on book clubs and snobbery

Dear Jocelyn Bowie:

We totally don't know each other, which is probably a good thing, as you apparently hate book clubs.

Which, of course, explains why things didn't work out so well for you. It appears you joined a book club in your new town for the sake of networking, which was probably your first mistake. Book clubs aren't about making business connections, they are about eating good food and making new friends and enjoying general awesomeness.

You got all snobberiffic about your new friends' book picks. I kind of get that. We've all had those moments. I recently got totally high school because a co-clubber chose The Catcher in the Rye, and I followed up his selection with Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. It was a bad move. All revenge-y, very ninth grade. But generally, I am in a book club so that I can read stuff I would never think of picking up on my own. If I only wanted to read books I expect to like, why would I be in a book club?

(Imagine all the beautiful works I would have missed if not for book club? Like Sweetness in the Belly? Black Bird? The Time in Between?)

But, Miss Bowie, did you really have to give an interview to the New York Times mocking the hell out of your former fellow book clubbers? If you think you were being polite when you told them you weren't into fiction, you totally scratched that by telling the New York Times you lied. People, like, read that newspaper, eh? All over the world.

Not cool, dude. And the Library Girl glasses only make you seem more pretentious. But maybe I'm the only person in North America who read this article and felt the need to share?

Sincerely,
Assy McJudgesalot

yet another book club

http://www.cjob.com/station/blog_adler_bookclub.aspx

Thanks to a friend for pointing out this link.... Now we can all take a moment to wonder at the effects of celebrity on private radio broadcasters listened to mostly by people who drive trucks. (At least it's not Rutherford? Whose first book, I assume, would be The Prince, and whose follow-ups might include the latest Harper biography?)

"Adler nation." ".... truly privileged in being part of something new and very special." (Because no one has ever come up with this broadcast-book concept before. Not some lady in Chicago and certainly not a national public broadcaster.) ".... one of the planet's top publishers."

Sigh. Okay, I'll stop picking now. Turns out yesterday was Grouch Day. But today I have no excuse.

(Top 5 books I would list should I ever become a radio personality/minor celebrity in charge of a book club and somehow bettering the nation's literacy:

1. Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood -- hah, you thought I'd pick Handmaid's Tale, eh? Too obvious. This tome is a better think piece on femininity.
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen -- super obvious. After asking people to read Persuasion last autumn, I'm afraid of further ruining Austen for anyone who's never read her.
3. The Stone Carvers, Jane Urquhart -- a romantic, startling reflection of First World War-era Canada.
4. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle -- an excellent children's novel, possibly my all-time favourite. Publishers turned down the novel several times, making L'Engle re-write it and re-write it, honing it to perfection.
5. A new entry, and, I think, a starting- or end-point for a paper on the Jewish-American woman's experience in literature. I'm not sure if it's the start or end because, frankly, I'm not overwhelmingly familiar with how much Jewish-American women's literature there is out there. The Guy Not Taken, Jennifer Weiner.

Okay, that's enough for today. Surely all my choices will change tomorrow, or within the hour. Like, immediately I want to switch Urquhart for David Bergen's The Time in Between. Or Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan. And maybe L'Engle should be replaced by The Time Traveller's Wife? And do I really want to end the list off with a group of short stories by Weiner? Even if I did think "Swim" was absolutely gorgeous, does Weiner belong on the same bookshelf as Austen? Even if I was impressed by her notes at the end of the book, which explained how she came to write each piece, and in what year?)

fathers and daughters

I have finished Bergen's The Time in Between, and pledge not to ruin it for fellow book club members.

However, I am struck by how the writer manages to centre the story around a conflict between a father and daughter who narrate from different points in time. Whether they meet in the book is irrelevant; what binds and tears them is their understanding of each other. Or lack of understanding.

Early on, Bergen writes of the way Charles Boatman's eldest daughter, Ada, follows and listens carefully to him, whether as a child, teenager, or adult, long after her siblings have lost interest. She is always trying to collect the threads of who he might be in the hopes of tracking the strands to the truth.

Her younger brother calls this a heavy weight only she bears.

I wonder if this is the curious way of daughters everywhere.



source of picture

connections

Is it spring yet?

I don't know what it is about February.... the taste of still-grey days that stretch past an 8 a.m. dawn and 4 p.m. dusk, the cold that continues to whip brutally against your thighs..... It's as though spring is fighting its way out of winter. But it's a long freaking battle yet.

Maybe that's why I long to be somewhere else, if only through reading. I want a $15 ticket to sunshine and warmth. Even mugginess and perspiration. Anything to get away from the feeling that my toes are actually separate from my body, or that the skin on my right index finger will crack apart enough to reveal bone.

I'm reading David Bergen's The Time in Between.

I probably shouldn't talk too much about it here, on the off-chance members of my book club are reading this.... but suffice to say it's a mystery of culture and understanding and love rather than the mystery of a missing person's case....

Ada and Jon are in Vietnam to find their father, Charles, who has disappeared.

Bergen, a Canadian, eases the reader into an unsteady relationship with Vietnam; the country becomes something of a lover you know you can't trust. This lover certainly cheats on you, is always looking for something better than what you have to offer.

Anyway, I find this graph, about how Charles perceives his oldest daughter, fascinating:

".... He worried about her; she was too aware. She watched him, and by doing this she gauged the tone of her own life. He was afraid she would end up desperate like him."

**source of photograph