Book Club and Book Reports

In December, a friend and I started a book club. We did because we both desired more adult, woman interaction in our lives. The goal was to invite people from our neighborhood and not to read just one genre of book. Another thing we really strived for was having a good mix of life stages: single, married, married w/ kids, ect. I really wanted that because I find that when I'm around women that have kids all we talk about are our kids. It has been really hard but I'm hoping that this group will help remember that there is a WHOLE WORLD outside of me and my household. I think it has gotten off to a good start and the women seem to enjoy themselves and each other. We've read three books now and I thought I would give just a short blurb on each for you, but mostly for me to remember later!

Kick-off Book:
The Power of thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
Very interesting! Pretty scientific in nature, which I enjoyed. The author did a good job convincing me that we have subconsciencious presuppisitions about people that are always coloring our world. I might be taking what he wrote too far but I came away thinking that if you want to put away all of your innate ideas of something or someone, you need to become an expert in that area. Anything you are not an expert in will be colored by what you think, instead of by what you know.

Korrie's Pick:
Falling Through The Earth: A Memoir by Danielle Trussoni
I really liked this book. It was about a girl/women that grew up in a broken family and whose father fought in the Vietnam War as an untrained "tunnel rat" crawling in the VietCong tunnels of hiding. She struggles throughout the book to discover herself and understand her father. She ends up going to Vietnam by herself as a yound adult to try and understand her father even better. This book really spoke to me because she was so emotionally strong but yet so impressionable. It showed me, again, how sensitive children are and how careful we should be with their minds.

Melissa's Pick:
Sudden Fiction: American short-short stories edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas
This book was my idea but I didn't even finish it. It was hard for me to read stories that were sudden and abrupt and they didn't seem to leave you with any satisfying conclusion. I learned to not read short-short fiction...

And there you have it! Next month's discussion is about The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Until then!