Just a reminder that next week we’ll be discussing this month’s book club selection, We Need to Talk About Kevin. If you haven’t yet finished yet (me), there’s still time! Hell, if you haven’t gotten the book yet and you’re a fast enough reader, there’s even time still to find a copy and get started. Not if you have a baby though. If you have a baby and you aren’t at least halfway through the book, you’re probably screwed. Unless you stop watching “Downton Abbey,” and other assorted TV shows, but let’s not be crazy.
And now a drumroll, please. Our book club selection for March is … “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot. It was one of our semi-finalists for our first vote and a book that sounded really interesting to me. Plus, it’s in paperback for less than 10 bucks. Score! As always, you can support Dear Wendy and buy through this link (or through the Amazon link in the right sidebar; I get a small commission on any purchases made through that link, which help pay for this site and now help pay for a few hours of babysitting each week so that I can work on this site, hooray!).
We’ll discuss WNTTAK next Tuesday, so be on the look-out.
This month we chose “The Marriage Plot” for our inaugural Dear Wendy book club selection. While I waited for the book to arrive from Amazon, I spent the first week of the month reading another book, “Under the Banner of Heaven,” which, after giving it 120 pages, I just could not get into (sorry, Addie Pray!). It was a relief to switch gears with Pulitzer Prize winner, Jeffrey Eugenides’, “The Marriage Plot,” a book that explores the transition from college to young adulthood through the lives of three intertwined young 20-somethings whose graduation from an Ivy League school in the early 80s sends them on three distinct paths of self-discovery.
At the center of the young trio is Madeleine, a pretty girl from an upper-middle-class family in Connecticut who struggles with her desire to be an independent woman and her need to be needed and adored. Her long-suffering platonic friend Mitchell, a brilliant guy with a promising future, has been in love with her since freshman year but Madeleine can never see him as more than just a friend, despite a handful of intimate moments between them. On the other hand, Leonard, a troubled guy from a lower-income family on the west coast who won a scholarship to school, has Madeleine’s heart. Unfortunately, he also has manic depression (or, what we now call bipolar disorder), a mental state that acts like a third wheel in their relationship.
Just a reminder that next week we’ll be discussing our January book club selection,The Marriage Plot. If you haven’t finished it yet, you still have the weekend.
Next month’s selection is “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” If you haven’t already picked up a copy, you can buy it here now (Kindle version here).
In a very narrow margin (93 to 87 at the time of writing this) The Marriage Plot beat out We Need to talk About Kevin for our inaugural book club selection. If you’d like, you can order your copy of The Marriage Plothere (or just click the image at your left). And since the margin was so small, I thought we could make We Need to talk About Kevin our February book club selection, which gives you a little extra time to get a copy. And if your pick wasn’t chosen this time, don’t worry; we’ll have another vote in February for the March selection. Happy reading, everyone!!
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2011: Even among authors, Jeffrey Eugenides possesses a rare talent for being able to inhabit his characters. In The Marriage Plot, his third novel and first in ten years (following the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex), Eugenides describes a year or so in the lives of three college seniors at Brown in the early 80s. There is Madeleine, a self-described “incurable romantic” who is slightly embarrassed at being so normal. There is Leonard, a brilliant, temperamental student from the Pacific Northwest. And completing the triangle is Mitchell, a Religious Studies major from Eugenides’ own Detroit. What follows is a book delivered in sincere and genuine prose, tracing the end of the students’ college days and continuing into those first, tentative steps toward true adulthood. This is a thoughtful and at times disarming novel about life, love, and discovery, set during a time when so much of life seems filled with deep portent. –Chris Schluep
Amazon.com Review
In 1984, Ron and Dan Lafferty murdered the wife and infant daughter of their younger brother Allen. The crimes were noteworthy not merely for their brutality but for the brothers’ claim that they were acting on direct orders from God. In Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer tells the story of the killers and their crime but also explores the shadowy world of Mormon fundamentalism from which the two emerged. The Mormon Church was founded, in part, on the idea that true believers could speak directly with God. But while the mainstream church attempted to be more palatable to the general public by rejecting the controversial tenet of polygamy, fundamentalist splinter groups saw this as apostasy and took to the hills to live what they believed to be a righteous life. When their beliefs are challenged or their patriarchal, cult-like order defied, these still-active groups, according to Krakauer, are capable of fighting back with tremendous violence. While Krakauer’s research into the history of the church is admirably extensive, the real power of the book comes from present-day information, notably jailhouse interviews with Dan Lafferty. Far from being the brooding maniac one might expect, Lafferty is chillingly coherent, still insisting that his motive was merely to obey God’s command. Krakauer’s accounts of the actual murders are graphic and disturbing, but such detail makes the brothers’ claim of divine instruction all the more horrifying. In an age where Westerners have trouble comprehending what drives Islamic fundamentalists to kill, Jon Krakauer advises us to look within America’s own borders. –John Moe –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of a boy who ends up murdering seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin’s horrific rampage, in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive–even thrive–in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta’s family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution–and her cells’ strange survival–left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? –Tom Nissley
Just a reminder that next week we’ll be discussing this month’s book club selection, We Need to Talk About Kevin. If you haven’t yet finished yet (me), there’s still time! Hell, if you haven’t gotten the book yet and you’re a fast enough reader, there’s even time still to find a copy and get started. Not if you have a baby though. If you have a baby and you aren’t at least halfway through the book, you’re probably screwed. Unless you stop watching “Downton Abbey,” and other assorted TV shows, but let’s not be crazy.
