March - How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

For March, we read a book about Dominican Republicans who immigrated to the United States in the 1960's. Julia Alvarez chose to write How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents in reverse chronological order and we found that we actually spent more time in the DR than the US which gave us a foundation for why they assimilated the way they did. While this people liked the book, they largely found it forgettable and more than a little confusing as we tried to keep track of whose point of view we were reading.

To get us talking about the book (and as a way to make sure we kept on track!), we played a Jeopardy-like game this month which was a lot of fun, and which we'll probably tweak and use again for other books. Under headings that included "What A Character" and "That's Novel," we talked about the different characters in the book, the way the novel was written,  immigration, and some words associated with the novel.

While this might not have been the most popular book we ever read, we did find a lot to discuss and I think it did make a good choice for a book club discussion, particularly when we were able to include some information about Alvarez and her own history which is very similar to the book.

February - The Custom of the Country

After January's meeting was first postponed and then cancelled because of the winter weather, imagine our disappointment when February's meeting had to be postponed as well. And then, on the rescheduled day, more snow. At that point, we just couldn't bother to care any more. And while we had a small turnout, with just four of us at the meeting, we had a really good discussion about a book that sort of surprised us all. Lisa S. is a big fan of Wharton's so it was not a surprise that she enjoyed it but Ann (who was ready to put it down a ways into the book) and Nancy (who listened to the book on audio) found they just had to find out what was going to happen to our anti-heroine, Undine. Unlike so many characters you might dislike in a book but eventually find yourself caring about, none of us came to care what happened to Undine, other than to see what she had up her sleeve next. Of course, she wasn't the only unlikable character in the book! We played a new game where each of us drew a character name and then had to use three words of phrases to see if the rest of the group could guess which character we had. It was a lot of fun and had us really thinking about the individual characters and how they interacted with the other characters. We'll definitely be playing this game again. We also talked some about Wharton and her daring attacks on upper class society given that she was a part of it. We never did get a chance to talk about how she didn't seem to care much for her female characters and I wonder what those of you who read the book think about that? Thanks for hosting, Ann! Next up, Julia Alvarez' How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.