2025-2026 Book Club Reading Schedule

 

The Boys in the Boat// Daniel Brown

Hello April! ☔ As promised, we closed the voting for next year's book club reading schedule at  the close of yesterday afternoon's meeting. This year's voting cycle has been the best one yet! So many of you sent in nominations and voted! Thank you! We truly believe we have the best book club members in all the land, we appreciate you!

 

Up next for our May selection is Hudson Bay Bound, by Natalie Warren. We only have a small handful of copies so far, though we do have another handful coming from MN Link that we'll get distributed once they arrive, but if you don't need a copy of this title, would you please take a minute to leave a comment down below to let me know? It helps us maximize our efficiency!

 

 

Onward!

 

It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler. The emotional heart of the tale lies with Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not only to regain his shattered self-regard but also to find a real place for himself in the world. Drawing on the boys’ own journals and vivid memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, Brown has created an unforgettable portrait of an era, a celebration of a remarkable achievement, and a chronicle of one extraordinary young man’s personal quest. 

This book was very well received by almost everyone in attendance. They really liked Brown's writing, and thought the attention to detail with the character's he did highlight was very well done. We all really liked Joe and found him an inspiration. The final chapter with the short write up about each of the rowing team members was fantastic, as were the included pictures. The historical aspects woven into the book were also widely appreciated and gave members a sense of "what was going on in the world" surrounding the original story of the boys. In fact, it inspired one of our readers to do a little more digging into the time and place for some supplementary details. Nice!

 

On the other hand, for two of us, this book wasn't all that grand. These members agreed that Brown is a great writer and the depth of the handful of characters he shared was fantastic, however, they would have liked him to do the same portrayal of all 8 of the boys and their coaches. Where did each of them come from? What were their interrelationships like? How did they work through their differences, because surly, there were differences. They thought there was far too much time spent/focus on Germany and Hitler, a subject endlessly covered in a countless number of books. They thought all the details from every race that got them to the Olympics was monotonous in places and would have preferred a brief recap of any that weren't all that noteworthy. More or less, they thought the book was about 100 pages too long and a bit of a bore.   

What are your thoughts? Let us know down below! 👇

Did you enjoy The Boys in the Boat? Fans of the book also enjoyed, Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, The Women, by Kristin Hannah (coming up in June!), and The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon. All of these titles are available within the Viking Library System~ reserve your copy today!    

 The votes are in!

Would we recommend this to a friend to read?  YES

 
Would we recommend this to another book club for discussion?  Yes

                                                                                                                                             Rate the book 1-5 stars, with 1 being the lowest rating:  3.75 stars