-family story is about a woman in her 30s who is constantly being asked why she’s still single. When her cousin announces her engagement, Yinka begins her plan to find a date to accompany her to the wedding, but learns along the way she may not need one after all.
- “One Italian Summer,” by Rebecca Serle. This is a novel about grieving and understanding a parent from the author of “In Five Years,” a book published in 2020 but also good to add to your senior book club recommendation list.
When her mother dies just before their planned mother-daughter trip to Italy where her parents met, Katy decides to still spend the summer exploring the Amalfi Coast as she grieves. Magically, Katy meets a younger version of her mother, giving Katy a whole new perspective on her mother as a person.
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