Book clubs can be tricky for English teachers. We can be a bit...bossy when it comes to the relaxed literary discussion.
But four of my friends humored me this October when we got together at my place and formed what is now known as the
Decades Book Club. The five of us span five decades, from twenties to sixties. We are all teachers, most of use are mothers and wives, some of us have cats, all of us live reflective inner lives.
As I told them on Friday, the Decades Book Club is the best thing to happen to me this year.
Here's what we've read, and our take on each.
This was my suggestion because I love
Olive Kitteridge so much -- and we all did. We are, by nature, a group who loves character-driven literary novels like
The Lonely Polygamist and
A Prayer for Owen Meany.
We all liked
The Burgess Boys. It was a great starting place, and it led to lots of fruitful discussion about family and sibling dynamics. No one we loved as much as old Olive, but certainly worth our time.
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls was our least favorite selection. Some of us are big fans of Sedaris, some not so much, but we all kind of felt that he jumped the shark on this collection a bit, exposing new depths of psychological distress and unresolved family issues. (Also he starts waaaay too many paragraphs with "The thing about..." -- "The thing about Hawaii..." "The great thing about sea turtles," "The thing about my unresolved obsessive-compulsive need to pick up trash on the Irish countryside...") His voice is just a bit too navel-gazing to be relatable. This was the only book that some members of the club (cough, ahem, guilty) did not finish.
Though I do really recommend "Loggerheads," if you happen to have a copy lying around.
This, dear Reader, is a book to read with a really awesome and committed book club. It is long. Perhaps longer than it needed to be. And I will admit that I might not have finished it without that tiny bit of book-club peer-pressure. Which is so something I never would have admitted before that I needed! I am a Reader-with-a-capital-R! I have a book blog for crying out loud! I don't need wine-lubricated discussions on my Google calendar to get me to read!
Turns out, I really really do.
The Goldfinch, which, btw, all five of us finished in its entirety, is a tome, but it resulted in my favorite book discussion so far. And that discussion grew into a larger discussion about depression, self-medication, self-deception, and self-sabotage. And art. And philosophies for living and finding meaning.
Books are amazing.
My favorite read of the year. I love everything Lahiri does, though I will admit that it can be a bit uneven. This novel was so beautiful and sad, its characters so real. She had a beautifully detached way of story-telling that makes her voice so moving and yet, somehow, distant, like she is telling some kind of sad fairy tale.
This is the book out of the ones on my list that I would tell you without hesitation to pick up. I read it in a few days and lost myself entirely in its pages. A work of love and sadness. Read it.
Next up:
Beautiful Ruins.
I have always been a believer in the ways that books make us better. And I know myself to be so much more fulfilled when I can regularly lose myself to a book.
But as I've said before, reading, and as a result, thinking, can be hard to find time for.
I am beyond thankful for the incredible group of women who have allowed me to find time to think, to connect, to reflect, and most of all, to laugh and to feel so profoundly supported by our shared experience of living meaningfully in the frenzy of modern life.
I am better for it.
