More Party Girls!

Day 140 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and my book group met tonight, so you get to hear what more party girls are reading: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. This is the book that so many people are reading that it stays in hardcover. (Or large print paperback, kindle, and audiobook. The trade paperback will be out in January, 2011.)

Yes, we had chocolate pie. Plus Cool Whip and berries. Green chips and salsa. Biscuits and home made strawberry jam. And Beer Nuts Party Mix ("a party in your mouth"), leftover from the Saturday night party.

What a beautiful evening on the patio. Breezy and warm, clear skies, puffy clouds, it gradually got dark around us as we talked about the book and the natural other things that arose from it. It was the perfect blend of book talk and related-to-the-book talk that was free to go anywhere. It felt like everybody got to say what she wanted to say about the book, and we got to hear about personal experiences or ethical or moral dilemmas similar to those faced by characters in the book. Interpretive discussion and a connected personally-resonant discussion.

I know that many, many book groups are mere excuses for social gatherings, and people sometimes 1) don't talk about the book and/or 2) don't even read the book. But we are a lucky bunch. Susan, our fearless leader, formed the group because 1) she wants to read fiction (or, OK, occasionally memoir!) and 2) her other book group was not actually reading the book.

Tonight we had a new member, Suzie, who had come to us as a haven because her previous book group was...well, it was Susan's previous book group! (I hope I am not exposing anybody! Uh...I think we are safe.) Anyway, we discussed the book, which, I hear, is remarkably rare in book groups these days!

Any comments about book groups welcome here.

The images today are collage bookmarks made by me from things found in books, glued to the backings for Swedish cooking utensils. On the left is a collage poem made from lines from other poems cut from pages of an anthology cut out from an old (but abundant, not rare) book, so the inside could be used to put something else (not a gun) in. On the left is an art collage, with ironic content, to be used as a large bookmark. Bookmarks are things found in books! So are newspaper clippings, brochures, playing cards, seed packets, greeting cards, CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) courtesy/complaint cards, etc.

I love bookmarks, I love crafty doo-dads, and I love collage poems.

Early Bird Catches No Blog

Day 118 of the “What are you reading, and why?” project, and Kim is reading Ladder of Years, by Anne Tyler, because 1) blogger is down and 2) her camera is lost, so she has to read! Presumably she hoped to upload pictures from her lost camera into her blog, etc.

I am hoping that 1) blogger is up again, since I am blogging now and 2) that MSN will keep working, as I only thought I was blogging now…and am/was not…

I couldn’t blog this morning because 1) I was swimming laps (pool opened for Early Bird Lap Swim!) and 2) blogger was down. I will have to get a new summer routine now that I swim in the morning when I used to be blogging. Maybe I will write the blog entries in my head, while swimming, and then come home and write them down. I have composed poems that way!

Of course 1) I have a good imagination and a gradually poorer memory, so it’s possible that I’ll think the blogs I swam are blogs I wrote… and/or 2) maybe I could get one of those fabulous computers that works underwater. Heh.

I love Anne Tyler. I remember reading a section of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in a magazine, offered as a short story, and then recognizing it when I read that chapter in the book. Loved The Amateur Marriage. Can’t tell you why.

Rebecca finished Strength in What Remains and had The Little Stranger and In a Sunburned Country waiting for her. Are these more books that followed her home?

Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder, is the amazing story of Deogratius of Burundi and his persistent hope in the face of terrible experiences and haunting memories.

The Little Stranger, a novel, by Sarah Waters, might seem to be lighter reading after Deo's story, but it is haunting, too, a ghost story, set in England in the aftermath of World War II.

But at least there should be some relief from humorist Bill Bryson as he recounts of the horrors of sharks, gigantic earthworms, and being baked alive in Australia in In a Sunburned Country.

And Kim is supposed to be reading The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, for a book group. She can read my copy, if she takes very, very good care of it, because I have finished it. Really good story. Revisited my childhood in a way, since I even spent 5 years of it in the South, with a woman helping with children and housework in our home, a woman I loved. She had come highly recommended by the county welfare agency, where my mom worked.

But wait a minute, Ladder of Years is about a middle-aged woman who runs away from home, husband, and kids. I've felt like that at times. I've actually 1) walked out the door and around the block when really miffed or 2) driven down the road and had a glass of wine with my mom, instead of moving to from Baltimore to Delaware, as Delia does in this novel, which now seems like something I had better read. Maybe, if I take really, really good care of it, I can borrow it from Kim.

Two for One

Days 74 & 75 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. I've been off at a women's retreat, asking women what they are reading.

Peg is reading Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro. Why?

1) She loves Alice Munro, and has read her stories over the years in books and journals and has given them to her daughters. I know because I am one of her daughters!

2) She was in Barnes & Noble and saw it on the shelf, realized she still had $ on her gift card from her son and daughter-in-law from Christmas, and thought, "Oh! I'll get a hardback!"

Right after I had this little discussion with Peg aka Mom, Susan sat down near us, the same Susan who has decided to pronounce Zooey as ZO-ee, and who was a little put out that I had not yet put her in this blog as being someone who was reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett.

"I will now," I said.

"Well, I'm not reading it now," she said. (I almost said "she pouted" but you are only supposed to say "said" when rendering dialogue.) "I'm done."

"Well, I hadn't really had a chance to ask you why you were reading it," I said. "Why were you?"

"I was in Barnes & Noble," she said, "and I had a gift card, so I went ahead and got it in hardback."

Twilight Zone music.

Susan had been waiting for The Help to come out in paperback, and had even asked the bookseller about the likely date, but there isn't one, not as long as it selling so well in hardback. That's how the industry works, causing a lot of hardbacks to be remaindered, as people hold out for the paperbacks, due to cost and convenience (easier/lighter to carry around). But then there's a hardback like The Help that everybody wants to read now. It's out in Kindle and audio formats, and available to pre-order in large-print paperback...but no regular trade paperback yet.

Next morning I learned that Mary Beth and Pam had also recently read The Help and really enjoyed and learned a lot from it. The "help" are the black maids raising white children in homes and communities where they are subjected to routine disrespect and indignities. Mary Beth, interested from a young age in politics and current events, vividly remembered the civil rights issues so crucial to this novel, and, of course, the assassinations of Medgar Evars and Martin Luther King, Jr. Pam felt she led a more sheltered young life and realized she was as unaware as some of the white women depicted in the novel of the important events going on all around her. I'll tell you more about what Pam and Mary Beth are reading tomorrow...or the next day.

For now, I want to say that Susan is currently reading Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, by Rhoda Janzen, a memoir, because her mom picked it up at Borders with a sale coupon and because Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love liked it.

So mothers and daughters are reading and sharing books about women here, not the chick lit sort, but the coping with real life sort. The Lives of Girls and Women sort. My book group read that novel by Alice Munro, and my mom says the stories in Too Much Happiness (which I can now borrow from her, in hardback!) are rich and complicated indeed.

"There's one I've read through twice already, and I'm still not sure I got it," she said.

And I'm not sure I get what happened when I passed through the room and found a woman dangling a pendulum over another woman flat on the floor at the retreat. She explained it was part of her work with energy and healing touch. In some spots the pendulum was still, in some spinning in gentle circles, and in others moving side to side.

After the woman on the floor got up, I said, "Can I try it?" and she dangled the pendulum over me. It went crazy, spinning everywhere in wild dancing circles and apparently I have wide open chakras! That, or I read too much.