April Book Club Pick

April was the first month I actually read the book club pick. It was C's pick and she chose The Yada Yada Prayer Group by Neta Jackson This book is not one I would normally pick up. I'm not religious, at all, and worshipping God is one of the main components of this book but for the sake of bookclub I tried to remain open-minded and give this book a chance. However I found the main character, Jodie, annoying. The story dragged, every time something happened that could have been a plot point it kind of fell flat. The story didn't really pick up till around page 300. It just wasn't an enjoyable book and everyone at book club agreed. I believe that this is the first time we've all disliked a book and I honestly felt bad during the discussion because I know C really enjoys this whole series.

May's bookclub pick was M's and she chose The Tea Girl of Hummimgbird Lane by Lisa See. I read Shanghai Girls by this same author but it was so long ago that I don't remember anything except that I liked it. The cover is beautiful and it looks good so I'll be starting this one as soon as I finish my current read.

July Book Club Pick

Image from Goodreads

June's book club pick was from C and she chose The Color of Water by James McBride. I was pretty surprised that this book isn't more popular. It was a fantastic read. The Color of Water is the story of the author, James McBride, and his mother, Ruth McBride-Jordan. Ruth was a Jew, born in Poland, the daughter of a rabbi, and raised in the American South. She married her first husband, a black man, in the early 1940's and spent her life raising 12 children in the projects of Brooklyn, and managed to get all her children through college. While Ruth's story is one of overcoming her past of abuse and dealing with prejudice (or not dealing with it), James story is one of self-discovery. He grows up confused, as a black child in a black neighborhood, with a white mother and attending a predominately white school, in the midst of the civil rights movement.  What comes out of their stories in amazing journey in to Ruth's past. Everyone in the group was enthralled with this book, most of us reading it in just a couple of days. Most people said it reminded them of The Glass Castle, but not having read that one I can't say anything about it. However, it did remind me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, mostly just in the way James talked about growing up poor and, obviously, being set in Brooklyn. We were also surprised at the way Ruth was able to just ignore talking about the issue of race in her house. She refuses to answer questions when James is growing up, and changes the subject whenever it's brought up. However, we were all in agreement that Ruth was an amazingly strong woman, in her own way, and managed to raise 12 children and send all of them to college. I gave this one 5 out of 5 stars and I highly recommend it to everyone.

July was my turn to pick. I went back and forth between several books for a week before I made my final decision. Snobs by Julian Fellowes, The 13th Tale by Diane Setterfield, and Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, were all on the table at one point but I ended up choosing my initial pick.

Image from Goodreads

This book is amazing! I'm excited to share it with the book club even though it's a little outside of what most members would usually read. I look at it as expanding their horizons, but I'm also going into this pick knowing that not everyone is going to like it. With my last pick (The Other Boleyn Girl) I think I would have been heartbroken if someone had hated my favorite book in all of existence, but this one I think I can handle it.

June Book Club Pick

May's Book Club pick was M's pick, The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani. This book was so good. I've known that Adriana Trigiani was a pretty popular author for a long time but I'd never picked up any of her books. After reading The Shoemaker's Wife I've started picking up her books at the library bookstore, because I want to read a lot more of her.

Image from Goodreads 

The writing was so beautiful. The way she described the Italian Alps was amazing. She walked a very fine line between perfect description and over description and managed to stay on the side of perfect. Her characters were unforgettable, Enza's whole family were amazing and I could read a whole book just about the nuns that Ciro grew up with. The romance story was the slowest slow-burn romance I think I've ever read. The story followed how Enza became the shoemaker's wife and it took about a decade for them to finally get together, but it was so worth it.

The only problems I had with the story were that it seemed to go on a bit too long. The majority of the story was, as I said before, how Enza became the shoemaker's wife. Once they were married and off on their life together there was a perfect spot to end the story, with Ciro and Enza walking off into the wilderness of Minnesota to follow their dreams together. But it didn't end there, and I really feel like it should have, the rest seemed like it got chopped off of a different book and tacked on to this one just to fill the word count.

There was also one point where I went 'Wow. Someone's trying too hard.' and that was when Ciro went to Italy to visit after WWI. He was having some internal monologue about how it wasn't his Italy anymore, and how years of poverty had taken it's toll on the people and they'd latch on to the next ideology to come along. And of course that's exactly what happened, Mussolini and the rise of Fascism, was the next ideology to come along. It just seemed so out of place for a young man, even a well read young man, who just left a war zone and was seeing his brother for the first time in over a decade to be sitting in a cafe, smoking and contemplating ideology.

This was a great pick, and I gave it 4 out of 5 stars!

June's pick is from C whose last pick was I am Malala. C always seems to have the most thought provoking picks and this new pick fits right in. For June the pick is The Color of Water by James McBride.

Image from Goodreads

The Color of Water is the story of the authors mother, the daughter of a Polish Rabbi who married a black man in the early 1940's and raised 12 children in the Projects of Brooklyn, I don't know much about it besides what I read in the blurb but it sounds good and I can't wait to read it!


Next month is supposed to be J's pick but she's going to be out of town so I get to pick! I'm pretty excited about it and I think I have my book chosen already, although it might change before the next meeting.

Book Club Pick for March 2017 and the Buzzfeed Quiz I Took

image from goodreads.com

Last months book club pick was Detroit; An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff. The discussion around it was great. Everyone agreed that it was good but unsettling in it's honesty about the city and the darker side of where we live. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes dark, gritty stories.

This month was L's turn to pick and she chose a book I haven't read since 9th grade! It's a short month for us since the next meeting is on March 28th so the book is only 150 pages. It's Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I don't remember a whole lot from the first time I read it so I'm going into this one feeling like a new reader. I know its a dystopian novel and there's a quote about burning books and then burning people, but that's about it. I've always liked books in the dystopian genre, Brave New World being one of my favorite books of all time, so I think I'll probably love it.



On to the next topic-Buzzfeed! I am a sucker for Buzzfeed quizzes. I was scrolling through Facebook last night, when I should have been reading, and came across a tattoo test that reveals which book you should read next. The quiz can be found here. The result I got was The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I happen to have gotten for Christmas two years ago and never read.
I wasn't intending to read this next. I have two Sarah J, Maas books I'm dying to get too and I told myself I'd focus on the Malazan Book of the Fallen series once I finished The Relic Master, but since the quiz told me too, I guess The Perks of Being a Wallflower just got bumped up the list. It's a slim book so I'm thinking it will be a pretty fast read. The copy I have is the movie cover, but it is one of the few movie covers that doesn't bother me. Probably because I loved the movie.

So, here is my reading 'plan' ( I use the term 'plan' very loosely and reserve the right to change it at any point.) for the next couple of weeks.
-Finish The Relic Master
-Read The Perks of Being a Wallflower
-Read Fahrenheit 451
-Make progress with Deadhouse Gates
-Start A Court of Mist and Fury
-Read a couple of fun romances in there somewhere

Most of those books are short. Romances are generally pretty short. I think I can handle that plan but I suppose only time will tell.

This Month's Book Club Pick

I wrote a bit about the book club I'm a part of earlier this week and I think I'm going to make each month's book club pick a bit of a feature on the blog. Since we only meet once a month it should be pretty simple. After each meeting I'll do a post with a bit of a review of the previous pick and a first impression on the new pick. Each month a different member picks the book, there are eight of us so there's a good mix of styles and genres.

Last month was my pick and I chose The Other Boleyn Girl, which I've already written about several times so I won't go into that again. This month our book was chosen by E (I'm not going to use names, just to protect the other members privacy, since they don't know anything about the blog), and she chose....

Detroit; An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff.

I'm pretty excited to read this one. The last non-fiction we did was A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, and I did not like it, at all. But the city of Detroit is an interesting place. I could say a whole lot about Detroit, both good and bad, but I'm going to try and keep an open mind about it and not let my biases get in the way of the authors views and experiences of the city.

Everyone is pretty excited to read this one, and one of us already read it a few years ago and she says it's excellent. Overall first impression; good, not too long, cover makes it look all gritty and dark, but I hope there's some good things in it too.

I've already picked it up from the library so it will be on the next 'What I'm reading' post and hopefully I'll have good things to say!

My Book Club and Why Book Clubs are Important

It's not really my book club. It's a book club that I happen to belong too, and I'm actually the newest member. I got invited to attend my first book club meeting in September 2016, but the group has been meeting for a few years. They are truly an excellent group of ladies. There's all age from early 20's to mid 60's, we are in all different stages of motherhood, different religious and political beliefs, and we all love to read, so you can imagine how lively the conversations can get.

I decided to share a bit about my book club because January was my pick! I chose one of my all-time favorite books, The Other Boleyn Girl. It seemed like a bit of a safe pick but I was quite nervous about it. I've loved this book so much for so long that it was a bit like giving them a piece of my soul to read.

Joining a book club has changed my reading habits quite a bit. I've found some new authors and books that I never would have picked up on my own, and it helped me get out of my year-long reading slump. I'd tried online book clubs on Goodreads and LibraryThing but neither really worked for me. I don't know why but I find posting in an online group full of strangers really intimidating, I also have a hard time feeling motivated to read a book I'd never pick up on my own when I know no one in the group will know, or care, if I read the book. Plus, as an introvert, I vastly prefer a small. intimate group to one with twenty thousand members I don't know. A book club that meets in person just works for me.

And here are the reasons I think book clubs are important;

1. You'll read books that weren't even on your radar, let alone your TBR list. This is true of just about any book club, whether it's online, at your local library, or a small group of friends in your basement. Reading tastes and preferences can vary so much, even in the same genre, that I can almost guarantee you'll end up reading something that you would have never picked up off a shelf, or one clicked on Amazon.

2. You won't like all the books you read. That's right. There will be books you despise, and that's a good thing, Because you'll be learning about yourself, as a reader, and as a person. Example: Bill Bryson. I thought I had a pretty sarcastic and mean sense of humor until I read a Walk In the Woods. Bryson is down right awful. I finished the book, but the first thing I thought when I put it down was, 'I hope I never meet this guy, I hate to think what he'd write about me,'.  Not only did I not like the book, by the end of it I didn't like Bill Bryson, and I'd learned that I don't like that much negativity from an author. Once upon a time I might have found his writing funny, but I'm not that person anymore. Personal growth can be a bitch, and my opinions were not popular at book club that month.

3. Book clubs can be 'Reading Slump Repellent'. When you just can't settle on anything to read, and nothing sounds good, a book club picks takes the decision out of your hands. Someone picked this for your book club, you have to read it, the meetings in a week and a half. And before you know it your back in your reading groove. I mean, I'm sure it doesn't always work that way, some reading slumps happen no matter what you do, but not having to decide what to read can help bring you out of it.

4. The discussions are amazing. When you have a great group of people who are passionate about reading, your group can have some wonderful discussions. One of our best book discussions that I've been a part of was about The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. We went over an hour late discussing that one. We have such a varied group, that there were so many different view points and so much going on in that book, it was an amazing night to be a part of. I can see how this would be tricky to find because not all book clubs are created with the goal of reading and discussing books. Some are about drinking wine, or getting out of the house to socialize with someone who doesn't want to wipe their boogers on your jeans, or gossiping about celebrities, or something else entirely, so finding the right group is important. But when you find it, it's worth all the cheap wine and Kardashian gossip in the world, unless of course you like those things, in which case bring on the wine!

If you're reading this I hope you have a great book club that is everything you need and/or want it to be. Whether it's a group that's strictly about the books, like mine, or one that talks about everything under the sun and has a good supply of spirits while they do it, remember the main goal of any book club should be to enjoy yourself!