Deacon King Kong by James McBride

I loved this book but probably never would have read it if not for my book club. It was slow starting out - so many characters with crazy names, but once you get to know them, and their neighborhood, you are hooked.
McBride tackles really deep racial issues but in a way that is not too "lecturey" (I made that word up). He just tells it like it is for these people living in a neighborhood that is changing.  The drug scene is destroying their Brooklyn community and their youth.  There were passages that I had to read twice because they were so moving, and so true.
But at the heart of this book, it's the story of a seemingly wacky drunk, Deacon King Kong (everyone has a nickname, which made it hard to follow sometimes.) The story revolves around Sportcoat (that is his real nickname) shooting a young man (drug dealer) who used to be his student in Sunday school. Sportcoat has no recollection of this shooting (he's always drunk) but there are those out to get revenge.  The story meanders around this neighborhood, introduces all kinds of sympathetic characters (who are sometimes mobsters.) It all takes place in the late '60s when these neighborhoods were so impacted by the drug scene.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

This was a great read. Engrossing, page-turner with truly interesting and diverse characters.  It strays all over the place and I don't mean that in a bad way. The story starts in Toronto and crisscrosses all over the world over many decades, in a plot that is engrossing. This is a story involving "money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it.