Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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Game Change: Book Review & Movie Mention

    I have a lot to say about this book, but the bottom line is that while enlightening and challenging in some ways, it is not necessarily the King James of modern politics I expected it to be. And regarding the barely related HBO movie, it’s just apples and oranges. This is absolutely not a time when you can skim by with the movie and say you’ve got the content of the book. Not the same at all, you guys.
Game Change Book Review
   Julia and Gen suggested this book to me about a year ago, and I finally got around to reading it. Actually, it was quite by accident that I snagged it on clearance while grocery shopping and have thoroughly enjoyed every chapter since. Woohoo! Anyway, these smart, sassy ladies described Game Change as sort of a behind the scenes analysis of the 2008 Presidential election story, supposedly a well researched and scrupulously documented and verified truth telling of what really happened between the biggest candidates, both Democrat and Republican. 
   Okay. Let’s get something out of the way first. The nature of truth telling or truth accepting is that you have to trust the source, and while I love and trust my sister and friend, I don’t know these authors at all. And, you guys, I have seen that old Dustin Hoffman movie Wag the Dog, so I am skeptical enough about media motivation to read everything with big, chunky grains of salt. 
   That said, I will pay dues to the writers and publishers for beginning this book with a description of how to interpret it: Their use of quotation marks meant one level of exactness; their use of italics meant another. Sometimes they were patching together stories from multiple sources; other times they were offered detailed accounts first hand but could not name their sources. And so on. I read it with a general understanding of their “map legend.” So for the rest of this review, just periodically insert the words if this book is to be trusted.

   Okay.
   At first blush, do you know what I liked about this book? The fact they it tells a really important, complex story about a chapter of our nation’s history, but from an intimate perspective. The reader is offered a fairly solid description of key events leading up to the election of our first African American President, and this is something that will be studied for generations. We get to watch the election process unfold beginning with the candidates’ decisions to run in the first place. We get to see how the campaigning affected the candidates and their spouses. We get little glints of true light off of some of the characters that media coverage tends to either sanitize or demonize. And I just plain groove this you guys. Public decorum is good and necessary of course, but how fascinating is it to explore not the train wrecks but the contradictory realness of our movers and shakers? Love it.
   Specifically, and this was a big surprise to me personally, the book displays an incredible wealth of understanding about Hillary Clinton, a woman whose story is equally important to our history, even if she was not elected then. I have to say, nothing I have ever seen before sheds as much light and humanity on her than this book did. I may not agree with much of what I know about her politics, but as a woman, as a human being, I gained a lot of respect for her after absorbing what she has endured over the years and what her motivations seem to be. I stand among those guilty of judging her for her rigidity and failing to appreciate her “big picture.”
   But I cannot say that Game Change reads as unbiased.
   For all of its fact loving and even tempered delivery, I felt more and more like the book was guilty of exactly what the book itself observed of media during that election: favoritism toward Obama. In an overarching, pretty obvious way too. I got the feeling that the writers were fourteen year old girls fawning over a Twilight actor.
   Game Change repeatedly describes a troubling perception on the part of the Clinton campaign, the McCains, and others that the press and general public were so immediately and thoroughly enamored by Obama that they became a bit hypnotized by his speeches, regardless of the surrounding facts and regardless of the fitness of his opposition, etc. As time passed, the complaints certainly grew about the press’ blindness and tendency to be manipulated. Yikes.
   Again, this is something that can only be proven by a perfect bird’s eye view of all facts and considerations, but I can tell you that this book seems to have been very soft and very comfy toward our soon-to-be new President. It seems to be equally critical and equally unforgiving toward every other candidate, though to a slightly lesser degree Hillary Clinton.
   Even when peppered with unflattering or downright infuriating facts about Obama, story after story is told with a lyrical, almost fairy tale tone that glows softly and brightly against the grittiness lent toward every other main character. That was frustrating for me as a reader expecting something more encyclopedic. If this was a fiction novel, the hero was made clear from the beginning.
   This is not to say I don’t grasp and appreciate the emotional significance of these historic events; just that the epic is not told from quite the neutral position it claims.
   On top of this, the HBO movie that recently aired was a complete disappointment to me. It was all about Sarah Palin! As much as I enjoy just for entertainment purposes watching her speak (and by the way, Julianne Moore delivered an uncanny performance, WOW!), Palin’s appearance in the book was fractional at best. The meat of the story was between Clinton and Obama, and it was almost fully accomplished by the time Palin was introduced toward the end. So for the movie to be made so unrepresentative of the book is, to me, more of the tail wagging the dog. I also cannot help but notice that the same week that Game Change was aired on HBO, they also began promoting a new series called Veep, in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays an attractive but laughable female Vice President. Ouch. And shame on you HBO, for not trying harder to resist transparency.
   Perhaps now I’m the one who sounds a little biased. Maybe. But I can appreciate the book for what it was and use it as a jumping off point for looking more deeply into interesting characters. 
   Game Change, if not vettable* as a complete, true, and unbiased story, is at least a well written drama unto itself. It serves up a layered and rhythmic collection of interesting stories about truly fascinating people. The authors provide a little less scrumptious detail than a fiction writer might, for obvious reasons I suppose, but that little deficiency is more than compensated for by the substance of the stories and their implications.
   I have so very much more to say about this you guys, pages and pages of notes I intended to share, but the horses are hungry and I need to mix some bread dough for dinner then possibly do a Jillian Michaels workout video. Have you read Game Change? Do you have time to talk about it? This is not a book club selection, so I am kinda flying solo here and  would love to hear others’ reactions and insights! Thanks for another excellent reading recommendation, Julia and Gen! Love you like crazy!
Be Skeptical. Seek Truth. Vote.
xoxoxo
* Vettable is one of about a million words in this book which I have been dying to use myself since reading it. Another of the many gifts of Game Change is a dramatic spike in my vocabulary! I started keeping track of words I had to understand from context but look up for definition and came up with a pretty healthy list! LOL

Reviewing My New Manifesto

   Well, it happened again. I finished a book and am awash in mixed feelings. It reminds me of the last day of a school year when you loved your teacher so much, so deeply, that you can barely stand to say goodbye, yet the teaching is done and summer awaits. Tonight I am equal parts numb from the vigorous grooming and tingling with motivation to put this new knowledge into action.
   Studying Barbara Kingsolver’s memoir of her family’s twelve-month foray into strict locavorism has been a spiritual experience for me. No kidding. She offers us in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle a literary gumbo of earth science, animal husbandry, human cultural history, religion & morality (yep, I think those are different), politics, economics, and philosophy. With a hefty dash of humor. I read it on multiple high recommendations from trusted people, and now I suppose I’m offering my own:
   Buy this book. It is an inexpensive purchase (I spent less that seven bucks on my hardback copy, albeit second hand). Don’t check it out, because I predict you’ll be marking and dog-earing and highlighting yours a lot. I sure did. One way or another, if you love food, read this wonderful book. 
   If you have the gardening sickness or a penchant for raising your own edible animals, study these pages. I found them to be endlessly inspirational this week between monotonous chores. When I thought that the wheel-barrowing of dried manure would never end and the glorious day to plant my broccoli starts would never come, much less the clipping of fragrant basil, I just sat down with a glass of water and soaked up half a chapter of the book. And my bones found the energy they needed for a few more circuits of shoveling and  bed filling. Her words helped me to visualize my summer garden.
   Even if the mission of eating locally is not that appealing to you, it’s an incredible family story and raises a plethora of tantalizing debate topics for your smarmy dinner parties. 
   And yes, I know what a plethora is.
   There are so many things I could tell you about this book. Let me just try to tempt you a little rather than  rewrite her masterpiece:
Some of the Juicy Topics That Beg Further Discussion:
  • Environmental overdraft
  • Demand side management
  • Illusion of top soil
  • Realignment with the food chain
  • Food Culture, or lack thereof
  • Knowing the provenance of your food
  • Self sufficiency as an act of patriotism, pointing back to Thomas Jefferson
  • Amish values and the beauty of boundaries
  • Agricultural agnostic
  • Xantolo
  • Culture being the property of a species, not just of the wealthy
  • Growing pizza
  • Life as a zero-sum equation (time management comment)
  • The draw to garden again and again and again, despite hardship
  • Economics of growing it yourself and the intrinsic rewards that overshadow this
  • The differences between harvesting and killing
  • The religion of time saving
  • Food Security
…And so much more. I need to find a few other people who have read this book in order to bounce some things around. Julia assures me that contacting the author would not be stalker-ish, but I have my doubts. 

How about a few quotes that glowed most brightly to my eyes?
“A lifetime is what I’m after.” Me too. Enough with the instant gratification business. We’re missing so much by rushing.
“From the ground up, everything about nourishment steadies my soul.” She spoke at length here about everything from soil preparation to harvesting and cooking from scratch for your family and friends.
“I decided my poultry patient could use a mental health day.” Amen, sister! This was from a particularly excellent chapter about heirloom turkey reproduction.
“Perfect is not the currency of farming.” Perfect is much less beautiful anyway.
“Cooking is 80% confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.” This made me cry. My girls started cooking when they could barely stand steady on a chair at the kitchen counter, and a half aprons looked like ball gowns on their beautiful, skinny little bodies.
“One of the best things gardens can teach students is respect: for themselves, for others, and the environment.” How exciting, by the way, that school systems around the country are adopting curricula that get their students dirty and happy! 
“Some things you learn by having to work around the word no.” Brilliant.
“For one thing, hogs are intelligent enough to become unharvestable.” Perhaps you have noticed a conspicuous absence of hogs at the Lazy W.
and finally…
“Nothing is more therapeutic than to walk up there 
and disappear into the yellow-green smell of the tomato rows 
for an hour to address the concerns of quieter, 
more manageable colleagues. Holding the soft, viny limbs 
as tender as babies’ wrists, I train them to their trellises, 
tidy the mulch at their feet, inhale the oxygen of their thanks.”

   Are you sighing along with me? And I promise you that Kingsolver retains her sense of wonder and poetry in every single chapter. I have never read so many cold, hard facts written this lyrically.
   Speaking of chapters, there are twenty. The story begins with some background about the family’s motivation for this journey and ends just after their year of locavorism concludes. Every chapter is an adventure, and the author shares the papery stage with her husband and teenage daughter. 

   I have to admit a smidge of relief to understand that they viewed the year long experience as a singular one, but still one that would precipitate change in their lives. I personally am just not energetic or reliable enough to be a fanatical about anything, so it grooves me to approach the ideas herein gently, with slowness and a bit of caution. In other words, the Lazy W will be supplementing our groceries more heavily this year than ever before, but I do not predict we will place a buying freeze on all things non local or inorganic.
   
   Have you read this book? Do you want to chat it up with me? Do you want to borrow my copy? Do you need some manure for your compost heap? We have plenty, so bring your shovels.
We Have a Paradise at our Disposal.
xoxoxo


Mama's Losin' It
   

Glimpsing Adrienne Sharp: Ballerina, Novelist, Inspiration.

   Connected again by Ms. Julia Callahan, I have spent the last couple of weeks corresponding with a lovely woman named Adrienne Sharp, authoress of The True Memoirs of Little K.

   Ms. Sharp’s laid back openness was like a warm blanket on my jangled nerves. I had so much I wanted to learn from her and had trouble reining in my eagerness, yet she was perfectly calm and easy going about the exchange. If you’re interested in my full review of the book, well here ya go.

   Okay. 
Following is our emailed interview. 
I am still crossing my fingers 
to someday visit Los Angeles and buy her lunch.
Or instead, maybe she’ll visit the farm
and teach me how to write fictive action!
Adrienne, I’ll make shortbread and hot tea. 
C’mon… We have plenty of room. xoxoxo
How did you arrive at the original idea for this book, and then how did you choose from which character’s perspective to tell the story?
   Because I was a ballet girl and I read ballet history voraciously, I knew about the famous Kschessinska and I knew vaguely that she was the mistress of Nicholas II. But it wasn’t until I wrote about the choreographer George Balanchine as a little boy in imperial Russia in my last novel that I drew close to the material for Little K. She was a perfect product of her place and time—a social climbing ballerina who used the stage as her platform to socialize with the balletomanes of Nicholas II’s court—and as almost all the counts, grand dukes, and tsars were big balletomanes, her access was limitless. As apparently, were her charms and her ambition.


If your book is translated to a film, what actors and actresses do you like for which roles? May I please suggest Robin Wright for Alix? Perfection…

   Robin Wright—perfect as Alix.  Kschessinska? Catherine Zeta-Jones? She’s a dancer, she’s small, and she can be gritty.
You said it took you a few years of research to write this (incredible) book…during the research and writing, did you ever want to change perspective or direction? Do you have any drafts laying around that were sketched out from, say, Niki’s perspective? (What a read that would be too!)

   K was my girl right from the start. But what I did think about doing was an overlay of marginalia from her son Vova’s point of view. She was writing this memoir for him, and I thought it would be fun for him to comment on what she wrote and to reveal what it was like to be her son, to provide his perspective of those scenes she recalls. (I suspect he was homosexual, though no one ever mentions this in my research.) But my editor overruled me—she thought the marginalia thing had become a bit too much of a trendy thing to do. But I still like the idea.

I thought the touch of placing young revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in K’s ransacked palace was brilliant and terrifying, especially that he sat at the tsarevich’s little school desk and wrote in his notebook! Is there any history behind that, or is it a wonderful piece of fiction from your mind?
   The nascent Bolsheviks did take over her palace and Lenin did in fact take Mathilde’s son’s bedroom for his study. I invented the part about Lenin writing in Vova’s school notebooks–or rather, appropriated the idea of using a child’s notebook for political work. Nicholas’s brother Michael’s abdication as tsar in 1917 was written in a child’s notebook, grabbed from the desk of the palace of friends, where he happened to be staying as a guest.

Did you know what your stopping point would be before you started? I personally did not predict where we ended up and was delighted and satisfied completely. But surprised above all. Did you decide that early on?
   I always planned to end with K preparing for death, sorting through the items she wanted in the coffin with her. But when I got there, this seemed too gloomy an ending. So I gave it some juice, bringing back some of her old defiance, her belief that the old order would be restored, that her son would find his rightful place. Otherwise, she couldn’t die. She was too worried about what would happen to her son without her. In reality, he ended up on public assistance and in public housing. So she was right to be worried.

How did you do your research: history books, internet, interviews? Did you compose your story as you went along, alternately with doing the research, or did you amass all of your background knowledge first then devote yourself to the fiction? What was your daily life like during those years?

   I used books, articles, and the internet—and I researched all along the way—to the bitter end. In fact, when I was working on my galleys I couldn’t stop adding details I was culling from my nonstop reading. When I started researching, I couldn’t keep any of the Romanovs straight—they all have the same names! By the end of it, I could spot misidentified photo captions.
Have you visited any cities in Russia? Or Paris?
   I’ve been to Paris, but I’ve visited Russia only in my research.

As a ballerina, have you danced any of the ballets described in your book? Or are these even still alive?

   Since I was only a ballet girl, essentially a talented scholarship girl in training to be a dancer, I never danced in any of the ballets described in my book. But because I was a ballet girl, I’ve seen almost all of those ballets performed. And those ballets Petipa created for the Imperial Ballet have become the foundation of almost every classical ballet company, except for those  created especially for the tsar’s private viewing pleasure at those hermitage performances, like the Four Seasons.
I would love some solid advice on the mechanics and mindset of keeping so many complex characters organized and effective! What a feat… so many personalities and passions kept alive over so many decades. I am having trouble writing a story about a dozen Sea Monkeys. Help me?
   Honestly, I don’t know how I did it—except by many rewrites.
Fascinating to me that a contemporary author is taking the time to reread a classic, War and Peace, especially such a long work, and not for the first time.  I’m going to take that as good advice for all of us. What else are you reading lately? Who are your favorite authors?

   You know something? War and Peace is short on specific, concrete details to create setting, and I really miss that. I can’t see the rooms or streets or clothing. And I’m noting that Tolstoy had some trouble creating Russia’s war with Napoleon into something more than a dutiful summary of the action of the battles. It’s very hard even for the master to bend history into dramatic fictive action. As for reading—I’m reading a lot of history of Los Angeles circa 1939. And I love Jennifer Egan’s work.
Care to give us a glimpse of what other epics are brewing in your imagination? It’s okay if you’d rather keep that close to your chest. But I will be reading it, whatever you come up with.

   I’m working on a novel tentatively titled “Hollywood Land,” that looks at how the Russian Jewish immigrants who came to Los Angeles too ambitious to peddle rags or scrap metal became movie moguls or gangsters, like Louis B. Mayer or Mickey Cohen. They created a parallel universe in the city—since they weren’t welcome in the institutions already there. So they built their own racetrack, country club, cotillion, hospital, talent agencies and law firms. 
   My main character is an eight year old boy who watches his mother dancing as a Busby Berkeley girl in some of the MGM movie musical extravaganzas of that time and helping his father as a bookie who falls in with Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel. So I’m reading about MGM back lots, Louis B. Mayer, and the Jewish gangsters who controlled the unions, Nazi Bund meetings in the Santa Monica mountains and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese rooted out of Boyle Heights and sent to Santa Anita racetrack to await deportation to camps in Arizona, Navy boys waiting for their call ups beating up zoot suiters downtown—another big canvas, I guess. Woe is me.

Did you read my quick, amateurish thoughts comparing your heroine to Chiyo in Memoirs of a Geisha? I am fascinated by this role women play in such different parts of the world. What do you think? Who do you think had a better life, the ballerina or the geisha?

   The dancer in one of the tsar’s companies in imperial Russia retired after twenty years with a lifetime pension—so by age thirty-eight she had some financial independence. Many of the girls married well and raised happy theater families, the kind of family Mathilde came from. Her sister married a baron at her retirement. And if a dancer were a woman like Mathilde, willing to sacrifice respectability for a very wealthy protector or two, she could accrue some other worldly goods, as well. But she could never really leave her class—she belonged to the demimonde, not the aristocracy, however she might play with them. And Mathilde could never have married either of her grand ducal lovers if there had not been a revolution and the court had not moved to Paris to live in exile. Even there, she was tolerated, side-lined, and most painful for her, so was her son—and the two of them were abandoned completely when her husband, Grand Duke Andrei, died.

Again, thank you. As a daydreaming writer I appreciate your insights. As a blogger I appreciate your time and openness. As a reader I am just a fan!!
   Thank you—your questions were fabulous and fun to ponder. Let me know if I can ever help you in any way.
   Wasn’t that fun, you guys? Isn’t she interesting? Every one of her answers triggered at least three new questions in my head, but alas… Life goes on. This just underscores the value and importance of conversation, of exchange and searching in life. I hope you’re inspired to read this book if you haven’t yet. And I also hope you’re inspired to buckle down and write something if that is in your heart. 
   Happy springtime, Adrienne! So very nice to “meet” you, and best wishes on your exciting new novel!
Scratch Below the Surface!
xoxoxo
   

Espionage and the Ballerina*

   This afternoon, in the bright January sun and with that great emotional conflict I always feel at the end of a really special read,  I finished one of the richest and most view-widening books I have ever had the pleasure of opening. 



   The True Memoirs of Little K penned by Adrienne Sharp is a glimmering piece of historical fiction set during pre-Soviet Russia and told from the perspective of, as a narration by, in fact, a Prima ballerina named Mathilde Kschessinska.
Holy smokes, you guys, this was a wonderful book!
Read this book. Read it in a cold month,
when you can brew yourself many pots of tea.
And read it while wearing as much perfume
and as many strands of pearls as you wish.
Do you own a fur jacket?
Wear that too.

Okay, back to a proper review…

   I was gifted this novel again by our beloved Julia, and I have once again discovered an author worth following. Ms. Sharp can count on future purchases from me.

Isn’t she beautiful? 
In addition to being a novelist of this and other books including 
White Swan, Black Swan, Adrienne Sharp  is also a ballerina herself.
And no, the Natalie Portman movie is not connected.

   The story is told as a first person narrative by an aged woman, a woman whose life is not only a fascinating story unto itself; but it runs parallel to a truly remarkable chapter in world history. Kschessinska was a native of Russia during the rule of the Romanov Empire, a child of the ballet, a product and purveyor of passion, and ultimately a victim of the greater picture, though I doubt she would ever use the word victim to describe herself. Her view of events from the most mundane to the vast and global is both maddening and enchanting. 
   Here, I have to admit a great deal of ignorance. Maybe it is my Americanized perspective. Maybe it is the fact that my childhood was back-lit by that unforgettable Reagan-Gorbachev feud. The Iron Curtain of the twentieth century was seemingly effective in closing off my knowledge that anything interesting happened on that continent before Ronald Reagan stopped acting. Yes. Let’s just say that.

   Remarking on the reading experience itself, allow me to say that the first little section of the book establishes the speaker’s voice which proves to be very natural if a bit long winded. Page after page of compound sentences and unfamiliar (Russian) names and cities was a little daunting, but that first impression quickly evaporates in the warmth of the woman’s true voice. Mathilde has all the depth and elegance and color that young women crave but will never attain until their own old age, when they have amassed their own collections of stories and scandals. On a personal note, I imagined Mathilde wore my grandmother’s perfume, Youth Dew by Este`e Lauder.

   Beyond style and implication, though, Sharp lays out almost Shakespearean patterns of love, lust, ambition, and politics. How she managed to excavate so much Russian and world history and then distill it into 400 pages of beautifully written prose is far beyond me. Between the love stories and the descriptions of families, wars, and ballets, the reader is teased with mention of names like Rasputin, Lenin, Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, and of course Czar Nicholas. I think maybe a person’s career could be based on the body of knowledge Sharp has managed to weave into the tapestry that became this novel.

   So which imitates which; art to life or life to art? Do we have this answer yet?

   This is a thorough pleasure to read. When Sharp spoke of Siberia, I was chilled to the bone. When she described the great imperial palaces I could hear imaginary echoes against clean marble. When she took me to the ballet, I could almost touch the velvet drapes. And the parental struggles of a mother giving birth to a child who was destined to leave her side, well… that hit so close to home that I read through tears and felt real compassion for this old woman I will never meet.

   The book’s emotional scope is great, and its educating potential is impressive. By the way, I did notice some interesting common ground between the life of our ballerina and that of Nitta Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha. Both women were entertainers. Both were bound by custom but complicated by love. Both, with their beauty and charm, held unnerving power over important men and were hated by more proper women. To make that discovery even more intriguing, we learn in this memoir that these two great nations, Russia and Japan, were at war during the time frame in which both fictional women would have lived.

   How’s that for exploring an alternate universe?? How I would love to be at the cafe table where Adrienne Sharp and Arthur Golden chat over a cup of coffee, comparing notes and dreaming up new stories.

   Okay, you guys, if I continue writing I will soon be describing and summarizing every single delicious chapter of this book. Please find time to read it for yourself. Borrow mine if you like, remembering that my only condition for sharing books is that you write your name and a brief review on the inside cover.

Record Your Own History.
Learn About Someone Else’s.
xoxoxoxo

* P.S.  I borrowed the title for this post from a line in Sharp’s novel, which suggested the title for a scandalous book written then about our main character. I hope neither our ballerina nor our author mind. Imitation, after all, is at its root flattery.. xoxo

Happy First Anniversary, Book Club!!!

 In January of 2011, almost exactly a year ago as I write this, my friend Tina and I decided to start a book club. We each invited one woman to join us, making a group of four. I invited my cousin Emily, and Tina invited her coworker Desiree. It was awesome. Our initial goals were threefold: to get thinky more often, to expose ourselves to a greater variety of literature, and YES to socialize. Because we’re girls. We really had no idea how things would go. I mean, January is famous for quickly abandoned though brilliant ideas, right?
   BOY HOWDY that is not how things went down
for our little Oklahoma Book Club.
   Since last January, our group of four has grown to twenty-two.  22. TWENTY-TWO. Veinte y dos. That is a 450% growth rate, you guys. And we didn’t advertise or anything; it’s all been just by word of mouth. In fact, in late October we made the rather uncomfortable decision to close enrollment due to a potentially unmanageable crowd. Seating and feeding people is one thing; but more importantly, in gigantic crowds we lose the intimacy needed for really satisfying book discussions.

  In our first year we devoured eight novels as a group and have shared many hours of great conversation with each other, exploring and debating the content of these selections. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve made each other blush. We’ve challenged our belief systems. Thanks to a Los Angeles book industry hook up we have with one of our members (her name rhymes with Frulia) , we even conducted a telephone interview with Aimee Bender, the author of one of our books! DO YOU KNOW COOL THAT IS?? So cool it’s almost awkward.

   As suggested by our club name, Dinner Club With a Reading Problem, we also eat.  We eat really well.  It goes without saying that every one of our gatherings has been a passionately convivial affair, sometimes themed to the book and other times a wild pot luck free-for-all. Even the self-proclaimed kitchen-challenged among us have participated happily, and we’ve traded fun recipes along the way. Again, because we’re girls.

   Reading has never been so much fun.  We always set attainable deadlines depending on the time of year and most members’ life groove at the time, so that no one seees book club as a burden or work.  We keep in touch with each other throughout the reading weeks. And we have grown to know each other in deeper ways than you normally do in a casual acquaintance.  Hearing a woman’s thoughts on a hefty read can reveal incredible things about her life and heart.

   So anyway… If you do not yet have a book club, I double dog dare you to start one.  It will not cost you much time or money, and what it DOES cost you will return to you tenfold in a rich life experience.

********************

   Curious about who we are or what we’ve read?  
Here are some vital stats:
The average age of our 22 members is 35.78 years. (Our most junior member turned 21 the same day as our most recent dinner, and our most seasoned lady is 55, though you would never guess it to look at her.)

Among the group we have 13 children and 4 grandchildren, ranging from infant to college aged.

Roughly one third of our members is married, one of them being half of a Derby Union. More on that another time.

Professions: By coincidence, a different one third of our members is in number-crunching professions. Accountants, analysts, IT whizzes, auditors, etc. Also in the group is a paralegal, a credit union manager, a college student/part time employee/ Mom of two teens, a literary publicist, a hair design student, a computer nerd, a social worker supervisor, a receptionist, a project manager for a major investment house, an oil & gas accounting/ payroll manager, a verification associate, and a dorky farmish blogger. We are a motley crew, and I love it.

These are the books we’ve read as a group so far, though we always find time to discuss our additional private reads along the way:

  1.    The Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul
  2.    The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
  3.    Hunger Games by Susanne Collins
  4.    Catching Fire by Susanne Collins
  5.    Mockingjay by Susanne Collins
  6.    The Shack by William P. Young
  7.    The Help by Kathryn Stockett
  8.    Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson

By the way, you can find my reviews for most of these books somewhere on this blog.

How Do We Choose Our Books? In the beginning we planned to take turns like nice, polite little ladies. I mean, there were four of us. It was easy. Then throughout the year, as membership grew, we started kind of stabbing in the dark, just sort of brainstorming over plates of food and deciding wildly what to read next.
   It was working out alright, but last week we decided to take a slightly more orderly approach in 2012 and draw names two months out, that person being the one to choose our next title. We meet every six weeks, more or less, and we recently started meeting at different places! All of our 2011 events were here at the farm, which I loved dearly, but I also love going to other people’s homes, and fortunately our group is overflowing with willing hostesses.

How Big of a Deal is This, Really? Well, it’s a really big deal. It just is, you guys. One member (her name rhymes with Flacie) expressed that of all the activities in her busy life, if she ever felt pressed to sacrifice something, the last thing she would sacrifice would be Book Club. That speaks VOLUMES. ha-ha-ha-ha…
   Another member (her name is definitely not Margaret) has been making six hour drives from Austin, Texas to join the fun. Still another member (her name rhymes with Blephanie) reluctantly picked up the burden joy of reading by joining the group for a book she had started three years prior but never finished. And guess what? She not only stuck with us; she hosted the next party!
   Personally, I am amazed to discover so much depth and stimulation at such an easy price. The events plan themselves, really, because we are all so eager to see each other and spill our guts about the books. We definitely have  found some kind of magic here, and I can see it lasting many years.

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   So Happy First Anniversary, Ladies!! You have each found a very special place in my heart because of this uncommon adventure. I have thoroughly enjoy getting to know everybody and stretching my reading muscles beyond what I would read on my own. Please stick around… 2012 is going to be incredible!

Much Love, 
xoxoxo
Marie