Colonialism and Independence
A Bend in the River (V.S. Naipaul)
Burmese Days (George Orwell)
A Good Man in Africa (William Boyd)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene)
Kim (Rudyard Kipling)
Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie)
Out of Africa (Isak Dinesen)
A Passage to India (E.M. Forster)
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
The Quiet American (Graham Greene)
A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth)
Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
White Teeth (Zadie Smith)

California Dreamin’
Big Sur (Jack Kerouac)
The Confession of Max Tivoli (Andrew Sean Greer)
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
Daughter of Fortune (Isabel Allende)
Devil in a Blue Dress (Walter Mosley)
East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers)
House of Sand and Fog (Andre Dubus III)
The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)
L.A. Confidential (James Ellroy)
The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)
The Mark of Zorro (Johnston McCulley)
Mildred Pierce (James M. Cain)
Oil (Upton Sinclair)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion)
Tales of the City (Armistead Maupin)
Two Years Before the Mast (Richard Henry Dana)
White Oleander (Janet Fitch)

For Religious Characters, I'd add Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen. Beautifully written.

Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz for Religious Characters and Settings

Ooh, also, Lamb by whatshisname. Christopher Moore

I want to put Ken Kesey's The Last Roundup in California Dreamin',but I'm not positive that's right.

Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, Tortilla Flats, just about any Steinbeck but those are my favorites.

For bookish, I'm not sure if Anne of Green Gables might work?

I'm not sure if Anne of Green Gables might work?

Since I haven't read it, I'm not either.

This is why I ask the hivemind.

And if something looks like it wouldn't fit a category, please let me know. A lot of this is going on brief Wikipedia or Goodreads descriptions.

Well, my instinct is that it would, but she's not a traditional bookish introverted character.

How could I have forgotten Lamb ? It's one of the salonista'a favorite books.

Steinbeck is the reason for the California theme. When people selected authors of focus, Steinbeck, Greene, and Dickens were the most popular. But I think reading just one author will not work as well with the salon concept. Russian authors was our least succesful topic, mostly because it meant we dissected books like in a book club, rather than discussing the general theme. So I basically chose themes that thos eauthors could fit into fairly easily.

Well, the "book" books are pretty centered on reading or writing.

Oh, for war, "The Things They Carried"? If you also do nonfiction, there's "Achilles in Vietnam", which is good paired with The Iliad.