This is the seventh post in “A Month of Reading“

December tenth.  Turns out I didn’t have time to write daily over the weekend. I was reading though, of course.  I even attended book club last night, where we discussed “wild,” and it was very interesting to hear the very varied opinions among a group of ten well-educated adult women.  Some of the members actively hated it.  I was quiet for the first part of the discussion because I loved it so very much and I didn’t want to argue my case.  That would have felt like a betrayal, I thought.  Or I would have cried, which is dumb.  There’s no crying in book club.

Instead I drank my wine and kept an open mind as one after another of my friends made fun of Cheryl Strayed and how stupid she was when she was 26 and hiking the Pacific Crest Trail by herself without preparing adequately.  They admitted that the passages about her mother’s death were powerful, and the section about putting her mother’s beloved horse down was incredibly disturbing, but at least one woman intimated that the writing was not good, and she wished that we would choose better-written books.

I tried not to be insulted by her comments.  In fact, I think I succeeded.  She’s entitled to her opinion, and an honest discussion of the book is what book club is all about, right?  I have certainly been very critical, even vocally so, about some of our past choices.  (Fifty Shades of Grey, anyone?)  This experience is making me realize that maybe there was someone in our group who really LOVED that book.  Who felt like it changed her perspective.  Who was so moved that she contacted the author to express her thanks.

I think I’ll be changing the way I express my disapproval.  I am sure I won’t be able to disguise my disdain for poor writing, or the way my life is wasted by reading it.  But that’s my opinion.  YOU can like a book that I hate.

That is actually the beauty of book club.  Our club meets monthly.  We take turns hosting at our own houses/apartments all over Los Angeles.  Most of the time the host chooses the book and the rest of us can suck it.  Most of the time the book is not something I would have chosen otherwise, and that is wonderful.  Every now and then there is a gem.  We all loved “Gone Girl,” which was our November choice.  My feedback was that I wouldn’t want to be friends (or enemies, more importantly) with the author, because that woman has a crazy/dangerous mind.

On the night before book club I brought my pristine copy of “Gone Girl” to a different group of women.  There were 11 of us.  It was the annual holiday party of my mommy group friends, the same ones who saved me from insanity when Kyle was first born.  I see them rarely now, and I wouldn’t have missed this holiday party for anything.  We do what we call a “Yankee swap:”  bring a wrapped gift under a certain dollar amount.  Pick a number.  Go in numerical order to either choose an unwrapped gift or “steal” one from someone who went before you. There are other rules, but that is the basic sense.

When numbers 1 through 10 had taken their turns, my gift, the obviously-a-book wrapped rectangle, was still under the tree.  When someone finally picked it up and unwrapped it, ten educated, adult women looked at it and blinked.  ”Gone Girl?” they said, tilting their heads.  ”I never heard of it!  What is it about?”

Oh, it’s only been on many bestseller lists for quite a while…

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What are YOU reading?