Tag Archives: book club

February 24, 2025 · 3:02 am

Long Island: Bets on the ending

Put Colm Tóibín’s Long Island in your library cart and you won’t be disappointed when it (eventually) makes it to you (I say eventually because inevitably it will have a wait list as everyone wants to read this one).

*many spoilers ahead*

It’s probably because I’d just finished the Elizabeth Strout, but the style of this one read as similar. Direct, descriptive of character’s thoughts, weighted moments that are not Literary – just excellent, and the interweaving of characters from previous works. Pressed I’d say I liked Strout better, but it would be hard pressed.

Long Island opens with a knock at the door. Eilis opens it to learn that her husband, Tony, has been having an affair. The woman he’s been sleeping with is pregnant, and her husband is at the door to explain that when the baby is born he will be dropping it off with Tony. And for some reason Tony thinks Eilis should go along with this plan. All of Tony’s family seems to think the same. Eilis is not so keen.

So off she goes (home?) to Ireland, bringing her grown children with her. With the unanswered question of whether she’ll return, and if she does return, if she’ll stay with Tony. She makes it seem like it’s his choice – like if he takes in the baby she won’t, and if he doesn’t, she will – but the reader knows (even if Eilis doesn’t) that this will always be her choice. Tony is not a choice maker.

Complications abound when she returns to Ireland. Her mother’s ailing health. Her former flame, Jim Farrel – now engaged to her best friend (but secretly!). Her adult children and what they want and expect from her.

How she can make a choice when so many people Expect So Much of her. What choices are hers, in the end. Well, that is the ending, and it’s a cliff hanger, so buckle up your book club and let everyone have their say.

For me? I want Eilis and Jim together on Long Island. And I want it to be a world where what Eilis wants she can choose. Want, we know, isn’t always get.

Delightful, great writing, absorbing (make it past the first 30 pages) and heart-full. Romance? I don’t know I’d call it that – stop slinging around genre words like you need them. Just read it, ok?

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February 16, 2025 · 2:38 pm

Pineapple Street: Not good, and hard to put down

What is the name for the genre of book that is not good, but you don’t want to stop reading, and you feel the whole time as if you are already watching the movie adaptation of the thing? Or the kind where the writing is verging on good and interesting, but is mostly just descriptive in the most obvious sorts of ways? Or where the characters change, but that change is at once extremely obvious from the outset and also simultaneously not convincing when it happens (like the crucial event(s) that force the change are just so predictably ridiculous)? Or where the way to hook the reader is through descriptions of how the ultra wealthy live – of their tablescapes (a word I didn’t know existed), their vacations, their clothes and their houses? Where you read the thing quickly and when it’s over feel faintly irritated with yourself for having given over the time to a book that is so clearly not good but is – nevertheless – hard to put down?

Jenny Jackson‘s Pineapple Street embodies this whatever-genre it is. It is – as was the case for me yesterday – an ideal book for a snowstorm where time vanishes in shovelling, sledding and fort building – and further funnels away in reading a book that when it ends you find yourself flummoxed that you didn’t just return it to the library. Perfect for an airplane, a beach, a doctor’s office where you expect to wait forever.

Oh sorry, did you want to know what it’s about? I’ve already given more time to this book then I’d like, so quickly: ultra rich family lives in Brooklyn Heights (which I’ve since gathered is a fancy neighbourhood in New York) and the millennial children lightly struggle with the Torturous Burden of being born extremely wealthy and the Guilt of not deserving such privilege. The end.

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January 14, 2025 · 2:16 am

Tell Me Everything: Elizabeth Strout is Not a Unitarian. But could be.

I’ve told so many people recently to read Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything and I’m desperately anxious that other people won’t love it as much as I did, so if you hated it, or even felt kind of ambivalent about it, just let’s pretend neither of us read it and never talk about it together.

In the universe of Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton this one is a close look at Bob Burgess who cannot see himself clearly. A book about Bob, but a book about how every life – those we know and more those we don’t – has a story (and in that story, matters). And how we try to figure out what a life means (in one heartbreaking and also sideways funny scene Lucy asks Bob exactly that – what does it mean) even when this is a question as pointless as it is pressing.

How Bob saves and doesn’t save – and eats the sins – of all those around him. How he sacrifices what he barely realizes he wants in aid of those around him, knowing, somehow the right thing to do quickly and with exhaustion.

The writing, as always, is this hard-to-explain balance of direct – telling you exactly what a character is thinking, or meaning, or what a thematic moment is “about” – and the evocative – letting a gesture carry the weight of all the possible explanations: Lucy wears odd socks. LUCY WEARS ODD SOCKS.

Take Bob’s wife, Margaret, the Unitarian minister, who only in nearly losing her job realizes the humility with which she must approach the pulpit. And in nearly losing Bob realizes what he needs of her as partner. I loved Margaret for her fullness (all of the characters in these books are full) and the scene that describes her nightgown – which may be the same scene or one adjacent where Bob speculates she is a narcissist – that does this brilliant work of both telling us exactly what is happening and lets it unfold in the scene itself.

(So many Unitarian threads beyond Margaret (meaning in community; community to support individual journey; life is meaningful for the impact we have on others; etc etc and on) I just googled whether Strout is a Unitarian: she is not.)

I’m not sure whether to tell you to start with this one if you’ve not read Strout before, but maybe it doesn’t matter – grab any one of the books and enjoy a universe where the small moments are worthy and your story is, too.

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October 22, 2024 · 1:11 am

Wellness: Book Club Gold

In the end I didn’t love Nathan Hill’s Wellness (I’m not even sure I liked it): it was bloated, self-important, unselfconscious about the privilege of its themes (like how Hard it Must Be to not be able to move in to your Forever Home on schedule), aggressive in making sure the reader got the themes (your life and its meaning come from the story(ies) you tell yourself about it!) and over-weighted with symbols to reinforce those themes.

But. But! I keep thinking about some of those pressing themes – to what extent you choose anything, to what degree we are all just making choices in reaction to our past or because someone told us something one time that made us sure of some truth, what shreds of identity remain consistent over time and geography and circumstance – in a way that makes me wonder whether a book you don’t like can also be a good one if it helps you reconsider something or see something anew.

If nothing else there is enough in this book for most middle class white lady book clubs to chew on for at least a few hours. Questions of open marriages, of hating your partner but staying married, of whether you too had an Adbusters subscription in the 90s and now find yourself buying bulk paper towels at Costco with nary a thought to the Corporate Giants, of placebos, of the purpose of art, of messages you’d leave your future self, of whether you can love someone for a lifetime, of how we forgive our parents and how we ask our children to forgive us, of the injustices of generational wealth and on.

But I can’t really imagine most book clubs (certainly not mine that has in its four year history only managed to read one book) wading through this 700 page commitment. And so it’s left to S. who suggested this one, and maybe to you, to tell me if this it the bottom of the U-curve and have we started the rise? I think maybe. I think maybe.

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