Twentieth Book Wrap Up & New Book

This month we took a step back in time, as Jerlin mentioned, to our high school days, and read (or re-read for some) “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller.  I personally was looking forward to reading what is commonly thought of as a high-school classic, but with more mature eyes and a better appreciation for the author’s take on what war is really like.  There’s no denying that the premise of this book painted an accurate picture of war, but for most of us, it didn’t go beyond that.  As Stephanie put it, it is realistic, but that doesn’t make it a good book.  Heller gave detailed descriptions of all of the characters, but when it came to the plot, there wasn’t one. 

One thing we all did appreciate was that there were a lot of great quotes, which really fueled our discussion.  Here are several that we highlighted:

• “Colonel Cathcart had courage and never hesitated to volunteer his men for any target available.” – pg. 55
• “Dunbar was lying motionless on his back again with his eyes staring up at the ceiling like a doll’s. He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom.” – pg. 9
• “Yossarian was in love with the maid in the lime-colored panties because she seemed to be the only woman left he could make love to without falling in love with.” – pg. 133
• “Because he needed a friend so desperately, he never found one.” – pg. 85
• “Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before. ‘You haven’t got a chance, kid,’ he told him glumly. ‘They hate Jews.’  ‘But I’m not Jewish,’ answered Clevinger.  ‘It will make no difference,’ Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right.  ‘They’re after everybody.’” – pg. 81
• “…it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.” – pg. 35
• “It shouldn’t have survived…” pg. 461, afterward by Jonathan R. Eller.

For our next book, we’re going to see what all the frenzy is about and read E. L. James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey”.  Amazon’s description says: “When literature student Anastasia Steele goes to interview young entrepreneur Christian Grey, she encounters a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating. The unworldly, innocent Ana is startled to realize she wants this man and, despite his enigmatic reserve, finds she is desperate to get close to him. Unable to resist Ana’s quiet beauty, wit, and independent spirit, Grey admits he wants her, too—but on his own terms.
 
Shocked yet thrilled by Grey’s singular erotic tastes, Ana hesitates. For all the trappings of success—his multinational businesses, his vast wealth, his loving family—Grey is a man tormented by demons and consumed by the need to control. When the couple embarks on a daring, passionately physical affair, Ana discovers Christian Grey’s secrets and explores her own dark desires.”

 

Nineteenth Book Wrap Up & Not So New Book

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is stylistically interesting but not entertaining until the reader meets the object, those were Jessica’s wise words in describing this fictional story of girl discovering his true gender during his adolescent years. Middlesex, though fictional, gives the audience a great insight into what could be the psyche of a hermaphrodite individual. It is this great insight that helped Steph feel really connected from the beginning to the end.  Eugenides does a thorough job incorporating complex family history, medical terminology and world events into the book and for that we give him two thumbs up.

The Holistic Ladies would recommend Middlesex to the open minded reader willing to spend some time diving into the complex nature of this subject.  As customary, here are a couple of the quotes shared during the meeting:

• “It is said: San Francisco is where young people go to retire.”
• “Responding would only confirm the facts of what had happened, whereas I wanted to cast them in doubt.”

Not So New Book

Dust of the shelves or look around your house, I am sure you will find our next book hiding from your highschool years. We are reading “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller. I am sure you hear people say “oh that’s such a catch-22 situation” but what does it mean? We will tell you what it means next month after we talk about it. I am specially excited to revisit Yossarians story.

Here is the Amazon review:

“There was a time when reading Joseph Heller’s classic satire on the murderous insanity of war was nothing less than a rite of passage. Echoes of Yossarian, the wise-ass bombardier who was too smart to die but not smart enough to find a way out of his predicament, could be heard throughout the counterculture. As a result, it’s impossible not to consider Catch-22 to be something of a period piece. But 40 years on, the novel’s undiminished strength is its looking-glass logic. Again and again, Heller’s characters demonstrate that what is commonly held to be good, is bad; what is sensible, is nonsense.

Yossarian says, “You’re talking about winning the war, and I am talking about winning the war and keeping alive.”

“Exactly,” Clevinger snapped smugly. “And which do you think is more important?”

“To whom?” Yossarian shot back. “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.”

“I can’t think of another attitude that could be depended upon to give greater comfort to the enemy.”

“The enemy,” retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, “is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on.”

Mirabile dictu, the book holds up post-Reagan, post-Gulf War. It’s a good thing, too. As long as there’s a military, that engine of lethal authority, Catch-22 will shine as a handbook for smart-alecky pacifists. It’s an utterly serious and sad, but damn funny book.”

Our next meeting will be on May 15^th @ 7pm. Location will be shared with members.

Eighteenth Book Wrap Up & New Books (by Jessica R)

MWF Seeking BFF

How important is it to have a local BFF? Should already having a handful of great BFFs in other cities be enough? Sometimes, it isn’t enough, and it wasn’t for Rachel Bertsche. Rachel moved to Chicago to be with her then-boyfriend, now-husband. She left behind her best friends in New York, without thinking twice. However, 2 years into living in Chicago, their absence, as well as the absence of comparable friendships, started to take a toll. There is really only so much a husband can do in the BFF department. The solution: a year-long search for a new BFF in Chicago. Rachel went on 52 girl-dates (with girls from book clubs to cooking class to “Rent-a-Friends” to Friends-of-Friends) in order to look for “someone [she] could call and say, ‘What are you doing today?’ or ‘Let’s meet for brunch in an hour.’” What she found was a “bouquet of friends,” as well as a new and improved Rachel.

                The club was lucky enough to be able to Facetime with Rachel Bertsche for the first half of the meeting. She answered questions about finding friends, asking girls out, taking friendships to “the next level,” and then some:

• Karen asked about the right way to ask out her bartender. Rachel suggested using “inside cues.” An example would be using the mentioning of a place you both like and saying, “Let’s go sometime! When’s your next day off?”
• Jessica E. asked about how to deal with the “awkward dates” and not get discouraged. Rachel very wisely said, “You need to keep going through the awkward ones until you find the one or two good ones.”
• Stephanie asked about taking friendships to the next level, and reaching the point of asking to crash on their couch after a fight with a boyfriend. Rachel advised to progressively move up in the type of conversation first, like go from e-mailing to texting, then to calling, etc. As for the “couch-crashing” point, there isn’t really ever a “right point” in a friendship. That just happens when you actually make that call. The act of making that phone call is what takes the friendship to that “place.”
• In response to Jerlin’s question about how to deal with friend break-ups, Rachel said “there are a lot of potential friends, but sometimes you just don’t mesh.”

All of the girls felt connected to this book because everyone’s been there. All of the girls are, or were at some point, transplants, and have gone on similar friend-quests. Elvira noted that there is total truth in what Rachel said about saying yes to invitations: “The more you say yes, the more invites you get.” Jessica R. told her story about coming to SF to be with her then-boyfriend, now-husband, and how she found an “SF BFF” by joining a ceramics class. There are a lot of different life-stages that cause friendlessness (Jennifer), and everyone could use a new friend or two. It’s about getting out there and being ready for new opportunities.

The night ended with a circle of stories about Girl Break-ups, friendships changing because of marriage or relationships, and about having friends of the opposite sex. One of the girls’ husbands asked why the meeting ran so late, she answered “we just sat around chatting like great friends.”

The next book we’ll be reading will be Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides for our April 4^th meeting. After which we will be reading the classic Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.

Oprah’s Book Club has this to say about Middlesex:

“A dazzling triumph from the best-selling author of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex is the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of Calliope Stephanides.

‘I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.’ So begins Jeffrey Eugenides ’s second novel, Middlesex, the story of Calliope Stephanides, who discovers at the age of 14 that she is really a he. Cal traces the story of his transformation and the genetic condition that caused it back to his paternal grandparents, who happen also to be brother and sister, and the Greek village of Bithynios in Asia Minor.

In 1922, Desdemona Stephanides and her brother, Lefty, whose parents were killed in the recent war with the Turks, are living alone in their nearly abandoned village. Pulled together by isolation, sympathy, and, perhaps, fate, Lefty and Desdemona become husband and wife, and a recessive genetic condition begins its journey toward eventual expression in their grandchild Calliope.

Middlesex is a story about what it means to occupy the complex and unnamed middle ground between male and female, Greek and American, past and present. For Cal, caught between these identities, the journey to adulthood is particularly fraught. Jeffrey Eugenides’s epic portrayal of Cal’s struggle is classical in its structure and scope and contemporary in its content—a tender and honest examination of a battle that is increasingly relevant to us all.”

Seventeenth Book Wrap Up & New Book

And Then There Were None…. Spoiler Alert! The title gives it away – Yes, everybody DIES!! The real thrill of reading a mystery comes from trying to discern “Who Dunnit”, a remarkably challenging feat when reading Agatha Christie – the undisputed Queen of Mystery.

For most of the Holistic Ladies, this was the first venture into the world of mystery novels, and the journey had mixed reviews. Jerlin mentioned that the book was less about the characters and more about the plot, which is a different focus than many of the other books we’ve read. Elvira agreed, saying, “It was a fun book, but I didn’t connect with the characters.”

Agatha Christie is known for breaking the rules about mystery novels – and is both praised and hated for it. Stephanie vehemently disliked the fact that it was difficult (Steph claimed impossible) to tease out which character was the murderer. Jessica C.R. trumped that claim by figuring out that the murderer actually had to be one of the already dead characters.

In addition, a lot of deliberation went into the conjecture of which character was the most guilty, as guilt was one of the main themes in the story. This discourse broadened into a discussion of sadistic killers, rankings of guilt, and the pros and cons of an individual “giving people what they deserve.”

As a group, there was no consensus as to the overall merit of Agatha Christie books. Most ladies were ambivalent about reading another book by Agatha Christie, using adjectives like “anticlimactic” and wishing for a greater depth of character development. Only Karen declared herself a die-hard fan, eloquently describing Christie as using a “captivating writing style. [Her style is] not confusing; no context clues are needed which sets it up well for a mystery.” Karen will be taking 15 Agatha Christie novels on her trip to India. Steph will be reading zero.

All in all, despite the mixed reactions to And Then There Were None, the Holistic Ladies had an excellent time dissecting the novel and relating it to our lives in general.

Tune in next time for MWF Seeking BFF, by Rachel Bertsche a book describing a Chicago gal’s quest for a new best friend after a recent move.

Sixteenth Book Wrap Up & New Book

Sometimes you need a quick and easy-to-read book to pop some common sense back in your head, even when it is not directly applicable to your current situation and even if you have to read it twice to spark your motivation to get financially savvy. The Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich chat was part therapeutic and part eye opener. Maybe all those 75 avoidable mistakes were redundant in places, maybe the book was all about the author’s accomplishments, and maybe we are not all married and on the cusp of procreation, but we all now have a seed implanted in our heads on how to be smarter with our money.

Karen went through the difference between good debt vs bad debt and talked about at https://www.mint.com/, an online tool that displays one’s bank accounts and helps categorize expenses. Karen even challenged us to pay everything in cash for a week and/or keep receipts to gauge the amount of money out the window!  I’ll give it a shot.  Spent too much on books last year? Check out a book from your local library, as Steph diligently does, or just get some second-hand books.

I will be hosting an “Investing 101 class” for all (and friends) to dig into some of those silly investment questions we are afraid to ask.  You will be amazed by the power of compounding interests. Date and location will be sent to the book club members.

Our next book is “And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie. We will talk about this book on Feb 7th.
Here is the Amazon.com review: “Considered the best mystery novel ever written by many readers, And Then There Were None is the story of 10 strangers, each lured to an Indian Island by a mysterious host. Once his guests have arrived, the host accuses each person of murder. Unable to leave the island, the guests begin to share their darkest secrets–until they begin to die.”

Fifteenth Book Wrap Up & New Book

“Women hold up half the sky”.  This Chinese proverb is the perfect name for this book by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which focuses on several issues that affect women around the world.  The girls all had very different views before reading the book.  Some were hesitant, because it was going to be a painful realization of what women are going through on a daily basis in third world countries.  Others were hopeful that they would learn of ways that we can help prevent these same things from happening in the future.  But after reading, everyone came to a consensus that, as Stephanie put it, “it revolutionized our worlds.”

The authors of “Half the Sky” offer a unique perspective on the issues of sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality.  Not only do they discuss the statistics of these harsh realities around the world, but they bring it to life with a story of a woman they met and spent time with, and then present a glimpse of hope by discussing what steps have been effective, and how we can continue to help in the future.  As it was stated at the end of the book, “…challenges are insurmountable only until the moment that they’re surmounted.” (pg. 228)

When going through the stories that impacted us most, it was difficult for many of us to isolate just one.  Right from the first chapter, we were captivated by the story of Meena Hasina, an Indian Muslim who was captured and forced into prostitution.  After bearing two children during her captivity, she fled from the brothel where she was held for so much of her childhood.  After establishing a life for herself, marrying, and having more children, she risked her life again, but saved her first two children from the life she once suffered.  Meena’s courage inspired us, just as much as Woinshet’s did.  Woinshet was kidnapped and raped by a man who wanted to marry her.  In Ethiopia, this was often used as a bargaining chip in getting a bride – no one else wanted a woman who had been raped.  Rather than accepting her life as her rapist’s wife, she fought hard for justice, and has established a safer life for herself.

Another story that moved us was that of Srey Neth.  One of the authors met Neth at a brothel where she was being held against her will.  After negotiating with her owner, Nick purchased her from captivity for the price of $150.  He took her back to her village, where she set up a grocery shop.  As competition increased and her father fell ill, she sought out employment in the city.  She studied hairdressing, and eventually married and had a healthy son.

While talking about these stories, we reflected on how lucky we are for the opportunities we have had, namely the opportunity to spend our lives in a place where we do not constantly fear rape or other bodily harm.  Shifting our focus towards our futures, another thing we all have the opportunity for is giving birth to a child in an environment that will be safe for both us and our babies.  Some of the stories that stuck with us the most were those of women who suffered obstetric fistulas.  Since women are often giving birth without proper medical care, they often suffer from this condition, which is preventable, and uncommon, in our country.

Overall, this book gave us a lot to think about, reflect on, and be thankful for.  We will continue to appreciate what we have in our lives, and explore opportunities to help those less fortunate than us.

Some of the quotes we liked are below:

“One study after another has shown that educating girls is one of the most effective ways to fight poverty.  Schooling is also often a precondition for girls and women to stand up against injustice, and for women to be integrated into the economy.” – pg. 169

“Suppose that the estimate of $9 billion per year is correct.  It pales beside the $40 billion that the world spends annually on pet food, but it’s still a great deal of money.  If that $9 billion managed to save three quarters of the mothers who are now dying, that would mean that 402,000 women would be saved annually, in addition to many newborns (and many maternal injuries would be averted as well).” – pg. 122

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” – Derek Bok, pg. 167

Our next book is “Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich” by Lois P. Frankel, PhD.  As we head into the new year, we thought it was a good time to become smarter about managing our money, and learn from the book, and each other, about how to do it.  According to Amazon, “Without your awareness, behaviors learned as a girl are preventing you from becoming a woman who is financially independent and free to follow her dreams. Now, with the same frank advice and empowering information that made Nice Girls Don’t Get the Comer Office a bestseller, Lois Frankel tackles the 75 financial mistakes that keep women from having the wealth they deserve. She isolates the messages about money given to little girls that little boys never hear. Then she helps you discover the financial thinking that is keeping you stuck in old patterns, dependent relationships, and jobs where you earn less than you deserve. Once you get to the root of the problem, Frankel helps you solve it-with fabulous results. Her coaching tips help you take control of your finances and make more money than you ever thought possible. Do you make these “nice girl” mistakes? * Mistake #4: Not playing to win. Being polite, quiet, and fair to a fault is playing the financial game “like a girl.” * Mistake #10: Choosing to remain financially illiterate. Knowledge is power. Learn to manage your major purchases, investments, and banking. * Mistake #20: Spending as an emotional crutch. Understand your emotions; don’t make purchases just to lift your spirits. * Mistake #45: Saving instead of investing. Fear can keep your funds in low-interest accounts. Get educated about investing. Get wealthy. Frankel gives you the financial savvy to change negative behaviors, make smart money choices, and embrace the life you want sooner than you think.”

Fourteenth Book Wrap Up & New Book

And then there were three…

Last night we had an informal chat about Water for Elephants. But don’t let the meeting size fool you, we were actually able to disect some interesting elements in the book. Jennifer came equipped with discussion questions from about.com such as “How would the novel be different if Gruen had only written about the younger Jacob, keeping the story linear and never describing Jacob’s life as an old man?” and ” Does the circus merely mirror society in an exaggerated way?” This book was right up Jennifer’s alley while it was not Karen’s or my cup of tea.  I give a shout out to Karen for sticking to the book and actually disecting details in the beginning and the end.  I personally found the story a little slow with similarities to The Notebook. Perhaps watching Robert Patterson and Reese Witherspoon will make me feel differently about the story. Speaking of watching, we will be watching the movie as a group on Nov 10th at 6.30pm. Directions will be given to group members

Now, in the spirit of freedom and thanksgiving, specially towards us women, we are going to be reading Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof. Here is the reviewon Amazon:

“From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.

With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope.

They show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel and, with assistance from an aid group, built a thriving retail business that supports her family. The Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time became a surgeon. A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school, earned her doctorate and became an expert on AIDS.

Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women’s potential. They make clear how so many people have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part. Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Unleashing that process globally is not only the right thing to do; it’s also the best strategy for fighting poverty.”

Deeply felt, pragmatic, and inspirational, Half the Sky is essential reading for every global citizen.”

Our next book club meeting is Dec 13th @ 7pm. Meeting location will sent to group members.