September - Furious Hours

This month we discussed Casey Cep’s Furious Hours, which was our nonfiction read for the year and also tied in with our classic book for the year, To Kill A Mockingbird. To change things up this month, we split into teams to answer questions about the book. The final question for each team was open-ended to allow for broader discussion about the book but a lot of the questions allowed us to get into more detail about the book. For example, we talked about narrative nonfiction which is a term everyone said they will not forget. Should that be on a year-end quiz?! 

We spent a lot of time talking about Harper Lee – why she never wrote another book and why she couldn’t write this book in particular. One idea was that she might not have been, despite the wild success of To Kill A Mockingbird, a great writer. That book drew heavily from her own experiences and she had not had to come up with an original idea; also, she was helped tremendously by a number of people, including her publisher. Another thought was that she might have been a perfectionist, writing and rewriting and never being happy with the finished product. Without someone to push her along, she was never able to finish another book and the pressure of trying to follow up her debut may have just been too great. 

Thanks to Lisa W for hosting again and to everyone who brought snacks and wine. It was great to be able to meet in person again. Hopefully we can get another month of good weather to do it again; it’s so much easier to socialize which is, of course, a big part of the reason we enjoy our group! Team Austen was the big winner of the game and will receive extra points for the win.