I haven’t done well with updating the blog about the book club a friend and I started since the first meeting.

A brief survey of what we’ve read since: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (we loved it), Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels (excellent), Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree (well liked, but I felt it over-rated), Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake (I loved it, but this had our lowest attendance), E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View (not universally loved), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (adored and it made for great discussion).

These summaries are necessarily brief, but we’ll see about doing more complete write-ups of what we’re reading. ⁽¹⁾

Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness: Stories was our latest book club pick. I’d not read anything by her before, but since reading this I’ve picked up more. I love her style, perhaps because she scares me.

As advertised, she’s an amazing writer who, with but a few sentences, can capture the essence of an entire relationship. Witness this scene from “Deep-Holes”: Continue reading »

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Footnotes:

1. For the nerds interested in what I’ve been reading, I keep a list here. [↩]

My friend Jo and I both love to read. So do many of my other friends. We talk about books all the time, and thought it might be fun to (semi-)formalize this into a book club. Jo and I both feel left behind in the classics – there’s just too many of them, and only so much time to read, and we haven’t read all the same things. So, we decided on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights for our first book club pick.

The meeting was held in August, and as September’s meeting will be tomorrow, I’m rushing to capture my notes on the book here before they’re lost.

Neither of us had read Wuthering Heights before nor seen any of the various film adaptations,⁽¹⁾ and we were looking forward to it. I found myself disappointed. Continue reading »

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Footnotes:

1. Though I had the misfortune of being sent a link to the Kate Bush video shortly after our book club pick was announced. Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Kara. [↩]