It seemed to me that never before has it taken so long to get warmed up in the discussion of a book as it did with this one. Discussion centered on minutia and the fairly straight-forward plot that was somewhat cobbled together from two separate short stories.

But about 2/3 of the way in, we started to discover that Salinger seemed to have much more going on that we gave him credit for.

Turns out Zooey’s reflection in his brother’s old room caused him to grow as a character so that he was able to be kind to Frannie on the phone.

If you did not come to the meeting because you didn’t like the book, then you are a sackless loser. Everyone concluded, as you well know, that the book had great merit that required the interaction of the group to fully appreciate.

We are now reading Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. The book for December will the Homer’s Odyssey. Better get on it.

Here’s a nice little post I found. A 22-year-old young man hitch hiked across the country to visit Hemingway in Key West. During the interesting visit, EH gave him a list of books that every writer should read.

It’s not the first time it has happened. Twenty minutes in and we are all looking around at each other thinking, Why are we talking about this rabbit trail? Let’s start talking about the book for Pete’s sake. One of the opening issues was, Was Robert Massie, author of Peter the Great, offering a sympathetic history? Was he trying to shield Peter from too harsh judgment by contemporary readers? It was a good question. But like 14 hungry wildebeests salivating over a magnificent thirty-point stag, we plunged in ravenously and after twenty minutes were still scrabbling for the rack.

Once things got going, there was universal agreement that, whether Peter’s harsh reforms, justice, warfare and taxation were pardonable or not, Robert Massie’s book was a spectacularly interesting read, and nobody complained about the 850 pages. Rather, most of us found it hard to put the book down. Stunning descriptions of life in the 17th and 18th centuries, suspenseful battle sequences and jaw-dropping accounts of Peter’s sheer, balls-to-the-wall, kick-assery were told with a novelists skill. No wonder the book won the Pulitzer.

Memorable events from Randy’s essay (accessible from the sidebar) include the Revolt of the Streltzy, incognito travels in Europe, Holland and the shipyards, Gordon, LeFort and the Jolly Company, Menshikov, Catherine the peasant girl that became Peter’s mistress, then wife, then successor, the construction of St. Petersburg, Charles XII, the Sultan’s harems and eunuchs, and the trial and death of Peter’s son Alexis.

Add to that the shocking accounts of the brutality of the 17th century, torture and executions, the state of women’s lives in Russia when Peter was born, the unfathomable cold, misery and hunger suffered especially by Charles’ armies in 1708, and you have something close to an epic. And we all appreciated Massie’s detours when necessary, to explain the back story on some nation or geography or cultural artifact.

As someone pointed out, our world would be very different if not for Tsar Peter’s influence on Russia, Europe and ultimately the world.

The excitement did not end with the book discussion. There were perhaps more books proposed than ever before, and with a large group of people voting there was a three-way tie. A tie-breaker vote yielded a two-way tie. And a final tie-breaker of 6 votes to 7 left us with Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game as the book for July.

The book for June is The War of the End of the World, by Llosa.

Note: there are a couple of pics of Russian locations in the menus on the left.

Doesn’t really look like a candidate to be a serial poon hound does he.

Since I wrote the essay on Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, I will not comment much here on the book. John created a pdf of some info about Ford’s family and influences which you can view here.

The book was my proposal, and the first book of mine to win the vote in over a year. And while I enjoyed the book very much and profited by it in my knowledge of history and the culture of British nobility, the general consensus was lukewarm toward it.

Why? From what we can figure, it was simply because it does not “stand the test of time” as the saying goes. It was probably great in its time but there wasn’t enough to keep everyone excited (except me of course).

Another disconnect was the culture in which the story took place. Many felt they could not relate with British nobility, their values, their priorities, their mannerisms and expectations. How is it possible, for example, for Edward to be unaware of where babies come from until 2 or 3 years into his marriage? How could Leonora facilitate the several mistresses her husband had?

The car that backed in to John. He was trying to get into THIS spot. Go figure.

There were at least two bits of excitement. First, a drunk guy backed into John’s car as we sat there and watched. He had 20 feet of space,but he just flew backward into the car while supposedly trying to park. It didn’t make sense. But as I said, we’re pretty sure the guy was wasted. There was no damage to John’s car though.

Also, a young employee…now, remember, we have been meeting at the Dog and Duck for 13 years…a kid who has been working there part time for around 8 months came out and fussed at us for having a small flask on the table. He told us not to bring alcohol to the bar. So next month we all need to bring several flasks, and tell that kid that we’ve been meeting there for our book club since he was in Junior High school, and he just needs to go back inside and wipe the counters.

After Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon next month, we will read Peter the Great by Robert K. Massie