Friday, September 30, 2011

The Moment You've All Been Waiting For...

A quick review: my dear friend Kelley over at Daily Sips presented me with a challenge last week - pick a book for an online book club.  Oh my!  What fun - and what a burden!  I mean, there are just SO MANY BOOKS out there from which to choose!  To choose just one for a book club...I felt like Spiderman.  It's both a gift and a responsibility. 

BUT, after consultation with an expert (i.e. my mother), I have come up with the first title for our monthly book club.  Let's review how this will work:

1. Everyone come back to my blog on Fridays and check in with their progress.  Be careful with what you say - someone else may not be as far as you are, and you wouldn't want to spoil anything!  These check-ins need not be anything elaborate - more like "hey, I'm on chapter five, wow, this is great!  You are my hero for picking this book!"  or "I'm on chapter four, this book sucks and I hate your living, breathing guts for picking it."  Stuff like that. 

2. On the last Friday of the month, I will post an online review of the book.  Everyone else in encouraged to do the same, either in the comments on my blog or on your own and link it in.  Then we can generate some discussion in the comments.  This will probably take some tinkering as we get into it, but we'll see how it goes. 

3. I will also announce the next book.  I will NOT, however, be the only one picking books for this thing.  I mean, I CAN pick them all, but you all will eventually get sick of reading biographies of medieval English queens.  (Don't worry.  That's not what I picked this time.) I will be taking suggestions and possibly assigning the task of picking the books to certain participants. 

4.  A note about the comments and discussions: we need to be able to have open discussions.  No two people are going to think exactly the same about anything.  So please, let's be respectful of others' opinions and expressions.  Let's keep it clean and civil out there. 


So, enough with the rules!   On with the first selection!

The book for the month of October will be...


According to Amazon.com:

he Weird Sisters in Eleanor Brown's delightful debut could have been weirder, considering their upbringing. Their professor father spoke primarily in Shakespearean verse, and while other kids in the bucolic Midwestern college town of Barnwell checked the TV lineup, the Andreas girls lined up their library books. They buried themselves in books so completely that while they loved each other, they never learned to like each other much. And when adulthood arrived and they pursued separate destinies, each felt out of step with the world. When news of their mother's cancer makes a terribly convenient excuse for attention-hog Bean (Bianca) and Cordy (Cordelia), the “baby” who always got off easy, to boomerang back to Barnwell from New York and New Mexico, respectively, they return bearing the guilt (and consequences) of embezzlement and pregnancy-by-random-painter. They're most terrified of admitting these failures to Rose (Rosalind), the responsible eldest, who stayed in Barnwell to teach Math and cling to her caretaker-martyr role. With lively dialogue and witty collective narration, the sisters' untangling of their identities and relationships feels honest and wise, and the questions they raise about how we carry our childhood roles into our adult lives will resonate with all readers, especially those with their own weird sisters. --Mari Malcolm

So...that's my pick!

(You gave the assignment to a Shakespeare fan.  This is your own fault.)

Check in over the next few weeks, and come read and discuss the final review on October 28!

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