Book Club Update

My first book club meeting was last night and I had a great time! There were about 15 of us of widely varying ages and we started the evening by enjoying dinner at Burtons Grill in Boston (I had a delicious wild mushroom and artichoke risotto with truffle oil). Then, once sufficiently stuffed with food, we talked about the book!

As I mentioned before (see my 1/16 post), we discussed Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. Each chapter in the book talks about a different kind of "outlier" - a person or group of persons that achieved great success - and posits that each such person had certain hidden advantages that allowed them to reach their potential. It wasn't exactly a riveting page-turner, but was fascinating nonetheless (like the fact that most professional hockey players were born in January or February - seems random doesn't it?).

The group decided that we would alternate between fiction and non-fiction books. So, our next book will be American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld.



This is the Amazon.com description of the novel:

A kind, bookish only child born in the 1940s, Alice Lindgren has no idea that she will one day end up in the White House, married to the president. In her small Wisconsin hometown, she learns the virtues of politeness, but a tragic accident when she is seventeen shatters her identity and changes the trajectory of her life. More than a decade later, when the charismatic son of a powerful Republican family sweeps her off her feet, she is surprised to find herself admitted into a world of privilege. And when her husband unexpectedly becomes governor and then president, she discovers that she is married to a man she both loves and fundamentally disagrees with–and that her private beliefs increasingly run against her public persona. As her husband’s presidency enters its second term, Alice must confront contradictions years in the making and face questions nearly impossible to answer.

I've read Prep, also by Ms. Sittenfeld, and it was a great book so I'm really looking forward to reading American Wife.