Not One of Our Book Group's Selections

At our recent book club meeting we were discussing the last time we had been consumed by a book. I had recently read The Help by Kathryn Stockett, and it was the type of book that made me want to leave work early so I could delve back in to see what the characters would do next. I highly recommend it!

I then read Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares. This is the first adult-level book in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. I loved the movies, and I hoped the book would be as compelling. Unfortunately, it missed its mark, but not for reasons you might think. The book is well written. The characters are well developed. I really did care about what happened to them. But that may have been the problem, at least from my perspective. The book seemed to gloss over some pretty serious topics, and I felt Ms. Brashares did a disservice to her audience, especially seeing as that audience is the grown up girls who read the Sisterhood... series.

Here were my two primary concerns, given that audience: (spoiler alert!!!!)

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First, Bridget found out she was over five weeks pregnant after a night of binge drinking, but nothing was ever mentioned about the concern of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). According to the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (NOFAS), "FASD does not just occur in children of mothers who abuse alcohol or are heavy drinkers. The latest research shows that as little as two drinks in early pregnancy or four drinks all at once (a binge episode) can kill developing brain cells." (http://www.nofas.org/educator/)

I would have loved for Ms. Brashares to have taken the teachable moment in her book -- geared toward young women -- to address the leading known and most preventable cause of mental retardation and birth defects.

The second concern is also related to Bridget and may have been a theme throughout the books, though, as I said, this is the only book I read, though I did see both movies. Throughout the book Bridget seems to be suffering from depression, some of which apparently becomes quite severe. Mental illness, including depression, is a disease. It's not something that will go away because a person's circumstances change or because she finds herself pregnant. Bridget seemed to be in need of intervention, and the story really glossed over the severity of depression -- a disease that is genetic, which the author seemed to understand by the portrayal of Bridget's mother.

Once again, there seems to be a missed opportunity to teach those readers who need intervention for their depression but who align themselves with a character such as Bridget who just seemed to snap out of it.

So, it's an OK read, but it's not great, especially given the fact that you won't really learn anything from it.

~Guida

Book Was A Bust!

So, Our Book Club met last night, and we even had our new member Amy. However, the consensus on the book, Little Chapel On the River: a Pub, a Town, and the Search for What Matters Most by Gwendolyn Bounds, was that, aside from being non-fiction, the book just didn't have that much to offer.

Sure, there were good points, and there were certain parts we actually liked, but no one LOVED the book. We didn't like that Bounds told stories about her grandparents but then stopped, sort of without notice. We liked that we were reminded of such an important event in history, September 11, but we didn't like that Bounds never returned to it. Navel-gazing aside, a sense of how she felt, why she wrote the book, why she needed to leave New York City all may have made the book more compelling. We liked some of the characters...we just didn't care about them, and we weren't really sure they were believable.

But we did answer the question about what matters most...and it's a place of belonging. But here's where the jury was still out. Could a place such as Guinan's Pub & Country Store really exist?

Do YOU have the place that, when you walk in, you just feel at home? And, do you have to grow up in a city in order to have that sense of belonging?

As a group we have a couple of those places -- restaurants, mainly -- and we're grateful to the people there who make us feel that way.

My First Blog for Our Book Group!

Woo hoo!

I finished reading the selection for June, Little Chapel on the River by Gwendolyn Bounds, and now I'm waiting until we discuss it on June 27. In the meantime, I get to blog about it!

The subtitle on the book is: a pub, a town and the search for what matters most, so, that's the question of the day: What matters most?

The story of the Little Chapel on the River is that, after the attacks on the Twin Towers, Bounds found herself homeless and shaken, and she finds solace at Guinan's Pub, about 50 miles north of New York City. According to the publisher, the book is one that "asks questions about the power of human decency and goodness and gives reason upon reason for one to hope that such places as Guinan's will never completely disappear."

While most of us don't live through the tragedy of planes flying into the World Trade Center towers right next to our apartment building as up close and personally as "the Gwendol" did, we all search for what matters most.

So, what does matter most, for you, today? And, perhaps more importantly, how do you communicate that?

~Guida

March Book Group Selection

"Man Walks Into A Room" by Nicole Krauss

A review by Adrienne Miller
Found wandering alone and incoherent in the Nevada desert is Samson Greene, a thirty-six year-old English professor who, it is revealed, has a brain tumor, the removal of which erases almost all of his long-term memory. Samson's life was cheerful and stable before his memory disorder, but when he's delivered back to his wife Anna in New York, it's clear they'll never be able to reclaim anything resembling the life they knew together. When Anna suggests Samson throw away his address book ("'It's depressing, all these people,'" Samson says), it seems as if she's finally throwing in the towel.
He befriends a student named Lana (watch out, men, for students named "Lana"), and leaves for the West again, this time hoping to get back what was lost there. He enrolls himself in an experimental memory research facility, where he has a kind of memory transplant with another patient. Probably not the most comforting solution, but what was the alternative? "'In the end,'" a character says, "'we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible.'"
By turns creepy, witty, austere, and vibey, Man Walks Into a Room — like The Body Artist, The Corrections, and the movie Memento (each dealt, in different ways, with memory disorders) — is a major contribution to the art of collective obliviousness and isolation, a lonely meditation on the nature of memory and loss.
Adrienne Miller is Esquire's literary editor.

Next book group is February 28th 2011

We will be reading "Cutting For Stone" by Abraham Verghese!
Available in paperback, hardcover, kindle, the audio book on CD is available at Southwest (right now) and I am 16th on the waiting list to download the book from the library.
Here are some specifics....

Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese, 2009  Knopf Publishing Group  541 pp.

In Brief, from http://www.litlovers.com/:

A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel—an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others. (From the publisher.)

M E R R Y C H R I S T M A S !!

My Christmas Gift to "Our Book Group"

It is my hope that this blog will serve as a chronicle of our book groups journeys through great books and snoozers. This is where you can come to find out what book has been chosen (if you happened to have missed a meeting), who will be hosting the next book group and most importantly WHEN is the next book group.

Also, you can post comments or afterthoughts about a particular book or link to something interesting - no expectations though :)

You can look back to books that we have read on the "Books of Reading Past" page and add your ideas to the "Future Reads" page.

January 13th, 2011 - Book The Immortal Life of Henrieta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot -  Here is an editorial review of the book that we will discuss on January 13th.
From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution--and her cells' strange survival--left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? --Tom Nissley