How To Break Up With My Newest Book Club

I harbor this super unrealistic fantasy that I will someday find myself in a local Podunkville book club that will be a perfect fit for me: it will be a welcoming space where everyone's voices can be heard, where we read interesting, challenging books and actually talk about them intelligently and in a way that honors differing perspectives.

Obviously, I've been there, tried that multiple times - and truly, this is never going to happen. Never? No, not ever. I see that clearly now. Dream dashed, but it's ok.

What keeps happening is that I'm a terrible judge of how certain people are going to eventually behave in a group setting. For example, there's one person I completely misjudged as being a lot more open and agreeable than they really are, and well, I now wish to extricate myself from any and all association with said person. (Long story short: this person has a habit of revealing other people's private information in a harsh, public manner, doesn't read social cues well, and totally dominates the conversation. And now I feel the need to protect myself.)

So, I once again find myself in "deja vu all over again"-land. The new book club started in September. By November, I had discovered I needed to get out. I've been trying the Be Perpetually Busy method of book club break ups ever since, to no avail.

I think a break up email to the whole group is probably in order. But something about that idea makes me cringe inside. Please tell me how you would go about breaking up with a local book club you had just joined.

Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser

Finally, I recommended a book club book that everyone else hated! I think this has got to be some sort of odd rite of passage.

"Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow" by Elizabeth Lesser was my pick. Well, it was sort of my pick in a way but not really.... See, I bought a copy as a birthday present for my friend, C, who loved it. C then recommended it to our book club as her pick, before she had actually read it. Turns out, C and I were the only ones who liked it. But C did not show up to book club, so I was the only one present to defend the book that everyone else hated. Hence it suddenly became "my pick" to defend.

It felt damn strange.

Defending it made me feel vulnerable, due to the subject matter.  The basic thesis is more complex than what I'm about to describe, but here goes: we're all just a bunch of bozos on the bus, and nobody is perfect. Yet almost everyone puts on a capable face and tries desperately to act like they've got it together all the time. Then, usually when something pretty bad happens in their life, they find their old capable face has to go, and they choose to start behaving more authentically.

Ok, not the best sales pitch anyone ever did for a book, I admit.

What can I say. This is not a book for everyone. INFJ-types like me will probably like it or at the very least appreciate it. Anti-therapy types who belittle the idea that people can go through a Phoenix Process after something bad happens to them will not care for this book. And people who cannot abide the story of a mother who cheats on her husband and ends a marriage for what our larger culture construes as frivolous reasons also will not like this book. Folks who don't want to think about aging, death, and dying will hate this book.

So to the 1% of the population I have not already described here: go ahead and read it!

I loved it, and am finding it hard to articulate why. Perhaps it is because I found one message of the book so appealing - and that's the encouragement to stop playing it so safe. Stop clinging to your most closely held judgments about the way you think others are living their lives so incorrectly. Instead, be flexible, be vulnerable, trust the universe, look for the signs that are there.

Summer Reading

I bet I can already guess which book everyone at the airport, on the train, and sitting by the pool will be reading this summer. Though, due to its subject matter, it may be well hidden inside an e-reader. This one is a trilogy (shocker). Any guesses? My own prediction is after the jump.

Last summer, it seemed like everyone was reading "The Hunger Games." The summer before that, everyone was reading "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and its progeny. And before that, "Twilight." (Me? I liked the movies so much better than the books - I didn't even finish "GWTDT" because to me it was begging for some serious condensing, and the violence was too much. I didn't finish "Twilight" because if I'm going to be reading about vampires, I need to be reading about them having wild sex. As for "HG," if I were Katniss I would have had sex with movie Gale looong before those games even started. Run the risk of dying a virgin? Hell to the no. Not after spending so much time alone in the woods with that fine piece. Hard to suspend my disbelief on that one. Where was I? ...)

I want to inquire about your reading habits. How do you decide what you're going to read for pleasure?

I do it two ways: 1) I keep a list of books I want to read, and 2) I'm in two shitty book clubs and I actually do the reading. Also, I only read real books - I don't have an e-reader (not that e-books aren't "real"). Open to conversion someday. Just not now. I use my local public library constantly, and I have my book list uploaded there. They send me an email when something from my list is in. I could also elect to have them mail it to me. They have a drive through book drop. Heaven. They also do e-books, so I can painlessly make the switch someday.

Personally, I don't divide the literary world into "kid stuff" and "adult stuff." I try to remain open to suggestion, and I'll read anything. I won't necessarily finish everything though. But I will give it a fair shake for 75 pages. I'm sure you've heard how Joel Stein caught hell for poking fun at grown-ups who read young adult fiction here:

"I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace proud. I don’t know because it’s a book for kids. I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults."

His brief commentary inspired quite a little debate on the internets. Funny how people think he is "wrong" for having his own personal boundaries about what he will and will not read. I think we all have the right to get irrational when it comes to our opinions on books. Anyway, I love that reading stirs such passion in the American public. Gives me hope for our future.

Summer 2012 reading prediction time.....

I predict everyone will be reading "Fifty Shades of Grey." I understand it's basically "Twilight" fan fiction about S&M. In the last 2 weeks, this book has been recommended to me several times, by some very straight-laced folk. One of my shitty book clubs just added it to our reading list. (This review has inspired me not to read it - be sure to read the comments, there is some damn clever writing in there, too. And this critique is hilarious.)

Instead, I think my inaugural 2012 summer read is going to be a little gem described by a friend I trust to be an underrated classic - "The Dud Avocado." What are your summer reading plans?

When Keeping It Real Goes Right, Book Club Edition

My "Other" book club met last night, that is, the book club I joined about a year ago hoping it would be a welcome contra to the original shitty, ginormous Podunkville book club of 25 people I was invited to join when we first moved here 3 odd years ago. And in many respects it has been.

If you've been reading me awhile, you know the importance of being in a book club in Podunkville - that's how you get the information you need to make it here in business, family and in life. Maybe it's a small town thing.

The truth is, Other Book Club is usually boring. After the last several meetings, I've gone home each time thinking I needed to gently break up with these folks but I couldn't bring myself to do it; because as I've already said I need the info being a member of the group can provide. Our book club seems to be missing a certain spark. Everyone is perfectly "nice." And sometimes "nice" is really grating, and not enough. Part of the problem is none of the members are really outspoken or funny or vibrant. Least of all introverted me.

Last night I decided to take the risk of being really honest about what I truly thought of the book. Holy hell, I hated the book so much so that I finally felt I had to keep it real.

The actual title of the book is irrelevant. Bottom line: it sucked out loud. I'm just grateful it was a library book. It was this ridiculous, poorly-written, fictional tale of a dysfunctional Oregonian family where everyone - children, mothers, the differently-abled - gets violently raped. Literally, I lost count of the number of assaults and rapes detailed in the damn book. And I mean it when I say none of it was at all essential to plot or character development. It was one of those shitty 450-ish-page books that on the surface feels female empowering, but when you dig deeper it is totally antifeminist, complete with those tired old "mother must be punished for having an abortion" tropes, and going back to the absentee dad thereby affirming the power of traditional marriage bullshit. It depicted a developmentally disabled character in a troubling "magical" and "inspirational" light, and with a certain dialogue that just did not ring true. And I kept thinking to myself "I just don't believe any of this could be real." I could go on and on, but I won't. Strangely, it has gotten glowing reviews online except for one negative one out of 87 that reassured me I was not taking crazy pills for hating it.

So I said pretty much all of that out loud at book club. And lo and behold, some of the other members revealed they felt like I did. We had a deep conversation about it. I felt like everyone was heard and respected. I even felt like I understood the rationale of the couple who loved the book - although I won't be jotting down their book recommendations, nor they mine, I came away liking them as people. What a pleasant feeling.

How about your book club experiences? Have you read anything lately in a group or on your own that really spoke to you? ("Wolf Hall" is on my list, thanks @Paola, as well as "Kindred" by Octavia Butler, thanks @Cloud.)