Tuesday: Education and Employment - Book Clubs?

A bunch of my friends are part of a local book club, and I see signs at the library for different book clubs, but alas, my schedule just doesn't really lend itself to going to an actual meeting. Which is really too bad, because I enjoy coming together with a bunch of people and talking about a book, and seeing how people view it differently, and it really helps me make connections to things in my life/different subjects that I'd never have thought of just reading it by myself.
But as I said, alas . . .

But I do have a plan to do a lot of reading this summer (from my plan to follow the Well-Trained Mind's curriculum for 9th graders during the summer.) But I want to have a book or two for "fun." I am going to find a couple, and share my summer book list with my readers, and I'll review them when I'm done. Then any of my readers could comment back, and it would almost be like a book club.

I will let you know in advance though - I am a fiction snob. Sort of. I read a lot of children/young adult fiction when I was younger. When I went to college, I was an English major, and read/studied/analyzed "the classics" and I especially enjoyed the writing of the American Romantics - Natathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, etc. After that, I couldn't really get "into" contemporary fiction. I'd pick one, and the writing would be so awful, or often, at best, just average. And I was also SO overwhelmed with the volume of fiction. There was just so MUCH fiction and I didn't know enough about any of the authors, and I hate to spend the time reading a 400 page book, only to be mad at the end because I felt like I wasted my time. So I have read very, very, very little fiction in the last 20 years. I read mostly non-fiction because it is a little more "what you see is what you get." And I can pick things that are in line with my interests and my my real life. But I plan on getting one fiction and one non-fiction at a time. And hopefully, I'll find myself a little surprised at the fiction I find.

(I'll also post my WTM reading list soon, and anybody is welcome to read/comment about those too, which I would love it if you did, but it is classical literature, and not the typical easy breezy summer reading books.)

We are also reading The Penderwicks as a family in the evenings (although we probably will need to move this to the mornings, evenings are too crazy), and I picked up The Willowboughs on CD at the library today for listening in the car. I'll review those too when we finish.