Learning That They Can't All Be Good Choices

I hosted one of my book clubs this past Sunday afternoon. This is the first book club I joined/started, and we've been meeting for almost 5 years, I think. This is the one that technically doesn't have a name, but is made up of the 7 Sisters of Soul - my best friends since college. The books I've chosen when it was my turn to host have generally been well-received, with The Hunger Games being my crowning acheivement. (We loved that book so much that we put off meeting for an extra couple of months so that everyone would have time to read the whole trilogy instead of just the first one.) But you can't make good picks forever, it seems.

When I've picked books for the club, I've often chosen a book I've already read that I love and think others would enjoy. Or I've chosen books I know a lot about and have some level of confidence that we'll all like it. I kind of thought this choice was in the latter category, but it definitely wasn't. I brought 4 choices to the last meeting. They were all books I had on my shelves but hadn't read yet. We ended up choosing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. As we always do when choosing books, we had read the back of it and the first sentence to get a brief feel for the style. It sounded like it would be good - a Dominican nerd growing up in the ghetto wants to be the next Tolkien and wants to find love, but has to battle the curse his family believes they're under. In some respects, it delivered on what I wanted from it, especially in the area of nerd culture. There were a LOT of fun, nerdy references to things like video games, comic books, sci-fi/fantasy literature, etc. I loved reading those things and feeling on the inside because I understood most of the references, and I enjoyed looking up the ones that were too obscure for me. But I think that hindered the enjoyment of the book for some of the other members. Some of those references were over their heads and they're not as nerdy as I am to want to look up the obscure ones and learn something new about Lord of the Rings. The characters also speak Spanish often and the narrator doesn't always tell you what it means. You have to figure it out in context, look it up, or just be content to not know exactly what they're saying. That last option is what most of us went with. And there was honestly WAY more sexual stuff than any of us could've expected from the description on the back of the book, and we did not want that. Another difficulty with the book was that it skips around telling the stories of different characters and that made it hard to connect with any of them very much.

But you know what? Sometimes you pick a dud, and there's still fun conversation discussing all the reasons we didn't like it and all the characters we didn't enjoy. We always wrap up each discussion by rating the book on a 1-10 scale. Here's what everyone said:

Allison - 7
Stacey - 4 (she didn't read the book, but this was her rating based on the conversation)
Erin - 4
Camille - 5
Kristin - 6.5

My rating would've been significantly lower if it weren't for the nerd references. I'm a sucker for that stuff.

If you're interested in what we thought about other books we read, and a complete list of all our books, check out 7sistersofsoul.blogspot.com and follow @7SistersofSoul on twitter!