Saturday, March 22, 2008

Crummy Book Club No More!


Last year I was happy to form a book club with seven friends. We meet every other month over a potluck dinner and enjoy conversation, a lot of laughter and a fair amount of conversation about the chosen book.

Amazingly (since we each consider ourselves people who like books and know how to choose them), most of the books that we selected last year were disliked by pretty much everyone.

So, by the end of the year we agreed that perhaps our group’s name should be "The Crummy Book Club”.

Well, we are The Crummy Book Club no more. We've had two consecutive meetings where we all liked the books that we chose.

This month's book was no exception: Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs. It is a wonderful, deeply imagined portrait of small town life in rural New York state. Perhaps not as humorous as some of his earlier novels (Nobody's Fool or Straight Man), it is similar in flavor to his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Empire Falls.

For an excerpt and an interview with Russo, check out NPR's Morning Edition (October 1, 2007) website.

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