June Book Club Reads

I joined two new book clubs recently, through two separate local libraries. They both meet monthly.So, June was a lot of reading about White women who were mostly boring. Not that I didn’t enjoy the books, mind you. I love boring white women.

Pints and Prose is through Greece Library. We meet at Blue Barn Cidery, which is a great space for hanging out and eating buffalo chicken dip but isn't the best for book discussion. I plan to go a few more times to see if it gets better.

Read Women is through Gates Library and focused on, yes, reading women authors. It's a group of about 7 people right now. 

#ReadWomenGPL

Cherry by Mary Karr

So, this is a memoir, which already makes me not like it. Memoirs feel so rehearsed. Ms. Karr tells about her childhood and adolescence using drugs and being a general deviant. The average rating for the group was about 3 stars. Three women didn't finish it. The writing is a bit convoluted and the language is a wee pretentious. But it was an ok story and several people thought they "learned something." This mostly means that people were able to feel superior because they didn't do drugs or show their body parts or use foul language as young people. Of course, they also aren't professors now, so there's that.  

Pints and Prose

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Bernadette is missing and her daughter is piecing together the story leading up to her disappearance by gathering up correspondence and stuff. It's almost interesting but most of the characters basically suck. You try really hard to remember that Bernadette is basically suffering from some major Anxiety Disorder, at best, but then she's awful and your empathy teeters. At least, mine did. . The family is rich and there's a lot of rich people bickering with the neighbors and people at the private school. Then, there are two people who are ass-hats through the whole thing and do character changes out of no- where. Some people loved that. I didn't buy it. By the end, most people in the book club didn't even care if Bernadette was dead or alive. This is actually the kind of book I think of when I think of book club books but is probably better if you don't think about it too much. 

Read Harder/ ReadHarderRoc 

The categories I was supposed to read for my Read Harder Book Club were: A SCi-fi with a female protagonist written by a female author and a book that was previously assigned that you hated.

I read The Only Ones by Carola Dibell in February and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier in January to count for these two categories. I enjoyed the first half of The Only Ones and then not so much. Rebecca was dreadful. Whyyyyyy was I assigned this in the 8th grade!?

“Regular” Book Club
Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin

So, this was my top pick for the Book Club Month. It's sort of the story of a woman who gets romantically involved with a politician. It's told from the perspective of four different women: the women, her mother, her teen daughter, and the politician's wife. It was inspired by the Monica Lewinsky story and really explores the relationships of lives of the women, rather than focusing on the scandal itself. 

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