So, Blink it is! I'm excited. Especially because a copy is already waiting for me on the hold shelf of the library. (I didn't personally vote... but I was kind of rooting for Blink, I must admit.)

Look for some questions to pop up here on November 9th.

And... happy reading!

p.s. I'm reading A Christmas Carol with my real-life book club in a couple of months. I thought it might be fun to start some discussion for it here, too. I'll likely put some questions up around the middle of December?

Do any of you think you'd be interested in reading along? We are all so familiar with the story, I know. But I've always said that knowing the plot can't ruin a truly well-written book. I think of almost any book that I can think of this particular one will put that theory to the test. Let me know what you think...

Hello, bookish friends. Are you ready for another book? This time we're choosing among four non-fiction books. I think they are all interesting choices and I'm curious to see what catches your eye.

Wild Swans by Jung Chang

Blending the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history, Wild Swans has become a bestselling classic in thirty languages, with more than ten million copies sold. The story of three generations of women in twentieth-century China, it is an engrossing record of Mao's impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love. Chang captures in gripping, moving -- and ultimately uplifting -- detail the cycles of violent drama visited on her family and millions of others caught in the whirlwind of history.

--Book summary courtesy of Simon & Schuster

Beyond the Killing Fields by Usha Welartna

In 1975, after five years of devastation and upheaval caused by civil war, the Cambodian people welcomed the victorious communist Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot. Once in power, the new regime tightly closed Cambodia to the outside world. Four years later, when the Vietnamese communists invaded Cambodia and defeated the Khmer Rouge, the world learned that during their control the Khmer Rouge had turned the country into "killing fields", in one of the most horrifying instances of genocide in history. Of an estimated population of 7 million people, about 1.5 million had been killed or had died of starvation, torture, or sickness. After the Vietnamese takeover, thousands of survivors of the Khmer Rouge, fearful of continuing war and a new communist regime, fled their homeland. Approximately 150,000 of them settled in the United States. This book documents the Cambodian refugee experience through nine powerful first-person narratives of men, women, and children who survived the holocaust and have begun new lives in America.

--Book summary courtesy of Amazon.com

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

In this interesting read for parents, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, explores how various factors come together for the ultimate success of an individual. Gladwell compares greats such as Mozart and Bill Gates, professional hockey players and other highly successful adults and analyzes how culture, circumstance, birthdate, luck, and even the timing of entry into kindergarten may play into each person's growth potential. One of the key statistics Gladwell employs is that 10,000 hours of time spent on a given skill, especially during youth, will create excellence in that area.

--Book summary courtesy of Carol

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell writes, "It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good."

Stay tuned, fellow readers. We're pulling together some book choices for you to vote on....

Do you think Fern is a sympathetic character? Maxwell notes, "Other people see that [she]...perhaps expects more of life than is reasonable" (p. 71). Do you agree with this observation? What exactly are reasonable expectations in life?

As Linda Richman would say, I'll give you a topic:

"What we, or at any rate what I , refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw." (p. 27)

Discuss.

(Afterwards feel free to discuss one of Linda's actual topics? The Mormon Tabernacle Choir was neither Mormon nor a tabernacle nor a choir. Discuss.)

So Long, See You Tomorrow

William Maxwell was born in Lincoln, Illinois, where So Long, See You Tomorrow is set. Along with publishing his own writing, he worked as an editor of the New Yorker for forty years, editing the likes of John Updike, J.D. Salinger, and Eudora Welty. Like David Wroblewski described, So Long is part fact, part fiction. The affair and its tragic consequences between the farmer and his friend’s wife were actual events taken from the Illinois State Historical Library. And at the age of ten, Maxwell suffered the death of his mother from the 1918 influenza epidemic. He wrote of his loss, "It happened too suddenly, with no warning, and we none of us could believe it or bear it... the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood swept away." This life changing event would be at the center of many of his works.

I’ll put out a few questions over the next few days but please feel free to start your own post if there is something you want to discuss. Look at the comments on the last post for some good questions from Larisa. I’m really interested in hearing what everyone thinks about the book.

Question #1

Why does the narrator view his father’s happiness as a threat (p.17)? What does he mean when he says, “It was not the kind of happiness that children are included in”? The narrator admits that it still troubles him yet he does “not even begin to understand it.” Do you?