Greetings, Saloners! I hope you all had a good week of reading. Mine was mixed. I gave up in the middle of one book, which always makes me sad, but I started another that’s pretty fabulous so far. Here are the details:
Category Archives: Book Group
Sunday Salon: mixed reviews
The sincerest form of flattery, perhaps
When Joey had his accident I was about 150 pages from the end of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. That was my book group’s pick for July and our meeting was scheduled for a few days later. I had been having very strong and very negative feelings about the book and it was just too much to process at the same time as the accident. I ended up taking a break from the book and skipping the meeting. I did come back to it, though, and now I’ve finished it.
I have a lot of complaints about this book but I’ll just write about one of them for now. It was a total rip-off of one of my all-time favorite books, Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business. I boldly told Doulicia, who happens to be in my book group, that if Robertson Davies was still alive, and in a litigious mood, he could probably sue Irving for plagiarism. She answered with a challenge. “Is it plagiarism,” she asked, “or homage?”
Breathless
Wow, it’s been a busy week. A LOT going on . . .
1. I had the theater experience of a lifetime. God bless the University Musical Society, for bringing the Royal Shakespeare Society to Ann Arbor, Mich. They didn’t just come and do a couple of shows, either. They were in residence for three weeks, giving talks and lectures and demonstrations and so forth. And we saw Julius Caesar and The Tempest. In the car on the way to The Tempest, I must admit Steve and I giggled over the fact that while we would be watching Patrick Stewart (as Prospero) in the flesh, our kids would be back home with the babysitter watching him in X-Men 3. And The Tempest was, well, I can’t even come up with an adjective. All I can say is, at the end, during the applause, people were shouting not Bravo but Thank you to the actors. And Steve and I were quite literally trembling as we left the theater.
This book is one hundred dollars
I started Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close with low expectations. I didn’t even want to read it. All I knew about it was that Jonathan Safran Foer, who judging by his very cute author photo couldn’t be more than about fifteen years old, was considered to be some kind of wunderkind prodigy making a big splash and billions of dollars and a movie off his first novel. But book group is book group, so I got me a copy from the library and in I plunged.
Dusty
My poor neglected little blog! I thought I better pop in and dust it off a little before it gets completely forgotten. I never mean to take such long breaks from blogging. I’ve just been so busy!
What else has been keeping me busy
I’ve been reading some, though not as much as I’d like. Here’s a rundown:
Penguin Classic: I only got halfway through Le Grand Meaulnes before I had to return it. It was an ILL and it came all the way from Ripon College in Wisconsin, no possibility of renewing it. Okay, this is an admittedly obscure title, but jeez, it’s a Penguin Classic, it’s not exactly out of print. And there was no copy closer to Ann Arbor MI than Ripon? Well, anyway. I sort of enjoyed the half that I read, but I was definitely handicapped by my lack of familiarity with the customs & mores of late 19th century rural France. There were a lot of descriptions of clothes that I’m sure were significant, but the significance escaped me entirely. For example, all the guys were wearing smocks. Smocks. Now I know they weren’t wearing oversized men’s shirts, backwards, with the sleeves cut off at the elbows. I know they weren’t fingerpainting. But there’s got to be some reason why these smocks (?) were mentioned so frequently. Honestly, I never thought I’d say this about any novel, but this one could have used some footnotes, or at least an introduction. Still, I’d like to go back and finish it some day. Despite the smocks, it was a vivid portrait of adolescent boys, coming of age, friendship, first love, etc. And, to answer your burning question, Meaulnes rhymes with moan, and it’s the main character’s name.
Panning Martha
It was great to get out last night and get together with my book group. We’re all moms of young kids and occasionally it happens that the energy level is a bit low on a Tuesday night. But last night we had a jolly time, including a very energetic discussion of Martha Beck’s memoir, Expecting Adam.
