Big Bad Blogger Book Club

After this meme a few weeks ago, two really smart people and me decided that we'd give a book club a try. We'd agree to read the same book at the same time and blog about it. If you'd like to sign up, leave me a comment. Remember, a facebook or myspazz blog is fine too.

Because someone needs to make a decision, we'll begin with A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry).

After that's finished, we'll select by group consensus from the following list:

A Prayer for Owen Meany (Irving)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
Dune (Frank Herbert)
The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
Great Expectations (Dickens)
The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
War and Peace (Tolstoy)
Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)
Les Miserables (Hugo)
The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
Shogun (James Clavell)
The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
The World According to Garp (John Irving)
The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
Not Wanted on the Voyage (Timothy Findley)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
Blindness (Jose Saramago)
In The Skin of a Lion (Ondaatje)
The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
Ulysses (James Joyce)

Leave a comment (with a blog link preferably) if you'd like to take part. I'm going to start reading it one week from today. Hopefully Ian and Tal will too.

Maybe it's me..

I just finished Wicked. Wow! It was such a long, painful go for such a short book. It took me most of the summer because I just couldn't bring myself to give up on it entirely. I hear that the musical is divine and I expected more from the book.

The length of the book was about 450 pages but this book certainly seemed much longer. It was somewhat interesting to get a backstory for the Wicked Witch of the West and I really empathized with her as the protagonist but the story never quite managed to grab me. I found myself turning the pages waiting to see how it somehow all came together at the end. Rather than create a tie-in to Oz (or maybe he did and I don't know because I never read the Wizard of Oz), the world Maguire created never really helped me imagine what it was like. Do you suppose the movie's to blame? Would have been easier if I hadn't had the picture of the movie witches in my mind?

I don't know. I don't really know how many stars I'd attach either. I guess I'd go about three out of five. It was okay - not fantastic. It's a book I don't expect to read again. The burning question is what do I do with Son of a Witch? Is it okay to give a way a book you've never read because you didn't like the prequel?