How Our Book Club Discussed a Book None of Us Finished

We ladies are pretty amazing. Sure, none of us got past page 217 of the 481-page book I chose for book club. But we talked about this book like wild, I tell you.

The book was Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown.

Our book club is doing this thing where we each choose a book either about our birth year or published in our birth year. (I borrowed the idea from Neil Hollands, who suggested in on Book Club Buzz.) Occasionally we like to do a theme sort of a thing, our book club does.

So here’s the deal about Bury My Heart:

We all completely get the importance of this book, especially when it emerged back in that wonderful birth year of mine—when it really opened people’s eyes to what had happened to Native Americans in the 1800s. All the lies and broken treaties and brutality and being forced off the land they knew.

But we all just plodded (partway) through it in a state of mild agony. In part, of course, because the subject matter is painful.

But also because the writing style is really not very energetic.

Guys, I’m just gonna say it: The writing is dull.

Dude’s taken crazy-interesting and provocative subject matter and managed to make it a hard slog to read.

I reached page 190 before bailing. My plan at that point was to read the last chapter, just to see how he wrapped it all up. Got one page into the last chapter and just gave up. I had one of those “life is short” moments and gave myself the OK to bail.

Hampton Sides wrote a wonderful Foreword to the book, which probably also led to my feeling of letdown about Brown’s prose style. It just didn’t reach the level of vibrancy of the Foreword.

But our book club sure talked about the book. There's plenty of stuff to discuss, even when we'd each read only about half of it. Also, we could discuss why we couldn't bear to continue to read to the end. (Though one of my friends says she's gonna do it. She was an English major and is made of stern stuff.)

But for me, I'm chalking up one more in the DNF files.

The young LBJ

The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1)

Guys! I just read the 750+ page first volume of a 3-volume biography of LBJ, and I’m having bliss-out fits over it.

I know.

You’re fleeing from the blog, and I kinda sorta understand.

But wait.

Let me explain.

(photo credit: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library & Museum)

This book is so ding-dang good I nearly got weepy at several points. And once my heart almost burst in joy.

That, my friends, is a sign of good writing. Robert A. Caro is a pure marvel.

We’ll begin with the sentence that darn-near caused a heart explosion. Here ’tis:

“And as Lyndon Johnson came up Capitol Hill in the morning, he would be running.” (p. 217)

So, the context. Caro spends the long first paragraph of that chapter describing the scenery—the columns and pillars of the Capitol—witnessed by the 23-year-old LBJ as he walked (ran!) to his office when he worked as an aide to a Congressman. That glorious sentence ends the paragraph, and it’s the perfect capstone. I even made someone else read that page because I couldn’t hoard it all for myself. Literary perfection.

The weepy thing happened when I read about how LBJ, as a young Congressman during the Great Depression, helped bring electricity to the Texas Hill Country from whence he came. After reading the description of the lives people led before electricity, it makes sense that it was during this time that people began naming their sons for Lyndon Johnson. Caro describes how farm women could see the workers coming toward her house with the line of electrical poles, and when the workers arrived, they’d find the finest meal the family could provide, served on their best dishes.

We get a good view of Lady Bird here, and one is given to believe that she truly was as sainted as Margaret Truman suggested in First Ladies. Despite her innate goodness, still (thankfully) she’s interesting. One of my favoritest quotes of all time is this, by Lady Bird to a friend: “Lyndon and I committed matrimony last night.” (p. 302) Doesn’t it just sound innocently naughty?

This book is detailed, in the best way. So you get a solid sense of who the supporting characters are. For years now, I’ve been saying the words “Rayburn House Office Building” in response to library patrons’ requests for the addresses of their representatives in Congress. And only in this book did I learn who Sam Rayburn was. And I confess now I adore him just a lot. He was honest. Need I say more? Yet I will. Here (we’ll let Caro say it): “Years later, when someone mentioned that Rayburn’s father had not left him much of an inheritance, Rayburn quickly corrected him—his father, he said, ‘gave me my untarnished name.’” (p. 301) He was as honest as LBJ was fluid with the truth.

This book covers Johnson’s early years—from birth to age 36. His ambition is striking. It’s exhausting even to read about.

The 3-volume Caro biography (with the 4th volume in the works) is known as the warts-and-all version of LBJ’s life story. I’m doing OK with it. I’ve known forever that the guy was earthy, and why sugarcoat the truth?

Also, gotta confess: major (major!) authorcrush on Mr. Caro. Not only is he a genius, but he’s also cute as a button.

Next up: Volume 2!

At Home. That's one magical title.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

Yup, I'm fancying up the nest here at Casa Unruly. So this book was an appropriate choice, I s'pose.

Also, I'm pretty sure Bill Bryson could make anything entertaining.

For those of us who are history geeks who also are addicted to HGTV (seriously: I’m hooked, and I don’t even have cable [thank you, Hulu!]), this book is the sort of thing we just feast on.

Now. A book about the history of private life sounds like it would be rather cozy, doesn’t it? I kinda thought so. Which is why it was a bit shocking that I had to fast-forward (the audiobook) through one part about disease. I was driving the car and getting woozy (oh, yes.... I'm a fainter), and that is not exactly a winning combination.

Also, there’s rats and mice in this book. You’ve been warned.

That having been said, this is also the kind of book that makes a person wildly annoying, because there are factoids here that simply Must Be Shared. For example: Jefferson had window screens at Monticello. And, brick buildings came into vogue in England because they could handle the horrible coal smoke pollution better than stone buildings, which discolored. And, we really should appreciate staircases more than we do; apparently it’s pretty darn easy to build a screwed-up staircase that's more likely to trip people up or down the stairs.

Yes, some of it was too gross for me, and some of it was a bit dull. But the overall effect: quite pleasing.

The audiobook:

16.5 hours; read by the author (whose voice you either like, or you don’t)

Home obsession

If You Were Here by Jen Lancaster

If you love HGTV and chick lit, you may want to check out this book. It has all that same kind of good stuff, plus it’s got smart-aleck footnotes. (I’m a sucker for footnoted novels.)

But—While this book was comical, it also activated my latent home improvement anxiety disorder. Yes, other people get all giddy about painting a room a new color; I get hives. (Thus, my quasi-addictive watching of the always-a-happy-ending HGTV shows. You know it’s going to turn out well. Plus: It’s not on my turf.)

In the book, Mia and Mac buy a fixer-upper in a ritzy suburb solely because she’s obsessed with its having been the house where the final scene of Sixteen Candles was filmed. 

Of course, since this is a book that requires a plot, the renovation is nothing but a big old disaster from start to finish. Yeah, the plot is kinda obvious—yet the ways the house fell apart were surprisingly surprising. (All those falling toilets!)

The best part is the writing, which is pretty clever—and the tone is nice and easy. (I find that I can read a Jen Lancaster novel, even though I’m not drawn in by her nonfiction work.)

And Mia’s sidekicks are entertaining, so that’s all good.

And some moments are truly funny. I really liked this conversation, in which Mia is telling her friend Tracey about the strains of home improvement: “‘Our nerves are shot and we’re both overreacting to everything. Like last night, when we tried to mount a cabinet? I thought we were going to spontaneously burst into divorce.’” (p. 238)

The thing is, though, that I get all jittery when things go bad with homeownership and home improvement. It makes me reeeeealy, reeeeealy nervous. (For example, Meghan Daum’s Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House made me a bit queasy. All that longing for the ideal house. The Ideal House, which Does Not Really Exist.)

Clearly, I’ve got some issues going on here.

And yet… I read on.

Great ideas, made even better

Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being by Martin E. P. Seligman

Martin Seligman’s earlier book, Authentic Happiness, is on my top-25 list. Now Flourish takes the ideas presented in the earlier work and expands them.

And man, it’s good.

Yeah, listen to me being all positive about the positive psychology.

Positive psychology is one of those topics—like space, Buddy Holly, needless tragic events, frugality, and personal finance—that sucks me in like a vortex. And I think of Seligman as the grand poobah of the positive psychology world. Certainly he’s the one who’s made most of this stuff accessible to us regular Janes and Joes.

Here, he critiques his earlier ideas as focusing too much on positive emotion alone, and he expands the goal to encompass engagement (flow!), relationships, meaning, and accomplishments. Because life’s not just about feeling happy, it’s also about loving and being loved, serving something bigger than yourself, having and achieving goals, and all that good stuff. It’s about well-being.

So this book does a couple of things. First, it tells you how you can enhance your own sense of well-being. One of the building blocks is the VIA Survey of Character Strengths. (You can do the survey online, and it’ll tell you your top 5 character strengths.) There’s lots more to the well-being stuff, but this character strengths business is pretty darn interesting.

The other thing that Seligman does here is tell us how these ideas are being used to improve others’ lives. The part I found most fascinating was about his work with the U.S. Army to improve the well-being of soldiers. In particular, he writes about the work they’re doing to help prevent PTSD, and it’s encouraging stuff.

I already own a copy of Authentic Happiness. I rather suspect I’m going to be adding a copy of Flourish to my shelves sometime in the next year, because I suspect I’m going to keep thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it…

I need my space

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach

Evidence of a benevolent universe: I picked this book for the Read-a-Thon. First book of the day, and it just plain blissed me out.

Yes, I’m a confirmed space geek.

But I’m here to tell you, you don’t gotta be that wild about space to really like this book. It’s got those intangibles that make a nonfiction book loveable even for people who don’t care about the subject matter. I’ll name one of those intangibles: intelligent good humor. There are authors out there, people, who lack this variety of Right Stuff. But Roach has it in spades.

Speaking of the Right Stuff, Roach describes the way that Stuff has changed over the years. She writes that, “America’s first astronauts were selected by balls and charisma” (p. 28), but these days they gotta be sensitive team players who ooze empathy.

These two sentences had me busting a gut: “Today’s space agency doesn’t want guts and swagger. They want Richard Gere in Nights in Rodanthe.” (p. 32)

This probably explains why I get all swept away by the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts, but feel pretty darn iggis about the astronauts of today. I like some swagger in my astronauts. I just do.

There’s also entertaining stuff here about what the astronauts eat, and also about what happens once they’re done digesting it.

And Roach got to ride on the Vomit Comet!

Which brings us to other gross biological stuff, like nausea in space and BO. But… it almost sounds like boredom, isolation, and confined spaces are more insidious enemies to today’s astronauts. It ain’t very glamorous up there.

But it sure as hell is entertaining to read about.

Money, money, money!

The 10 Commandments of Money: Survive and Thrive in the New Economy by Liz Weston

Liz Weston is one of my favorite personal finance writers, plus she seems nice when she appears on Marketplace Money to answer callers’ questions. (I like nice.)

I was curious to find out if this book would be terribly similar to the other general personal finance books out there, or if it would offer some new stuff—which thankfully it does.

I’m a sucker for personal finance books, and some of them are pretty dumb. And some of them think the reader is pretty dumb. And some of them simply say the same exact thing as every other personal finance book in existence.

Liz Weston doesn’t do those things. She offers up-to-date advice about personal finance topics, from retirement savings to insurance to anticipating home repair costs.

Plus, she writes in a casual style that makes the stuff easy to read, and that’s quite an accomplishment when you’re talking about establishing an emergency fund.

Since I consume these books like bonbons (yes, this may be a sickness), one of my tests is: How many items did I add to my financial to-do list, based on this book’s advice?

This book passes the test. I’ve got a list of un-fun but important things I should follow up on. Which I’d say makes the book well worth reading, even if you’ve already read dozens of these books. And if you haven't read dozens, this is a good one to pick if suddenly you're consumed by the urge to read a personal finance book.

He fought the law...

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts by Julian Rubinstein

The delightfully-told tale of a whiskey-addled hockey player/bank robber who became a Hungarian folk hero in the 1990s.

I was truly doubtful I’d like this book, which was chosen by our book club, but by halfway through I was reasonably engrossed with the story. For me as a reader, the thing that made this book work was Rubinstein’s writing, which is pretty darn snappy and smart.

Also, it’s the kind of story that’s almost too weird to be true—which is exactly how you *know* it’s true.

Attila (I’m serious—that’s the guy’s name) sneaked across the border from Romania to Hungary, started smuggling pelts, played hockey on a pro team (but was never paid for doing so), and took to robbing banks while wearing ridiculous wigs. Then he’d go spend the stolen money on extravagances and have to rob another bank.

Hungary during those years doesn’t sound like an easy place to live, so no wonder people tuned in to hear about his escapades and considered him a Robin Hood type of hero. (Though, guys! He kept all the money for himself and went scuba diving!)

Kudos to Rubinstein for making even this here curmudgeonly firstborn rule-follower feel a little tiny bit sympathetic toward the (anti-)hero.

I do not apologize...

... for my reading tastes.

It's true that I popped into a bookstore expressly to purchase those 2 lovely magazine items pictured there.

And it's true that I'm going to spend uninterrupted time this weekend reading them whilst drinking coffee (because tea, though oh-so-British, is also oh-so-not-my-caffeine-choice).

(Though really. What's there really to read? It's all pictures!)

But it's also true that it was borderline embarrassing to be a grown woman buying this stuff.

I paid cash and scuttled out of there under my umbrella, escaping into the night with my contraband.

I do not apologize for my reading tastes. But, occasionally, I cringe (just a little) because of them.

Really, John Steinbeck!?!

Really, John Steinbeck!?!

Your actual travels-with-Charley experience wasn’t juicy enough in itself, so you made stuff up?

Really!?!

And you thought we wouldn’t find out you lied, lied, lied to all of us all these years?

Really!?!

(Actually, though, yeah. He Almost Got Away With It.)

(OK, so that's Seth and Amy going after Blago. But you get the idea.)

Now… some of these literary unmaskings (I’m looking at you, James Frey and Greg Mortenson) have not really caused me any particular personal pain. Yes, it sucks that they’ve been lying to readers, and that ticks me off. But I didn’t take it personally because I never read their—ahem—novels.

But this Steinbeck business… this stings. I have loved Travels with Charley lo these many years and now I’m told I’ve been loving a lie.

So what we got here is One Honked-Off Reader Person.

And apparently this means I’ve been lying, too, because I’ve been saying for years that I like Steinbeck’s nonfiction better than his fiction.

Turns out: It’s all the same.