My Own Personal Book Club

I used to be quite the reader...in 1st grade at least. I had my own shelf of chapter books in the classroom library, I remember it having a label on it that said "Marianna's Books" but that's probably revisionist history. I would knock back books by the day. My favorite time of the year in school was the Pizza Hut reading competition where you would pledge to read a certain number of books in a month and if you met your goal you got a free pizza. While others would shout out their goals at 2, or if risky, 5, I would pompously up the anty to 15. This is definitely where I lost the popularity contest each year.

Around middle school I stopped reading. Actually, during middle school I just stopped caring about anything other than being moody and complaining that no one understood me. Rather than pick my reading habit up again in high school I just stopped reading all together, school work included. This led to the classic note on my report card "Marianna's grade would have been infinitely better this term if she had actually handed in her homework...at all". Around this time I was also diagnosed with ADHD. Coincidence? I think not.

In college it was suddenly cool to read. Bryn Mawr loves books. Everyone and anyone is reading at all times. I had gotten so used to not doing my homework that suddenly having to do it, and lots of it, every night kinda turned me off of the idea of pleasure reading. I bought a few books with intentions of reading them for fun but never got around to it. What books I did read for fun were limited to the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.

Since I've been home I've taken up reading again. My $96 of library fines mysteriously disappeared sometime over the past year and as such I have been granted borrowing privileges again at my local library (they were taken away 5 years ago after a heated confrontation with Gladys, the former gatekeeper of the library). Also I have been allowed to participate in my mom's daily tradition of "commuting". As Mom works from home she doesn't get that time in between work and home to wind down that others get when they "commute". Instead, after she's done working but before she cooks dinner, she puts music on the stereo, pours a glass of wine and sits in the living room with a book. It's absolutely as classy as it sounds. So now every day at five the two of us sit down with a book, a glass of wine, the dogs sitting at our feet and music softly drifting throughout the room and wait for OMP to come home. Bliss.

I've managed to get back into the swing of things knocking back quite a few books over the past month and a half. Some have been great, some have been less than great, some haven't gotten past the first few pages. I would like to join a book club as there's nothing I love more than sharing my opinion, but until I find one that's not filled with crazy soccer moms (who am I kidding, I would love to join a soccer mom book club), I'm stuck being my own personal book club.

Because I can't share my opinion with anyone other than myself, you, the blog readers, will now become my audience. Please chime in if you've read any of the books I've read and have any insight into them. For the record, our next book will the The Help by Kathryn Stockett. You are officially invited to join my book club.

For now, in no particular order here are the past books of Marianna's Book Club (cooler name to be decided on later).

Devil In the White City-Erik Larson

Plot: A non-fiction book by Erik Larson, Devil In the White City takes a look at the 1892 Chicago World's Fair. Larson's information is ridiculously detailed as he follows the fairs planning and implementation as well as the side story of H.H. Holmes, a serial killer who has set up shop near the fair grounds.

Thoughts: Loved it. I bought this book two years ago after studying the Chicago World's Fair and never read it because of the whole not reading for fun thing. I picked it up a month ago and couldn't put it down. You start to question whether or not it's a non-fiction book because the story is so gripping.

I'm usually turned off by side stories, flipping through them in order to get back to the main story, but they all gelled together really well in this book. I particularly enjoyed the occasional story of Patrick Prendergrass, an Irish immigrant who thought he would gain political power through postcards (hellooooo alliteration!). I won't ruin the ending of that one for you.

After I finished Devil In the White City I immediately began to look for jobs in Chicago because I was so fascinated by the city...at least the 1892 version of it. I might be sorely disappointed should I ever actually move to Chicago and find that things have changed since then...

Holy Crap! I just looked the book up and found out that it's slated to be a movie in the next few years with Kathryn Bigelow directing! Awesome!

The 19th Wife-David Ebershoff

Plot: A complex story intertwines the lives of pioneer Mormons in the mid nineteenth century with a 21st century boy recently ousted from his fundamentalist community. Polygamy and murder twist the two together.

Thoughts: My friend Andrea recommended this book to me and after reading reviews I was eager to read it. I love reading about fundamentalist religious communities (have I looked into the requirements for joining the Amish? Yes). I am absolutely fascinated by communities that are able to function outside societal norms. That being said, The 19th Wife was incredibly confusing. The switching between present day and past is fine at first, but with the past story moving at a much quicker pace than the present day story the pacing really threw me off. By the end of the book I was only really paying attention to the modern day story (which is really gripping) so I think I must have missed the big picture of the book. While I should probably read it again to get a better idea of the nineteenth century story....I probably won't.

Outside the Limelight: Basketball in the Ivy League-Kathy Orton

Plot: Kathy Orton chronicles the 2005-2006 basketball season in the Ivy League. That's basically it.

Thoughts: I'm a huge Ivy League Basketball fan. I'm probably the only girl in her twenties who did not attend an Ivy League school who is (Caroline's degree from Barnard puts her in a shady grey area for this one...). We started going to Princeton games when I was a baby and just never stopped. There is no logical reason behind my love for the games. They're not fantastic, the play is slower than most games and the gyms are so quiet you can hear crickets. But when Ivy basketball is played I'm riveted.

That being said I was not a fan of this book. It read like a book of my blog entries would read. While I love my blog entries, even I'll acknowledge that if I were to ever make a book out of them they would need serious editing and rewording. While I appreciated the inside look into a league I've put so much time into, it was light and failed to satisfy me. I was looking forward to some insight into non frontrunner teams like Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia and Yale and how they handle being overlooked so often. Ironically....they were overlooked. Orton only covered Penn, Princeton, Harvard and Cornell in depth.

I did really enjoy reading it as the season wound down, however, and appreciating how far Princeton has come in the past four years. Reading about the teams struggles in 2006 made last night's 20th win of the season taste that much sweeter. I also enjoyed reading about Cornell, who would in the next four years come to own the league. I'm looking forward to watching them do great things in the tournament next week, from what I've seen and what I read they deserve it.

Magic Hour-Kristin Hannah

Plot: A once prominent child psychologist is publicly scorned for her failure to foresee a patients violent rampage. Humiliated she returns to her Washington hometown to help a recently found child who turns out to be a feral child. Lessons on love and family ensue.

Thoughts: Remember how I love fundamentalist communities? I also love feral children. I was pumped when my boss handed me a copy of this book and told me she thought I would like it. She was right, I loved the plot. Loved watching the relationship between the child and the psychologist flourish. Loved the descriptions of small town Washington state. It was a very comfortable book that went great with a glass of wine and soft new age music in the background.

Unlike Devil In the White City, I did not love the side stories. I didn't really care that Ellie used to be homecoming queen and is still dealing with her former glory even though she's 40. I didn't really care that Max and Julia had feelings for each other, really it seemed unprofessional as they were both doctors on the case. I also didn't care for the final twist. Julia, the psychologist, references it as being like a Disney movie at the end, which nearly made me vomit. I also didn't care for the fact that it had an epilogue that only took place five months in the future. That's not an epilogue, that's another chapter. To be fair, I don't actually know the rules of epilogues or even if they exist.

American Wife-Curtis Sittenfeld

Plot: A small town Wisconsin woman meets a man from a powerful family, marries him, deals with the repercussions. Supposedly based off of Laura Bush.

Thoughts: HUGE book, really thick. Loved the first half. Sittenfeld was really good at creating characters and I felt myself becoming a part of the story. I think the fact that I was able to separate the main character, Alice, from her alleged counterpart, Laura Bush, helped a lot. Both her and the rich family, The Blackwells, felt like original characters rather than characters of public figures.

Then they went to Princeton reunions. I'm very territorial about Princeton having spent a lot of time there throughout life. I get really angry when books, movies, etc. feel the need to reference every individual part of campus from dorms to lampposts. Maybe it's because I'm so close to the place that I notice it more than I notice it when other locations are involved. Every sentence seemed to drive the fact that they were at Princeton into the readers head with a hammer. I had a hearty laugh when she described each reunion worker as being incredibly organized and level headed. As someone who spent sleepless nights counting out reunion keys last May I can assure you I was a mess.

After they came back from Reunions the book went downhill. The similarities between the Blackwells and the Bushes became impossible to ignore. At some points I practically expected her to put quotations around the characters names, a subtle wink to the idea that this might not be fiction. This would be all well and good except for the fact that it was fiction. If I had wanted to read a sensationalized story of the Bushes marriage I'm sure there are plenty of options out there. I enjoyed the book when it was original with just enough reference to truth to ground it. After "Charlie" became president, however, it was just too much to handle.

The Glass Castle-Jeanette Walls

Plot: A girl from a family of eccentrics grows up in different places, learns to love her family despite their faults.

Thoughts: Really great book. The author, Jeanette Walls, recounts her journey throughout the United States as her family moved often to escape financial problems. Still living in the memories of my cross country trip, I was fascinated by her descriptions of the different places her family ended up. These small towns seemed to be the epitome of despair. Her eventual home in West Virginia was actually the first official town to recieve food stamps. Yet each town or house seemed to have a former glory attached to it. Welch, WV once had a booming coal mining culture, their house in California while falling into disrepair still held on to it's former beauty through small architectural details. Whether intended or not, it was a beautiful metaphor for this family. Broken, yet holding on to this idea that they might one day turn themselves upright again.

The book has a rather non-traditional ending, at least for this type of story. Unlike other feel good tales, the family does not all end up together, wealthy and happy. Walls, her brother and one of her sisters end up on their feet, doing just fine or even excelling in the case of Walls. Her parents, however, remained homeless up nearly until her father's death. While there was no magic ending, there was a peace in the ending. I realized that while I crave a happy ending to every story, there is often a fakeness to happy endings where you are questioning whether the person is truly happy with the way things turned out, or whether they even turned out like that at all. The Glass Castle's ending was peaceful. Things hadn't turned out perfectly but everyone was where they needed to be in order to feel free.

So grab yourself a copy of The Help and join the book club. Otherwise I'm heading to the soccer fields in my Volvo and joining the first mothers book club I can find. I will steal a baby as my cover if necessary.