My book group discusses Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale and what it means to be a discerning reader

Last fall, my group enthusiastically endorsed starting the new year with The Nightingale, the runaway best seller that has garnered 16,521 reviews on amazon.com, 85% of which are 5 stars.  A couple of weeks before our January meeting date, the emails and texts began flying around:  “Very predictable;” “Beach book genre;”  “72% done.  Getting tedious.”  By the time the group met, most of us had finished and liked it a bit better.  Personally, I thought the last 1/3 redeemed the first 2/3 as the characters began to face moral dilemmas for which the right choice was not obvious, and this made it more interesting, but still, I would give the book no more than 3 stars.  Had we not read All the Light We Cannot See, set in the same time period and similar location, perhaps we would not have been such harsh critics.  The Doerr book is layered and sophisticated with beautiful language and imagery.  The Hannah book, by contrast, is fairly straightforward, telling rather than showing, and contains few surprises.  (I’m sure Kristin Hannah is laughing all the way to the bank.)

One group member said she was embarrassed to have recommended the book based on the encouragement of two other friends whom she said, “I thought were discerning readers!”  What does that mean, exactly?  Are the 14,000+ reviewers on amazon who LOVED (their caps) this novel less than discerning readers?  We wondered.  Are we book snobs?  My book group consists entirely of teachers, some practicing, some retired and with one exception, people with degrees in English.  Perhaps our eye for books is different because our business is the richness of language and the craft of narrative.  Thus, I think we read with different expectations, always on the lookout for a novel that is worthy to teach.  Can it be a great book if it isn’t something you’d put in the curriculum?  There are certainly books that I would not teach that are well written – I am currently reading Elizabeth George’s Banquet of Consequences, an excellent mystery with continuing characters who have been carefully crafted over the series – but its subject matter doesn’t lend itself to the classroom.  While the topics and issues of The Nightingale do very much belong in any literature study, the issues are not nuanced or developed in a way that warrants close reading and analysis. 

The group concluded that yes, we are, in fact, more discerning readers than many.  I recognize, however, that it is a continuum.  My husband’s book group (also teachers) reads Tolstoy and Doestoevsky in 200 page increments – heavy lifters by comparison.  Still, in an age with the prevalence of social media and with television and movies on demand, it’s great that those thousands of people are picking up a book and reading it. 

Recommendations from (discerning!) friends of other WW2 era books:

SUITE FRANCAISE-Irene Nemirovsky

SARAH’S KEY-Tatiana de Rosnay   

A TRAIN IN WINTER Caroline Moorehead

LOVERS AT THE CHAMELEON CLUB, PARIS 1932, Francine Prose