Book Club Books (by Barbara)

I guess I can write on this blog, since I’m Retired in Austin, too.

Almost two years ago, I was invited to join a book club with some ladies from church. I decided it might be interesting, since I like to read (at last count, I have read 121 books this calendar year). Of course, what I usually read comes in two categories. The first are mysteries. The others are religion/theology books – either that I’m supposed to read for school, or that are about topics that catch my interest – such as the 6 I’ve read on the women's question since we discussed 1 Timothy 2 in Bible class (and the 3 others I have waiting.)

I suspected the book club would introduce me to more literature type/less popular fiction books and things that I wouldn’t ordinarily pick and boy has it.

I’ve read non-fiction stories about real people, such as Glass Castle, a memoir by a woman who grew up in a very strange family, but she and her two siblings have turned out to be regular people; Kabloona, the story of a man who in the 1940s spent 15 months living with the Inuits (Eskimos) above the Arctic Circle; and Same Kind of Different as Me, the story of an art dealer, his wife and a poor black man they met in a soup kitchen in Dallas and formed a relationship with.

I learned a lot about history through non-fiction books such as Devil in the White City (Chicago World Fair of 1893); and Isaac’s Storm (1900 Galveston hurricane – although I quit that one in the middle). I learned a lot more than I’d known before about autism - in the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, (fiction, but written as a memoir) although I didn’t find it an enjoyable read.

I enjoyed Moolokai, the story of a leper colony in Hawaii in the early 1900s, so much that I read another by the same author which was the story of Korean mail order brides, who came to Hawaii in the 1920s.

Two books I enjoyed and recommended to Dad and that he liked were Water for Elephants, a story about running away and working in a circus, and the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. We meet in different people’s homes and the hostess for the discussion of the Guernsey Literary Society was a woman who lives in England six months of the year and is in a book club there. Hearing her tell some of the stories her English friends, some of whom were adults during the war years, tell made that discussion really interesting.

I’ve enjoyed some of the books and not enjoyed others. Some I thought the writing was good, but the story I didn’t care for. Atonement was one of those. (I didn’t like the movie, either.) I thought the story in Same Kind of Different as Me was somewhat touching and inspiring, but was poorly written.

I haven’t decided where I’m going to come down on World Without End, by Ken Follett, which is the summer selection for our August meeting. That’s if I finish it. - it’s over 900 pages long, and I’ve been reading 3 or 4 evenings and am less than 300 pages into it. If I don’t finish it before vacation next week, I probably won’t return to it.

If you’ve not fallen asleep from boredom, and if you’ve read any of the above, let me know what you think. One of our members said at one meeting, “It was hard to discuss this book, because everybody likes it. You need some disagreement for good discussion.” Maybe I like that statement because she and/or I are usually the one(s) who disagree.