Books Read for HUP Book Club

I expected to like this a lot better than I did. The Chicago World's Fair is an interesting topic, as is a real-life serial killer. However, Larson's writing style really didn't work for me. The author is clearly a meticulous researcher, as evidenced by the extensive endnotes and bibliography, but the sheer amount of minor detail was mind-numbing, and I found the little colorful details about sunsets and so on a bit hard to take alongside the documented bits. The last quarter of the book, which is told as a procedural, moves a lot more quickly than the rest of the book, and I enjoyed the chase. If it hadn't been a book club selection, I would have put it down after 100 pages.

I first read this a bit more than 15 years ago (just before I started this blog), and I reread it for my book club. I remember liking it better the first time, but I still very much enjoyed Bradbury's well-crafted writing.

A highly worthwhile classic.

With all the critical acclaim this novel received, I expected to like it a lot more. The first half is filled with a lot of dull and unnecessary fleshing-out of secondary characters, who all seem to be to be out of my Jane Austen nightmare. Once the point of view shifts to Robbie at the midpoint, things get substantially better, and the final section makes the whole effort almost worthwhile.

The ending contains a minor twist—which I guessed about a hundred pages before it was revealed—and a major twist that surprised me a little. If not for the final bit of surprise, I would have regretted reading this book.

(By the way, I do recognize that a lot of what I hated about the first half of the book is what makes the minor twist work, but that doesn't make it any more palatable.)

I adored this book when I first read it, and I still highly recommend it. Of course, on a second reading, the major plot revelations are no longer surprises, and the pace seems slower. Still, there were a handful of moments that took my breath away (Henry meeting Alba at the museum jumps to mind). With the benefit of four more years of distance, the 9/11 scene rings more true and necessary than it did when I first read the book.

I hope my book club enjoyed it as much as I did!

I first read Pillars of the Earth in college, and I quite liked it then. I was pleased when my book club picked it, because after reading World Without End last year, I was looking for an excuse to revisit Pillars. I'm happy to report that it holds up well.

Pillars of the Earth is centered on the construction of a cathedral at Kingsbridge in twelfth-century England. The prior of the abbey, the master builder and his family, a nearby earl, a displaced brother and sister, and the presiding bishop comprise the core set of characters, and their complex relationships form the core of the novel.

There's nothing fancy about this book. The writing is incredibly straightforward and clear, and the characters are uncomplicated. The joy of the book is in how the dozen or so main characters interact over the course of several decades, how the "good" guys finally prevail and how the "bad" guys fall. It's just good storytelling, plain and simple.

This is another book I would never have picked up were it not for my book club. Maisie Dobbs is a novel/mystery set in post-World War I England. The titular heroine is a spunky and overly-clever private investigator who rises above the limitations of the women of her time. I didn't mind the premise so much as the execution, which is overly flattering of the protagonist—I like my heroes to have flaws.

This novel probably works better for its intended audience: 10-14 year old girls.

Kingdom Coming is the most frightening book I have ever read.

During the Bush administration, fundamentalist Christians had a terrifying level of influence over the U.S. government, from Rumsfeld's "holy war" mentality to Bush's "faith-based initiatives" (which were a thin veil over blatant religious discrimination). In spite of the election of a Democrat President, these Christian Nationalists aren't going to go away. In this book, Goldberg details many of their core beliefs (most of which have no basis in reality if you don't believe in the literal truth of the bible), and she makes it abundantly clear that you can not reason with them.

Having read this book, it is now clear to me that the pluralistic society I cherish, with both freedom of and freedom from religion, is in serious danger. There is a surprisingly large and dedicated minority that wants to irrevocably weave born-again Christianity into the fabric of the United States.

I have no problem with Christians, insofar as they have no problem with me not being a Christian. It's the second part that doesn't seem to be working.

Clearly, it is time to renew my ACLU membership.

In this very funny novel, Christopher Moore reconstructs the "missing" years in Jesus of Nazareth's life. Here, through the eyes of his good friend Levi known as Biff, we see Joshua (Jesus) at age six, entertaining his younger brother by killing a lizard and bringing it back to life, and we follow him as he learns what it will take to be the Messiah. We see the well-known miracles from a new angle, and we see the apostles in a wholly different light.

Moore is very respectful of the core values that underlie Christianity, but he isn't afraid to make Jesus human, and he certainly isn't afraid to give the rest of the cast of characters some big — and funny — flaws.

I'm sure this book would offend lots of people, but if you long for a Christianity that doesn't take itself so seriously, you might enjoy it. I did.

I recommended Replay to my book club and reread it to prepare for the meeting. I liked it a little less the second time, in large part because Jeff Winston's evolution from cycle to cycle was less surprising. Also, I was a little creeped out this time by Jeff's actions with Pamela during his "last" replay. I still value the book for the way it makes me think about what is important in life, and I still recommend it.

Water for Elephants is mainstream fiction at its best. Gruen's protagonist is a 90-year-old man in an assisted living facility who flashes back to his early twenties when he served as a veterinarian for a traveling circus during the early days of the Great Depression. The details of circus life are interesting and extremely well described, and the characters are even more colorful than you might expect. The opening prologue is a little bit contrived (as you find out at end), and the ending is over-the-top sappy to the point of being completely unrealistic, but the meat of the novel is well executed from all angles, and I was more than willing to forgive the minor flaws.

I don't read a lot of history, but this was described as novelistic in its approach, so when my book club chose it, I tried to be optimistic. Alas, though this may be more novelistic than your average history book, it reads to me like a master's thesis. Massie was a thorough researcher, and it looks like everything is carefully documented, but the heavy interlacing of direct quotes makes the end result more academic than authentic.

I admit that I'm happy to now have a better understanding of the Russian Revolution and to now know Rasputin a little better than the shadowy fairy-tale figure of legend. It will be interesting to see how well I enjoy the movie when the book club views it in a couple of weeks.

I first read the 1962 Hugo-winning version of Stranger in a Strange Land about fifteen years ago, so when my book club picked this book, I decided to read the "uncut" version that was published in 1991. The characters and basic plot are the same: Valentine Michael Smith is a human born on Mars and raised to adolescence by Martians. As a young adult, he travels to Earth, and the novel focuses on his entrance into — and impact on — human culture.

I liked this book a lot better fifteen years ago, and in part, it's because the "uncut" version moves too slowly. Also, I think some of the ideas were fresher then (at least to me). My four-star rating is more about what I remembered than what I just experienced, but this is still a worthwhile and important book.

Blasphemy is a scifi thriller with very little character development (indeed, most of the characters are one-sentence cliches). The plot revolves around a particle accelerator that may or may not be a phone-line to God. I liked the "voice of God" dialog toward the end, and I enjoyed the how-is-he-going-to-resolve-this tension until the big revelation, but then the novel keeps going for a bit too long during the "chase" scene.

I probably would not have read this if it hadn't been selected by my reading group. I didn't hate it, but I can't really recommend it either.

Water Music is a playful re-imagining of the adventures of Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer who attempted to chart the course of the Niger River in Africa. His story is interwoven with the stories of Ned Rise (a British scalawag with great talent for nearly getting killed) and a handful of other colorful characters. T.C. Boyle's prose is inventive and anachronistic, and he has a knack for crafting one or two sentences that jump off of each page.

I wanted to like Water Music a lot more than I actually did. The plot is surprisingly tedious, and the regular bits of clever wordplay weren't enough to save it. I quite liked the Ned Rise character, and would have enjoyed a novel about him alone, but the frequent changes of viewpoint gave the novel a start/stop rhythm that was hard to get into.

I'd like to try another of Boyle's novels because this one was almost in my sweet spot.

This is another book I would never have read if not for my book club. It is also the third (that I'm aware of) annual book chosen by the Hopedale library as a book for the whole town to read (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and To Kill a Mockingbird were the much superior first two).

I did not enjoy this book. I'm interested in the underground railroad and the history of the United States leading up to the Civil War, but this book is ridiculously melodramatic. The bits about quilting in the modern era are contrived, and the way the protagonist suspensefully reads in short bursts the memoir she finds is ridiculous. The memoir itself doesn't sound very authentic, and the big twist ending is telegraphed halfway through.

It doesn't help that I'm annoyed by people who are proud of the accomplishments of their dead ancestors. I'm descended from a signer of the Declaration of Independence, but you won't catch me talking about it at parties. No one has a right to be proud of anything but their own accomplishments. Get out and do something to make your country greater instead of bragging about how great it is. Wave your flag somewhere else, and shove your family history up your ass. Be a good person now instead of talking about how great your grandpappy was then.

The Alchemist is a parable about a shepherd who pursues his dream of seeing the world. Coelho tells the story in very simple language, and he conveys some simple but profound life lessons: life is in the journey (not the destination), follow your dream, there is no past or future (only the present), etc.

If not for my book club, I probably would not have read this novel. I can see how it could have a big impact on a lot of people, but honestly I didn't get much out of it. I have already learned those life lessons many times over (though I suppose it doesn't hurt to be reminded).

I was skeptical when my book club chose Prodigal Summer because my previous exposure to Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible) didn't end well—indeed, I couldn't finish it at all. Happily, I fared much better with this one.

The themes of Prodigal Summer strongly echo those of Richard Powers's best work. Like Powers did in The Gold-Bug Variations, Kingsolver entwines multiple story lines with unifying threads taken from biological science. Here the unifying threads include a lone coyote den, the extinct American chestnut, and pheromones.

The novel has three human story lines that circle around each other and eventually interconnect. All take place in a rural county in Appalachia. There's Deanna, a fiercely independent park ranger, Nannie and Garnett, an aging pair of neighbors, and Lusa, a newly-married transplant caught up in family politics.

What strikes me about this novel is that all of the characters are compelling, and each of the three story lines is worthwhile on its own. Kingsolver's women are all strong and independent, but her men are a little disappointing in their ignorant stubbornness. Her dialogue and her powers of description are strong.

This is the most enjoyable book my book club has chosen to date. Recommended.

A little over a year ago, my book club read The Kite Runner as its first selection. I didn't care for it that much, and I certainly didn't want to endure Hosseini's amateurish writing again, but I was overruled and the book club picked A Thousand Splendid Suns.

I was pleasantly surprised. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a much more compelling book than its precursor. The characters are more nuanced, the story has a better-structured arc, and the descriptions are richer. I think Hosseini may actually be a good writer and The Kite Runner simply suffered from being exploded from a short story into a full-length novel.

The leader of my book club wanted to choose a "classic", and as a group we picked The Great Gatsby. It's an excellent book—far be it from me to suggest otherwise. However, universally-liked books don't make for very good book club discussions, and this selection resulted in a fairly dull meeting.

I enjoyed revisiting Gatsby, in large part because I really didn't get it when I was forced to read it in high school. As an adult with a bit more of an appreciation for the historical time period in which the novel is set and for the class boundaries that still permeate the United States, I liked it a lot more.

After reading Letter to a Christian Nation, I recommended that my book club read The End of Faith. This turned out to be a bad move. Where Letter is terse, polished, and hard to argue with, Faith is a pedantic mess. Harris makes most of the same points in both books, but this one is dull and unconvincing, especially at the end where Harris seems to be arguing that the whole world should convert to Buddhism.

Read Letter to a Christian Nation, but skip this one.

This was a "quick read" chosen by my book club. It's a straightforward murder mystery with wisecracking investigators and buxom babes. The narrator is exceedingly fond of bad puns, which is cute at first but wears thin after a while. I didn't like the book very much, but that's in large part because I don't care much for mystery novels in general.

The author, Glenn Ickler, lives in Hopedale and joined us for the book club discussion, which made it hard to have an open discussion, but it was interesting to hear him talk about his "retirement career" writing mystery novels.

The Road is a bleak post-apocalyptic road-trip novel. McCarthy's narrator is a father who, with his son, is trekking across an American wasteland looking for signs of hope. Along the way, they pillage root cellars on abandoned farms, looking for anything edible, and they try to stay away from bandits on the road.

My book club chose this because it won the Pulitzer, but none of us ended up liking it. I hated it a lot less than most of the members, but it was still a tough read. In the post-apocalyptic genre, I liked Fiskadoro better, and Riddley Walker best of all.

This was a "quick read" book selected by my book club. It's a harrowing true story of a mountaineering expedition gone badly wrong, and it is indeed a quick read.

I was put off by Simpson's self-aggrandizement. It was unbelievably stupid to get into such a predicament. He's extraordinarily lucky to be alive to talk about it.

I read this for book club but unfortunately had to miss the discussion (I was away on vacation). I've never read Allende before, but I was very pleased with my first encounter.

Ines of My Soul is a historical novel featuring Ines de Suarez, a Spanish conquistadora who participated in the conquest of Chile. It's engaging and very well written (the language is beautiful). I'm looking forward to reading more of Allende's novels.

This is a book I never would have read, had it not been chosen by my book club. It's a horrifying autobiographical work written by a woman who survived the Rwandan genocide. It opened my eyes to some of the atrocities that took place there, and for that it was worthwhile.

On the other hand, it's a work of blatantly pro-Christian propaganda. The author attributes her survival to direct intervention by God, and there are several scenes where days of intense prayer lead to some insight or rescue. I have tremendous sympathy for anyone who could survive such an ordeal, but spare me the evangelism, please.

I have read a few of Bill Bryson's books before, and I generally enjoy his self-mocking wit. I didn't feel the need to read any more after the excellent A Walk In the Woods, but when my book club chose this memoir, I was happy to oblige.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself is assembled in large part from articles Bryson wrote for a British Sunday newspaper, and it suffers from the pastiche effect. Bryson tries a bit too hard to find Americanisms that will sound quirky to his British readers. It's enjoyable, but forgettable.

It frightens me to no end that this book was the first place I saw so much of the evidence for global warming. It's horrifying how little scientifically accurate reporting has been done on the issue in the mainstream press. The evidence and the consequences of global warming, caused primarily by manmade CO2 emissions, is absolutely compelling, and Al Gore has done a great service by compiling it into both a documentary film and a very readable and understandable book.

If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, you should. And install some fricking compact florescent light bulbs or buy a Prius already.

At my suggestion, my book club chose Cat's Cradle for the February selection. I was nervous about it, because although it's my utmost favorite book, several people I've recommended it to have hated it.

The reactions of the book club members spanned a wide spectrum. Those who disliked it mostly didn't care for the scifi elements and the lack of character depth. Those who enjoyed it thought it raised interesting questions about morality, religion, government, and the human condition. The two of us who loved it the most had both first read it at about age 15 (about 20 years ago for me). Everyone liked it more in retrospect after talking about it.

Since it has been nearly ten years since the last time I read it, I brought more to it this time, and I enjoyed it as much as I always have. I found some new favorite passages, including the very timely "The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren't loved wherever they go, whatever they do." I better appreciated how McCabe and Bokonon got lost in their play-acting, and how much government is in the business of giving people meaningless things to talk about and fight over so that they don't notice the horrible conditions they live in. For the first time, I noticed Vonnegut's subtle musings about free will.

Cat's Cradle is a deceptively simple book. The plot is easy to follow and the chapters are mostly just a few paragraphs each. It has, however, a tremendous depth. It paints a humanist viewpoint in a hilariously satirical manner. Every time I read it, I laugh out loud at every second or third page, and I regularly marvel at the terse, subversive cleverness of Vonnegut's writing.

I'm not a fan of biographies and I have a weak stomach, so I never would have picked this book up if it wasn't for my new book club. As it turns out, the graphic details of 18th century surgery didn't bother me nearly as much as I expected (which may be due in some part to having watched two and a half seasons of House over the last twelve months).

Anyway, The Knife Man is a biography of John Hunter, the influential and groundbreaking British surgeon. It details his rise from assisting with dissections at his brother's anatomy school to being a celebrated champion of scientific medicine. Along the way, there are softball-sized bladder stones, torn achilles tendons, grave robberies, tooth transplants, gunshot wounds, and more. I was surprised and sometimes fascinated to learn about particular medical tidbits that were (and weren't) known in the 18th century.

But ultimately, I plodded through many sections of the book. In places, it's pretty dull and sometimes it's downright repetitive.

I recently joined a book club, and this was the first pick. It made for interesting discussion, but I didn't care that much for the book itself. It was very interesting to read about an Afghani protagonist, and to learn about life in Afghanistan under the Taliban, but the writing is uneven, and there are a couple of really annoying scenes, including a "deathbed conversion" to Islam, and a fist-fight to the death.