January | 2011 | Book Chatter

If you visited me earlier in the week, you may have read this post where I expressed my ~~anxiety~~ anticipation over my book club’s yearly selection meeting. Well, we met at Border’s last night to select twelve books and let me tell you, it was hard to limit myself to two books. I came in with a stack of oh… 18 or so.

I’ve separated them into two groups.

Once the chosen books have been assigned to a month, I will post them under the Book Club tab.

The Chosen

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
A Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japriscot
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Pearl of China by Anchee Min
Room by Emma Donoghue
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
*The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
*Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

*Pitched by me

The Recommended (not chosen)

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
*Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong
Candide by Voltaire
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
*Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye
Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli
The Photographer by Emannuel Guibert
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
*The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
*We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

*Pitched by me

What do you think of the list? Sometimes it’s hard to choose for an entire year because you just don’t know what you’ll want to read several months down the line but we’ve been choosing this way for years. It seems to work for us.

This weekend hasn’t been terribly relaxing. For one, The Boy came down with a very weird, chest abnormality on Thursday. After doing fitness testing at school that involved a number of push-ups, a bone (rib?), along with his sternum, popped out of his chest. It was huge and pressing against his lungs so he couldn’t breathe. After urgent care and a trip to his doctor, we still don’t know what it is. We are waiting for a specialist referral to determine what can be done. Right now, the swelling has gone done a little bit so he can breathe a bit easier, but basketball or any activity for that matter is out right now.

In other news…

We’ve been on the fence for a while about getting another pet after our beloved kitty passed away two years ago. Well, I think we are ready for a pet so we’ve been looking at dogs. Today we hit a basset hound rescue and let me tell you, you would have laughed like hell because we must have looked so odd there.

The Girl was completely overwhelmed by the number of dogs at this sanctuary. There were well over 100 hounds and they all came running towards us. Most were loves but some were not and we were covered in mud and other things while The Girl screamed bloody murder and hopped up onto tables and crates. Plus, it was rainy and cold.

I don’t see how anyone could possibly find a dog there. Once you found one you sort of liked, there were like 50 other dogs upon you and they were relentless. I have such a headache from the experience. Maybe we should just stick to cats.

Right now, a lady from another rescue is about to come and look at our house and yard situation. Mainly to see what we need to do to the yard because it backs to open land, etc. Plus we are gone a lot during the week so we definitely need a certain type of dog. Anyway, getting the house prepared is a start. It could turn out that we are just cat people and always will be, but I’d love to find the right dog and make it work.

As for the rest of the day, I plan to take care of The Boy, down a few aspirin for the pounding headache and curl-up with Hating Olivia which I picked up last night and could not put down.

Since I was doing so much this weekend, I am already feeling the dread of Monday. I hate that.

What are you doing today?

Chatting with friends about books and life…