Tag Archives: book club

May 17, 2023 · 1:54 am

The Last Thing He Told Me: A Forgettable Title, for a Memorable Book

It is an extremely good feeling when a person you love loves a book that you love. Orders of magnitude better feeling when a person you love who does not normally (ever) read books (1) reads a book and (2) loves a book and (3) that book turns out to be one you don’t mind/enjoy (I want so much to go so far as to say love, but… #integrity).

I get that this is what it means to share passions and that this is so much of what does underpin close relationships – I do. But so many of my recent friend additions have been ones where the first point of connection is being Adults With Small Dependents And Too Many Responsibilities, and not The! Joy! Of! Reading! (though to the credit of K. and K. this *is one of our shared connections, and I’m grateful for it).

Enter Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me. Our ill-named book club (famous for never picking, never-mind reading a book) decided we’d had enough mockery, and so we’d read a book. Problem: C. who refuses to read (anything? that can’t be true. But made up things where you might feel something). So we gave her the power to choose the book, and she did. And she loved it! (though, she – like me – couldn’t remember the name of it two weeks after reading it, so maybe something to take back to the focus group: get a better title).

I won’t tell you it’s the best book you’ve ever read, but it is a romp. The sort of thing you can immediately see being turned into a miniseries (oh wait, it has been already?) starring someone and someone and extra tall wine glasses. It follows Hannah and her step-daughter Bailey in the days after Hannah’s husband/Bailey’s father, Owen, goes missing – oh he leaves behind some notes, some cash, and is wanted in connection with a collapsing ponzi scheme (though maybe all ponzi schemes are collapsing? anyway).

While tripping along the thriller-suspense-can’t-put-it-down-just-one-more-chapter-I-swear lane, the book stumbles into some interesting thematic questions about what it means to be a parent – like literally in the sense of the limits of biology, but of course more in the sense of what responsibilities, what sacrifices, what ways of thinking-being are required. It makes a reasonably good case that ‘parent’ is to be – the verb, I mean – and has almost nothing to do with the noun.

And if you’re not into books with parenting themes there’s still lots of quasi-car chase scenes to keep you entertained, and modestly interesting other threads about identity and starting over. Perfect book for a beach or airplane.

But mostly? It’s a lot of fun. And so much more fun when your not-a-book-club people read it with you. Thanks, C.

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March 11, 2023 · 3:35 am

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow: high school math and Mum and I disagree

I have this memory of being in Mr. Lowe’s OAC (yes, OAC) Calculus class. I got back another test where I had managed a 70 something after a thousand hours of studying and fretting and worrying and fretting. And feeling like #why. At the time the why was this vision that if I didn’t take OAC Calculus I wouldn’t be able to take Psychology courses at University and become a therapist*. Then I discovered a University that would let me in to their Psych program without Calculus. I digress. I’m sitting in this class and I get the 70 and I’m just Done With Calculus (despite Mr. Lowe spending hours of his own time helping me, and my friends J. and J. spending hours of their time helping me). So I go to the office to call my mum (or maybe it was a pay phone) and ask her – crying in this memory – can I please drop Calculus, I don’t think I’ll need it to be a therapist and it’s making me miserable. I don’t know if my mum remembers the call, or knows how I’d spun out the different versions of my life that hinge(d) on her Yes or No to Calculus. But she supported me and said, of course, do what you want to do. And so I dropped Calculus. Like right after I hung up I walked over to the counselling office and dropped it. Probably for Latin. Very useful. (actually) (as useful as Calculus?) (what do you want from me)*

WHY THE LONG RAMBLE, ERIN.

Well, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, in addition to being (or maybe mostly being) a book about friendship and its boundaries, and a book that intentionally or not tries to capture the mood of A Little Life (credit to mum for pointing out this parallel which is Spot On), is also a book about women in math.

Our protagonists, Sam and Sadie, spend the book falling into their friendship and then creating wildly successful video games together. Their lives are peppered with the accidents of circumstance and the mistakes of choice that make for any life, and their friendship is one of the accumulation of small moments layered on a true connection. The book is mostly about this friendship – how they come to be friends, how they betray one another (or think they’ve betrayed one another), how other people interrupt and intersect with their friendship, and what the boundaries of love in a friendship fall. It is a beautiful story on this thread – even if, again credit to mum, Sadie’s grudge against Sam midway through the book stretches the boundaries of plausibility.

And it is also a book about what Sadie has to experience and respond to because she is a woman who is very good at math, and one who loves video games, and one who wants to make those games in an industry and institutions full of men. I’d forgotten I read this book, truthfully, but then remembered when reading a list today of top books of last year, and was like oh right, that one. And then found myself tonight listening to a podcast about how boys are struggling in school and how this is impacting men’s outcomes in a bunch of domains. And truly – I’m a mother of a self-described boy and am not dismissing the (surprising to me) information about the widening gap in gendered achievement in schools. But was also like Come On. I suppose I can accept two things at the same time: women are doing better at school/university across a wide range of metrics AND the programs that men dominate are still the ones preferentially valued. The glut of women in universities is hardly yielded Power to the extremely well educated, and extremely underpaid teachers at my daughter’s daycare.

So maybe that’s the thing I liked best about Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: its careful exploration of how Sadie navigates computer science programs, video game making/marketing and Silicon Valley. The way she finds herself used, abused and manipulated by men with power and then ‘lucky’ to find the good ones. The way efforts at ‘wokeness’ risk violence, and the tension between what we know about our friends as individuals and the way we let their individual identities influence our perception of their actions (like: did he do that because he’s my friend, or did he do that because he’s a man?).

And there’s more someone else would read into this book about race and class and orphan-hood and disability. There’s a heap to think through and plenty to enjoy. It reads quickly, is absorbing, and in the end – I think – satisfying.

But for me? I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Lowe. And what we tell ourselves about math.

*I did not become a therapist. But Latin probably got me the degree.

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November 30, 2022 · 5:59 pm

Shrines of Gaiety: Extremely Fun(ny)

I’m here to report that Kate Atiknson’s Shrines of Gaiety is extremely fun and funny. Though, if you are at all like me, it will take you 75 pages to figure that out. I started out thinking ‘this is Serious literary fiction’ (and it is literary fiction!) and set in London after World War One and about gender politics and gangsters and so must be Dull But Important. Persist, dear reader, persist.

It is funny, smart, playful and entirely absorbing.

Perhaps another reason why it takes a bit of time to get your bearing in the book is that it flits chapter by chapter through third person limited narration among a motley cast of characters all interwoven with one another in the setting of London’s night clubs: a runaway teen ager arrived in London to find her fortune as an actress (spoiler: she does not find her fortune as an actress so much as nearly starve on the streets); a once-impoverished parochial librarian arrived in London with her fortune to take up a job as a spy (!); a newly arrived Detective Inspector tasked with solving a spate of murders; the head of a string of night clubs, Nellie Corker, who sees ghosts, reads fortunes and machinates to maintain her power; and the passel of Corker’s children half of whom are indistinguishable and the other half sharp and bright.

Threads of murder and mystery, romance, debauchery (a baby party! where adults dress as babies and fancy around with nannies and opium), theft, corruption and scheming. Delightful for the fun of it all, but woven through with substantial questions of how a society (or an individual) responds after a great trauma (say a giant war and then an influenza pandemic), of how that generation of women and men change as a consequence – both in expectations for their lives but of their roles in politics and the economy, of how little we can rely on the police.

I can’t promise you’ll love it, but I do think that if you make it through the first hundred pages without laughing you’re probably a bad reader and should just quit.

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February 22, 2022 · 1:26 am

That Summer: When the bathtub is the beach

If beach reads are those you tote with you to the beach (though let’s be clear, my beach days are all toting toddlers, and why is it ‘tote’ for the beach – like you never just carry something from your car to the sand, it has to be ‘toted’ I DIGRESS) what is the name for books you read in the dead of winter? For me it would be deep-bathtub-to-soak-the-cold-from-my-bones reads. I have this memory of reading The Kindly Ones almost exclusively in the bath in the winter of 2010 – memorable because it was close to 1000 pages and my bath was then (and now) Not Big – and probably because reading it was a purposeful diversion from the thesis writing I was meant to be doing.

[spoilers and sexual violence]

Now the diversion is from equally existential threats – will my floor ever not be covered in yogurt? (ha ha – we all know the threats are… much more substantive, but really, the menace of yogurt) – and the desire to sink in to anything else is high. And it’s So Cold. So we find ourselves with our bathtub read: That Summer by Jennifer Weiner – famous for beach reads. And it is one you can sink into with little effort and find yourself immersed (how far can I take this) in a decently plotted and reasonably thoughtful consideration of the long, irrevocable change wrought by a rape.

It follows Daisy and Diana and how their lives cross and the ways single events ricochet throughout the rest of their lives. It purposefully explores the privilege of class and gender – most clearly the threat of violence that underwrites too many sexual experiences and explicitly grapples with how #metoo upturned what many women took for granted as the way things were and had to be, and the safety of some men in imagining they could carry on being and doing horrendous things.

All while offering lush descriptions of Cape Code and picturesque cottages with bleached wood frames and outdoor showers. And too many descriptions of a pan fried steak. (for the record: one description of a pan fried steak is too many).

Where it doesn’t attempt any commentary and just takes for granted the assumed is in the whiteness of the book. And maybe that is fine, no book has to be all things or do all things. It just read as remarkably… focused on the particular threat for young white women running along a beach. Maybe more perplexing given the effort in the book to see the woman reading it – frustrated with a partner, irritated by a tween, struggling with Purpose and Meaning – and to myopically miss the possibility of additional complexity.

Anyway – probably all beach reads are marketed to rich white women (anyone written a Masters thesis on that?). But yes, this particular rich white woman needs another thing to read in the bath, so send me your suggestions.

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