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Just had the ol’ bookclub meeting. Since I picked the book, I hosted – and we had a great time here at Chateau Johnson, it was one of the most enjoyable book club nights yet – if I do say so myself. I chose Bet Me, by Jennifer Crusie – something easy and fun – a summer read. I was very pleased to find that every member of the club gave it an “A.” Yeah me!

Sooo, if you have a bookclub, and decide to read Bet Me, here are some ideas (I know, they’re not extremely original, but fun all the same) to liven up the meeting:

Play Elvis &/or Elvis Costello music (I chose the King’s #1 hits cd)

Serve Lots of bread with REAL butter, Chicken Marsala, and Krispy Kremes. (We tried to make the Krispy Kreme cake, but it didn’t go very well). I also printed Min’s recipe for Chicken Marsala and gave each book club member a copy to keep.

Discussion questions:

What is your opinion of romance novels / chick lit as a genre?

Should Bet me be shelved/categorized as a Romance or simply Fiction?

Grade the book (and explain rationale).

Favorite character? Character you identify with/relate to most?

Did you like or hate Cindy?

Favorite LOL moments?

Who would you cast to play Cal and Min?

Write your own 1st sentence to the novel, starting, like Crusie does, “One upon a time…”

Would you read another Crusie?

After you burn through these questions, which should have made for some interesting conversations on their own – it’s time to play the “If” game. By now you and the other book club members have probably imbibed copious amounts of wine, and are perfectly primed for this activity. Based on the “If Dinners” that Min had with her best friends, the If game allows each book club member a chance to randomly choose a question from The Book Of If and ask it of all the other members, everyone answers the question before moving on to the next member who will select another question, and the process repeats itself. If you don’t have an absolute blast doing this, then, well, you need to get into a new book club.

Yep, it’s not a blue moon, or even a full one -but the stars have aligned so that both books clubs I belong to chose to meet this week. Which meant while I took a leisurely 10 days to read one, I crammed the other in over the weekend! These two books are nothing alike, but since I’m reading and dicussing them in tandem, I can’t help but compare apples to oranges, as it were.
First up – as discussed in last night’s meeting: Digging to America by Anne Tyler. I gave it a C/C-…and my reasons are basically the same as one Amazon reviewer, so I’ll include their words here:I finished this book because I was urged to by people who had read and loved it, but the reason why is still beyond me. Nothing much happens in this book except a series of suburban dinner parties. Since there is no plot, some strength of characterization should have been necessary, but none of the characters are engaging and we don’t get to know them very well. There are some sentences and scenes which are good and amusing descriptions of people’s thoughts and conversations, but that’s not enough to carry a book which was conceived without much in the way of content.

This reviewer pretty much covered all my opinions on the book. I’d only add that I was disappointed by the direction the author takes the book: you start out expecting to read a story of 2 families adopting children from Korea and learning about all that goes into that – but this is just glossed over while the focus falls on the grandmother of one of the adopted children: a critical, cold widow who, an immigrant herself, is afraid of becoming too American.

Another side irritant is that I couldn’t help but wonder why Tyler chose to make Maryam (the foreign grandma) and her family Iranian. Any ethnicity would have served her purpose – I felt that Tyler’s choice was an author’s cop-out – an easy way to borrow some drama and conflict thanks to Sept 11. It was a cheap shot, imo, and not used very well besides. Unlike The Namesake – where I felt truly immersed in the Bengali culture – the description of Iranian culture here felt torn from a cookbook.

As for the other book: Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, the meeting is Wed night – and I’m hoping for the rain to finally go away, so we can enjoy a nice evening outside – the perfect surroundings for this story. (As for Digging we met at a Korean restaurant, which turned out to earn the same grade as the book: C-. Maybe it’s just me, but Korean food just tasted oilier and saltier than Japanese – I had the salmon, which I always love, and managed to be “underwhelmed.”)

I enjoyed this book – I give it a solid B, a B+ even. Unlike Tyler’s book, Kingsolver does an excellent job developing her characters, both major and minor. The conflicts are subtle, the plot woven gently – so the characters take center stage. There is a great deal of fascinating info about nature, insects, birds, and farms – yet it never feels didactic or overwhelming. One of my favorite parts was her description of scent, and the way we respond to it.

The only time I did get a “preachy” vibe from the novel was in reference to pesticides and organic produce – here, I felt the author was using her characters as a soapbox she could stand on.

I read this book the last week of May/first of June – a perfect time to do so: I was often reading outside, and listening to the wind in the trees, smelling the new bloom of peonies, and surrounded by clover. Even all the bugs heightened my enjoyment of the read. Perhaps the only time I will EVER say bugs heightened my enjoyment of ANYTHING.

Of Harry Potter fans who have made the jump and posted predictions about what will happen in Book 7. I can honestly say these are my own thoughts, which I did not beg, borrow or steal from another site. To be honest, other thank J.K.R.’s own site, I have never been to a Harry Potter site!

I did however, just finish reading the book of predictions published by mugglenet.com, which is apparently THE Harry Potter fan site. Can you believe I borrowed this from my MIL? Or, more accurately, hubby borrowed it, and after that, I just had to read it too.

It was a fun little book – I was quite impressed by the main author/webmaster of mugglenet – who started the 20 million hit/month website when he was 12! The kid was homeschooled, which is quite encouraging for my plans to homeschool my own kids – til middle school at least. Anyways, aside from sounding like a 5-paragraph structured high school research paper, the chapter breakdowns, musings, and, of course – predictions were interesting. Most of the arguments and debates my husband and I have had over the books were included. I have never read a HP book, exactly – I’m holding out to buy my first books for when it comes out in a COMPLETE box set. But I have listened to all 6 books on audio, a really awesome way to spend long drives, or painting your house, or working out – reader Jim Dale is INCREDIBLE!!! If you are an HP fan, and have not listened to the audio versions yet, I highly recommend giving them a try. Listening to the books together with the husband would spark lots of discussion, and it was neat to see someone else offer thoughts on these same topics.

With that being said, I still came away with a few thoughts and ideas that were not specifically mentioned in the book – which leads me to the actual topic of this post MY OWN HARRY POTTER PREDICTIONS FOR BOOK 7 (bum-bum-bum…….):

My main one deals with the debate raging over whether or not HP is, himself, a horcrux. I say he is…but here is the catch – Harry himself is not a horcrux, but his scar is. I think that it is the scar itself that holds a piece of big bad V’s soul, and by destroying that horcrux, Harry will lose the scar that has marked him as “the boy who lived” and finally, he will be able to live his own life, free from the mark of Voldemort (both literally and figuratively).

Another prediction I have actually came to me while I was reading the mugglenet prediction book: in it they ponder how Dumbledore came to be in possession of James Potter’s invisibility cloak, and why Dumbledore had that strange look of triumph in his eyes when Harry tells him how Voldemort regenerated himself with Harry’s blood to circumvent the magic of Lily’s love. I think Dumbledore was there the night Lily & James died: he either arrived on the scene in the invisibility cloak as Voldemort was killing Lily, or he came soon after – searching the remains of the house for clues (and perhaps finding the cloak). That’s where he was while McGonnagall was watching the Dursley house as cat sentinel, and where he was coming from when he arrived that evening. This will be important because – A: if he was there at the time Lily was killed – he either played a role in stopping V from killing Harry, or saw something that leads him to think Voldemort’s regeneration won’t be the success he thinks. or B: if he went to the house to search for clues afterwards – perhaps he found evidence that led him to the same conclusion – by regenerating using Harry’s blood, Voldemort has somehow made a fatal error. Either way, I believe Dumbledore made an appearance at Godric’s Hollow that fateful night, and it will play a role in book 7.

As for some of the biggies: will Harry die (I say no) is Snape a “good” guy (I say no, hubby says yes – and he’s probably right), and is Dumbledore truly dead (again, I say no, and hubby says yes, and he’s probably also right about that.)

Until July – when we can gorge ourselves on Harry Potter mania!

Just picked up Philppa Gregory’s newest novel at the library: The Boleyn Inheritance. It is a little different from her past work – the story is in first person, but it is broken down into sections, so that the reader alternates between three women: Jane Boleyn (married to Anne’s infamous brother), Anne of Cleves (Henry’s 4th wife), and Katherine Howard (Henry’s 5th wife). So far, I am enjoying the rotation of the characters’ voices – and seeing the story unfold like a patchwork quilt. Gregory is doing a nice job making each woman distinct from each other, and establishing their personalities from the very first paragraph.

The nature of Gregory’s historical fiction is inherently ripe with dramatic irony – it will be interesting to see how she uses this to her advantage.

The only thing I have found disturbing so far is the way her current depictions of Anne of Cleves and Jane Boleyn contradict the picture that characters in her previous novels have painted of them. I suppose the difference can be attributed to the fact that before – we met these women through the eyes of others (people who, for the most part, disliked them) and now, we are seeing them through their own eyes.  It’s always interesting to compare the way you view yourself, and how others view you. Interesting, and a little scary!