3 posts tagged “book club”

Riding Lessons: A Novel

Sara Gruen

When this book came up on the reading list for my book club, like most months, I read the synopsis.  Then I decided that I didn't want to read it.  It's about a woman who was an Olympic eventing contender who has an accident on horseback.  After recovering she never rides again.  She goes back to her dying father's farm.  Both of these things hit a little too close to home.

The back story.  Or, my back story, I guess.  When my mother was 19 she was a student at Potomac Horse College in Maryland.  She was on the short list for the Olympic Eventing team.  She had an accident.  A horse fell going over and fence and fell on her.  She was pretty banged up and thus ended her professional Eventing career.  Fast forward 34 years and my father, a long time horseman falls ill with cancer.  After battling for more than a year he dies.

So you can see how the book would just feel a little raw?  But I started reading it anyway.  I bought it on my lunch hour and because a was hungry for reading I started it right there in the coffee shop.  I made it about 10 pages in and promptly had to shut the book.  The main character, Annemarie, referred to her mother as Mutti.  That's the German for Mom.  Which is what my mother has always called her mother.  It was just too much.  But it was the book club selection and I was home sick yesterday so I decided to press on.  And promptly read the entire book.

I loved it.  The story isn't actually about this woman's riding accident or even her dying father.  It's more about the relationship between Annemarie and her mother, Ursula, and Annemarie and her daughter, Eva.  The story does take place on Annemarie's family's farm amid the horses but it's not really about the horses at all.  Although there is a compelling subplot that is about one of the horses.  It's mostly about these three women who are all so headstrong and independent and, in many ways, fractured.  It's about them coming back together.

And set amid the stables and horses and pastures, the story sucked me right in.  My immediate misgivings set aside, but never quite forgotten as the story continued to remind me of the personal struggles of my own and the personal struggles of my family.  Best of all, the author, Sara Gruen, handled the horse parts of the story with aplomb - something that rarely happens.  This is a woman who knows horses and farm life and wasn't afraid to do her research.  It made the book entirely enjoyable to read. 

The Color of Water 10th Anniversary Edition

James McBride

I just finished reading my book club's April selection, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride.

I started the book thinking I wasn't going to like it because in all honesty, I'm not a huge fan of non-fiction.  But I read it through even though it took me two extra weeks.  Others in the book club flew through it.  They found it to be the sort of book they couldn't put down.  While I didn't find it that, I did find it to be an incredibly touching story.

I think I was supposed to get a sense of history, a sense of racial and religious divide out it.  To a point I think I did.  But more than that, it was a touching testament to the power of family.  How you take the good with the bad and you do the best you can.  And it doesn't matter who you come from but who you choose to go with.

To me, more than anything, it was a story about growth.  Proof that we are the masters of our own destiny.  In the end I'm glad I read it.  I'm glad I bought it because it's a book I'll likely read again.  Probably when I start to feel a little lost in my own life.  I think it will be there to help me remember to set my path.

The Friday Night Knitting Club

Kate Jacobs

1 comment

Last night I finished reading The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs for book club.  I'll admit when I picked it up and read the synopsis on the back I figured this is one that I was only reading because it was the chosen book for the month.  By page 16 I changed my mind.

I'm the sort that either gets sucked right into a book or I just never quite get it.  This one, almost immediately, had me hooked.

I loved the characters and identified with Georgia almost from the outset.  Not, of course, because I'm a single mother to a biracial daughter (because I'm not) but because she's had to struggle to make her way and succeeded doing it.  The surprising thing was that I identified with all of the main characters in some way as if they were each facets of my own personality.  A testament to Jacobs' talent.

The story seemed so real to me and I invested in the characters.  At the end of the book, as everyone's life is being wrapped up for the purposes of ending the novel, I found myself in tears - feeling for the hurting characters and cheering for ones that came out on top.  I got to know these women through the chapters better than I've gotten to know a character in a long time.

I'm immensely glad that I picked the book up even though I wasn't all that interested in reading it.  It's a good book, one that's not likely to go down as a modern classic, but a good book nonetheless.  What I thought was going to be basically a book about a bunch of women who get together and knit and gossip was actually a touching story about unlikely friends and coming together when the chips are down.  It was about the love and support that only your girlfriends can give you.  More than anything, though, the book was about making something of yourself and overcoming your own obstacles.  Inspiring to say the very least.  I'm happy to say that what I thought was going to be a book I slogged through will likely become a keeper that I'll read again and again.