Thanks fierceness

I got to shout out the book club, because there is nothing like a good book. And I have been loving what the girls have been doing. The book club came about during the winter this past year. I don't know if it was all the snow, a light work load or what, but I had a urge to get back to fiction, something I had abandoned for most of my university career. I read of course, but even if I was reading for pleasure I found more solace and stimulation in the pages of MacMillan, Kearns-Goodwin and Shilts than I did in any frivolous fiction. I would also say that when I have, in the past, been drawn to works of fictional literature it's with a snobby and decidedly conventional approach. I love the Russian classics: Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, pretty cheap eh? I love Jane Austin, such a girl. And the great Black Americans and their influencers, Emerson, Du Bois, Douglas, Ellison and Wright. Anyway, all of this is driving at the point, that in fact as my undergraduate education neared its close I felt a distinct void. I didn't take a single literature course at the University of Toronto, not even children's lit. which I bet would have rocked. And I stopped reading. So when those long nights set in in January I began to feel something must be done, and done it was. Eight or nine girls agreed that we would commit to one book a month. Strangely we also agreed that the book club would be girls only. Not even gays! Not that we have anything against male readers but there was a certain female dynamic which felt right from the beginning. There is always a certain pride in exclusivity. We had a preliminary dinner to discuss the structure of the book club, and our plans for the next meeting. So far we have been through two cycles, it should have been three, but things happen. Our last meeting was at Andrea and Emily's - we read Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls and drank margaritas. This month Lauren chose Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle. Now both of those are memoirs, not fiction, but that is beside the point. The point is that yesterday when I went to the St. Jamestown library to look for the book, I came away with a few others. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Linda Little's Scotch River, and Steinbeck's Cannery Row, plus a couple of study books, since I am contemplating taking the GRE's and the LSAT's - you know because I am counting on this fiction thing getting old.

*just as a side note, I chose that image of Walls's cover because I thought the cheesy Amazon logo was awesome, not because I was incapable of finding a freestanding image of cover.