Introducing Our Book Club
When it comes to reading, there are two types of habits we seem to nurture in our lives:
–
Habit Type One: We secretly hoard and consume our guilty pleasures without letting anyone in on the fact that it’s our seventh read through the Harry Potter series.
–
Or Habit Type Two: We have a list of books we know we want to read, but because we don’t have any outlet for discussion, it feels exhausting to do by ourselves.
–
Enter Habit Type Three: The Book Club. Now, try to banish the remembrance of super chick-litesque films (not that anything was wrong with “The Jane Austen Book Club”) and let’s get practical. A book club is a way of allowing someone else to select one book per month based off their own research and time and then creating a space for group discussion.
–
Bottom line, you’ll read things you might never have known you’d enjoy, meet people you’d otherwise never get a chance to and have fun in the meantime. You already know what our team has been reading, but now we’d like to formally invite you to #DarlingReads, a place to get to know you a little better amidst the internet’s noise and dialogue around a variety of subjects on a deeper, more connected level.
APRIL '18
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” by Maria Semple
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” is Maria Semple’s second novel, heralded by the New York Times as “Divinely funny,” and by TIME as “a bracingly smart family dramedy,” and we have no disagreement here.
–
Semple’s second work of fiction, this story focuses on a preliminary mystery: fifteen-year-old Bee is missing her mother, Bernadette, and we don’t know what happened. As the novel goes back in time and retraces the weeks leading up to Bernadette’s disappearance, we meet a variety of hilarious and quirky characters. There is the next door neighbour, an uptight and perfectionistic mother, the long-distance assistant in India that Bernadette has been sending emails to, the perhaps oddly unemotional father who is resistant to giving Bee the information she needs, and then Bee herself.
–
We discover a secret past, while exploring family dynamics, marital realities, the force of feeling that comes with a genius mind, and how under it all, daughters often will do anything to be seen and loved by their mothers. This novel moves us to laugh and even cry with compassion, and has a fun format consistent with many modern novels. It’s like a PG version of a Zadie Smith novel, with the playfulness of Mark Haddon when it comes to the everyday.
–
* Join us this month on Facebook HERE to stay in the know on our discussion schedule. (Mobile users click here.)
MARCH '18
“The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup” by Susan Orlean
, we find over 35 short essays based of interviews of people and groups, from the Tonya Harding Fan Club to the unknown “The American Man, Aged Ten.” Orlean executes a profile of a newly successful Tiffany (the Tiffany) and her relationship to her brash, male manager, investigates the history of The Shaggs (“either the best band of all time or the worst”), and discovers why Christina Sanchez chose to become the first female matador de toros to have made her debut in Spain.–
Susan Orlean’s first book, “The Orchid Thief,” may have come on your radar, but even if it didn’t the film version, re-titled Adaptation, is even more likely to have. The film garnered four Academy Award nominations, and won Meryl Streep a Golden Globe in 2003. Her writing crossed over again when one of the essays in this compendium, then named “Life’s Swell” became the inspiration and basis for the film Blue Crush.
–
More than all of this, Orlean remains a powerful voice in culture today as a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, writing articles in addition for Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire and more publications. She was named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2003, and given a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. This collection of essays, published in 2001, displays a mind a life full of awareness, examination, and a robust interest in everyone around her.
–
* For this book, we will be selecting particular essays to read and discuss over on our Facebook HERE. (Mobile users click here.) Join to discover which five we will begin with (hint, obviously Tonya Harding Fan Club will be included).
