Books Read for HUP Book Club

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.