Eighth meeting: Zeitoun

Oh my! I am a bad blogger. I am two months, and several books behind. I blame it on the distractions of sunny patios and cold beers... 

Last month (May 2011), Cheyenne hosted our eighth book club meeting to discuss Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. As my previous post indicated, I read the book in two nights and really loved it. But, I love almost everything Dave Eggers does, so that is no surprise. To remind you, this book is written like a novel but is actually the true story of the Zeitoun family from New Orleans before, during, and after Katrina. It is gripping, intense, and magnificently (I think anyway) shows the many different sides of people's responses to disaster. No spoiler alerts here-- though people may feel like they know about what happened in the aftermath of Katrina, what happens to the Zeitoun family is shocking, and best left as a surprise!

The meeting was in College Green Park, and we had a picnic! Pressed sandwiches, strawberry lemonade, spinach salad, and gooey brownies (Matt's first ever attempt at baking-- they were great!) All eight of us at the meeting were cozy and cute under the little gazebo when suddenly the wind picked up, a dark cloud loomed ahead, and all of the families and kids in the part started fleeing. We all started to laugh because it seemed so eerily similar to the book. Like Zeitoun, the main character, we decided to stay in our gazebo to ride out the storm. This change in the weather was the perfect segue to a great discussion of the book.

As usual, the group was split in their opinion of the book. For example, while I thought the book was the least political Katrina story I've read, others thought it was too political. The varying opinions of the Eat, Drink, and Be Literarians never cease to surprise me, but also impress me. It is great to examine a piece of literature from so many different points of view. One thing we could all agree on is that the Zeitoun family has a story that should be told.

If you have read the book already, or perhaps don't mind a spoiler, see a video interview with Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun here.

Impatient? Me?

So, yet again, I finished the book club book more than a month ahead of schedule. I just can't help myself when the box arrives from Amazon. It's like Christmas!

I finished Zeitoun about a week ago and I cannot wait to talk about it with the club. It is unlike any of the other books we have read in that it is non-fiction. It is about the Zeitoun family and their lives in New Orleans around the time of Hurricane Katrina. It is still written like a novel, but the characters and the events are real. While reading it, I actually preferred to pretend it was fictionalized because some of the things that happened to the family are terrible, and I just wanted them to not be true.

I'm itching for anyone else to finish this book so we can cheat and talk about it before the meeting at the end of May. But I guess in the mean time I should get started on the ever-growing stack of books on my night stand.

Updates

The book for May will be Zeitoun (Vintage) by Dave Eggers. I am very excited about this since I love Dave Eggers and have read many others by him (What Is the What (Vintage), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and You Shall Know Our Velocity are my favorites).

Happy reading!

Quitting is for schmucks.

Well, I'm a schmuck. Just this once I suppose. Typically, I have this very weird habit of never admitting that I could not finish a book or that I just quit reading it and moved on with my life. Instead, I maintain-- for weeks, months, even years-- that I am just "still reading" a book. I have several of these never-enders on my night stand at any given time, and every once in awhile I will actually convince myself that after a 3 year hiatus that I will magically be able to stay awake reading Atonement or Love in the Time of Cholera (neither case has ever been true, but both books have proven to be capable cuddling partners). But, something inside me snapped this week, and I decided to take one off the shelf and just say no... er... just say "I QUIT!"

Hello, my name is Katy, and I have stopped reading The Best American Non-Required Reading 2008 edited by Dave Eggers, Intruduction by Judy Blume.

Now don't get me wrong-- the book wasn't entirely bad. I usually love collections of essays, short stories, chapters, comics, poems, etc. I find that collections like these are sometimes the only thing that can capture my grad-student sized attention span (meaning very small because I'm supposed to be focusing on the three dozen unread journal articles sitting only a few feet away on my desk) and therefore as a "genre", I love collections. And I also adore Dave Eggers. I have read all of his books at least twice and my borderline inappropriate love of his work (and what I imagine he is like in real life) is what drew me to get this book in the first place. And Judy Blume? Hello, what adolescent girl (past, present, or future) has not been able to find her voice after reading just a blurb of Judy Blume's brilliance?

So why am I actually committing to QUITTING this book if all I can say are good things? Well... for one thing, it's freaking 2010. In fact, it's the second half of 2010. Why should I be focusing on the best literature of 2008 if there's just more (and better?) stuff piling up on my nightstand for me to look at? But still, I have clearly known that 2008 is long gone for about 18 months now, and still didn't quite give up. I put the book back on my nightstand and it continued staring me down. "Finish me! Don't give up!" it whispered every night as I would reach past it for something -- dare I say it-- better. So what happened? I answered the call of the book one night. I chose it above all others. I started a new short story and... well.. I just got bored. There. I said it. It just couldn't quite grab my attention and I kept re-reading the same two or three paragraphs night after night, trying to move forward.... somehow, this turned into literally flipping through the rest of the book and skimming random pages of random essays. When I realized that nothing more between the two pretty covers caused me to make a second glance, and that when I tossed the book off of my "to read" pile that I felt NO REMORSE I just knew. It is time to move on.

Whew! I feel liberated.