Book Club: October Edition

My book club has really pushed my boundaries this month. I generally like my fiction to be stories that take me away and let me forget about the real world and all of the problems in it. This month's novel, Still Alice by Lisa Genova, firmly plants me in real world problems that people must deal with every day.

Too sad to be witty right now

The story focuses on Alice, a tenured professor at Harvard with doctorates in the study of psychology and language. One day, Alice can't remember the word for something during a lecture. The next she finds herself momentarily lost less than a mile from home. What follows is a heartbreaking spiral as Alice is diagnosed with Alzheimer's and rapidly begins to lose her memories and ability to function. Equally heartbreaking is the effect Alice's disease has on her family, the sadness as she no longer recognizes her own children, and the difficult decisions that must be made concerning her care.

This novel is very well written and will give the reader a very good insight into what patients and family members go through when one is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I'll compare this one to Flowers for Algernon, in that the point of view is entirely from the person with the affliction and not always trustworthy. The most difficult passages for me were not the ones where Alice couldn't remember things, but the one's where Alice's husband John seemed to be withdrawing from the situation by working too much. It's difficult for me not to resent him for working so much during the few months she had left mentally and for any of the moments that Alice was able to perceive how painful it was for him to watch her deteriorate. Conversely, I suspect no one could be able to handle perfectly watching their loved one slowly lose themselves. The only other point I'll bring up about this novel is that it is a good picture of how a well off educated family who loves each other handles Alzheimer's, as heartbreaking as this is, I suspect a novel about a patient who doesn't much close family or financial resources to help cope with it could just kill me.

Tea is feeling blue today.

Book Club novels I get to read at work, since the club is part of my duties. This particular novel I had to read while shut away in my back office because I could not stop crying and often had to pause to recompose myself. So if tearjerkers are your cup of tea, this one's for you.

Book Club: September Edition

First an introduction. I run the Book Club at my local library. It meets once a month and is open to anyone who wants to attend. Books are chosen by the members two months in advance (in September we picked November's book) and no matter how much I wish it, book selection is not solely my choice. The result of that is books I would not normally choose for myself. Sometimes I love them (The Help by Kathryn Stockett, despite the recent craze, actually is good), and sometimes I can't stand them, but can still see how they would appeal to some people.



It's a pretty cover at least.
Kinda.



Which brings us to September's Book Club selection:

Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy

Set in Dublin, Dr. Clara Casey is tapped to build a Heart Clinic using an existing building and limited resources. What follows is a story about the community of friends and the far reaching positive effects created by the clinic's staff and its patients.

While the idea of this novel is a good one, the weaving of a bunch of small stories into an overall community story doesn't work for me here. It didn't really for my book club either. Their major complaint of this book was that there were far too many characters to follow and that by the time you finished one person's story, you'd forgotten the previous ones. While keeping up with the characters was a challenge, I found that overall the stories in the book weren't really believable. Normally that wouldn't be a problem in a fiction book, however it seemed as though that that was something the author was going for. Also with her writing she tended to flat out tell me things about a character when I wish she'd just shown me through the characters words and actions.

Is this your cup of tea?

Obviously this book was not my cup of tea to begin with, so I won't over criticize an author for choosing to write about subjects that don't really interest me. And I will recommend this book for those of you who need a feel good novel about a community looking after each other and the stories of the diverse lives of the people in the community.