Eleventh Meeting: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

So, as it turns out, working on my prospectus, grading papers, and having ever Saturday designated for tailgating and football not only makes me neglect blogging, but reading in general. For the past three months, I have only had time to read book club books (usually I read at least one book on the side each month too). And, I am two meetings behind in my blogging! Well, that all changes now.

September's meeting was hosted by my besty Lisa. She picked Rebecca's Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.  The story of Henrietta Lacks is an unusual one-- as a woman, hardly anything is known about her, but her contribution to science is infamous! Henrietta was a poor black woman living outside of Baltimore in the 1950's. When she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, her doctors took some of her cancer cells without the knowledge or consent of her family. These cells, known as HeLa cells, were the first human cells ever able to be cultured, and they revolutionized the way we research and understand cancer and living cells in general. The book is part biography of Henrietta, part biography of HeLa, part scientific journalism, part memoir of the author uncovering this story, and reads like a novel. I found it to be incredible.

The book raises a lot of issues from racism to medical ethics to justice. Why were the HeLa cells taken without consent? Why was her family never told about the cells? How could Henrietta's cells be so influential in the face of health care today while her children can't even afford a doctor's visit? While it would be easy to point fingers and paint certain parties as villains in this book, I think that Skloot did a great job of reporting objectively, with no judgment, the role of each family member or physician.

As usual, the review of Eat, Drink, and Be Literary were mixed. While most of the book club members are psychologists, we have our fair share of experience with ethics and ethical violations, so some parties thought the book was just exploiting another example of why there are so many ethical codes now. It was really interesting to hear Lisa's point of view as a health care professional, and also to hear our friend Mandy's point of view as a biologist. Mandy works with HeLa cells and could give us the inside scoop on how prevalent they are in labs worldwide, and how much they now cost to purchase. I loved the book, and hearing everyone's points of view I loved it even more!

The Help

Remember how a few entries ago I mentioned something about never reading books until they had already come out as movies? Well, with this last novel I came in right at the buzzer. I finished The Help merely days before the movie premiered nationwide.

Wow, what a book! I honestly had no idea what the book was about when I heard the buzz about it last year. It wasn't until I saw a preview for the film that I had any idea. The previews looked fantastic and I vowed I would read the book before heading to the theaters. I bought the book when my besty Lisa and I made one last nostalgic trip to the Borders in our home town during its going out of business sale and knew I had only two weeks to finish it... luckily this self-imposed challenge was incredibly easy to complete. The Help was engaging, powerful, and a feel-good story (my favorite) about a group of black women in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960's and the white women they worked for. Stockett captured the complexity of a time where civil rights were making headlines but not making headway in homes of the south. The book showed that beneath the racial tensions that women are just women-- they face the same struggles, joys, and heartbreaks no matter what their skin color or place in life.

My favorite line in the book (which I highlighted and dog-eared) was apparently Kathryn Stockett's as well. As I read her afterword entitled "Too Little, Too Late", she said, "Washing that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought."

This special book is the kind that stays with you after you read it. It was difficult to put back on the shelf.

**I haven't seen the movie yet, so this post will likely be updated once I do

The Hunger Games Series

Oh. My. Gosh. That is really all I can say.

I finished the Hunger Games series over two months ago and I have just been contemplating what to write about them ever since. Nothing I can say could ever accurately represent these novels or how much I loved them. This series was like brain candy. I read all three books in a combined four sittings, and after I finished them I went through a mourning period. I couldn't think of reading another book, I couldn't believe the world Suzanne Collins had created for me was over, and I found myself literally cuddling with the books at night re-reading select chapters to get my fix.


No spoilers here-- the Games are best experienced if you have no idea what to expect. But, let me just say that these novels have something for everyone.

If you can't remember the last time you stayed up all night to finish a book then it is time to pick up the The Hunger Games, Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games), and Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3).

Upcoming book picks

September's meeting will be hosted by Lisa and she picked The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It is non-fiction (sort of a biography but sort of not) but reads like a fast paced novel. I'm 80 pages in and have found myself going to bed at nine every night this week so I could get more reading time in!

Other upcoming books are Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros (this one is my pick)... I'm hoping for some theme eats/drinks to go with these culturally specific books. We'll see if Japanese night and Mexican night pan out.

Happy Reading!

Tenth Meeting: Stiches A Memoir

When Eat, Drink, and Be Literary regular Sarah told me her pick for book club I was excited and very nervous. Sarah picked Stitches: A Memoir by David Small which happens to be a graphic novel. I had never read (er.... looked at) a graphic novel before so I was nervous that I wasn't going to do it properly. I realize how crazy that sounds, but I stand by it. I was afraid that I wouldn't "get" the book fully or notice what I was supposed to. Luckily, it seemed to go pretty well. Small's story was actually best told through images.

Since I have recently been on a memoir-about-a-messed-up-childhood kick, this fit right in. Small grew up in a love-less and silent home. His mother, who he later found out was a closeted lesbian, was harsh and cold and silent. His father was fairly absent. His brother barely in his life. If that wasn't enough to be considered a "messed up" childhood, Small had a growth on his neck removed, and the doctor took half of his vocal chords leaving him voice-less. Several months later he found out that this growth was actually cancer that had gone untreated for years. Small spent the rest of his youth, and much of his adulthood dealing with the fact that he couldn't speak above a raspy whisper, and that he had been lied to about his life.

The minimal words and dark artwork in this memoir were incredible vehicles for the theme of silence in Small's life. The silence of anger, of confusion, of unhappiness, and of actually being voice-less were all uniquely powerful depicted in one scene after another.

Sarah did a great job hosting a discussion about this book. Our discussion drifted back and forth from the content and the format of this book almost seamlessly.

If you have never read a graphic novel before, this is a good gate-way novel as it is not comic book-y or super hero-ish, but is definitely a piece of literature. I'm very glad it was picked for book club and that I was able to expand my horizons.

Jeannette Walls Extravaganza!

I am always a few years behind on summer beach reading. I don’t know if it’s because I am too busy reading other books, or just never have the attention span to read a whole book while I’m at the beach, but I typically don’t hear about , let alone read, the “fabulous” best seller types until after the movie interpretation has come out on DVD. So, in true fashion, I am six years behind the craze for Jeannette Walls’ incredible memoir The Glass Castle. However, I’m only 2 years behind in reading Half Broke Horses: A True Life Novel which could be considered a prequel to her memoir.

Because I’m a rebel, I decided to read Half-Broke Horses first. I figured it happened first chronologically speaking, so what was the difference? Also there was the tiny practical matter that I already had that book in my possession.  Last month I was in Tucson for four days visiting my boyfriend’s family, and I figured the flight down was the perfect time to start the novel. I was pleasantly surprised by the book. Walls wrote in the voice of her grandmother Lilly Casey, whom there are not enough adjective to describe. Born in 1900, she practically defined my idea of feminism-- she spent her life surviving and trying to find her purpose and never let a matter as small as her gender get in her way.  The “true-life novel” was the perfect format for telling this incredible woman’s story, and it is a concept I’ve fallen in love with.  I’m jealous of Walls and her ability to so beautifully bring to life the mythology of her grandmother and I wish I could do the same for my own grandparents!I finished Half-Broke Horses over the first few days of my visit to Tucson, and I relished every minute of it. As I experienced the desert in the summer for the first time, I got to read about Lily and her family living in that very desert—conquering it at times, and allowing it to conquer them at others. I felt a great appreciation for the fragile but harsh environment I found myself exploring, and some of Lily’s pluck rubbed off on me and I felt empowered and strong (which came in handy when hiking through the Sabino Canyon).

The last morning of my trip, as I packed my bags to travel back to Iowa, I serendipitously found The Glass Castle which my boyfriend’s mom had laid out for me to read. I started it over my morning coffee while I sat by the pool, and then somehow managed to finish it before my flight landed in Iowa. The Glass Castle is Jeannette Walls' memoir, and chronicles her simultaneously fascinating and disturbing childhood. Her parents, Rex  (a brilliant but irresponsible and somewhat abusive alcoholic), and Rose Mary, (an artist, the daughter of Lily, and in my opinion the worst mother of all time) were constantly on the run from bill collectors and raised four children, Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and Maureen on "adventures" around the U.S. The family lived in poverty most of the time, and while never short on creativity, or story-telling, the family was constantly short on food, and, well, responsible parenting. It was shocking to me that a family like this existed in the not-so-distant past, and that the children raised in this way were able to overcome.

Most of all what shocked me was a look at mother daughter relationships across both of the books. My own mother recently told me that the most surprising thing to her about motherhood was that when I was born I was my own person with my own opinions and values and personality right away. I thought of this while reading these novels because as different Lily was from Rose Mary, Rose Mary was from Jeannette. While I of course know plenty of sets of mothers and daughters in real life, these books offered a unique view of the mother/ daughter dynamic. I got to experience firsthand through Walls' descriptions how three generations of women were from childhood to womanhood to motherhood and how beautifully complex their relationships were with one another.

In short, I would recommend both of these books to any woman whether read alone or as a set. I would also recommend reading them while sitting poolside overlooking the Catalina mountains, but that's another story!

Ninth Meeting: The Charioteer

June's meeting of Eat, Drink, and Be Literary was hosted by my friend and former roommate Matt. He picked a book called The Charioteer, by Mary Renault. The story was about Laurie, a young british soldier in WWII who also happened to be gay. He struggled with these feelings and with who he wanted to be, and found himself quickly caught in a love triangle- one side he is being pulled by Andrew, a very innocent concientious objector o the war with whom he has an innocent love that neither of them act on, and on the other side, he is being pulled by Ralph, a young man that Laurie had gone to school with when he was young. Ralph is not innocent like Andrew, at all, and in many ways acts as a mentor to Laurie as he discovered himself and what his sexual-identity was.

The book was really difficult to read-- perhaps our most difficult yet! For one thing, the book was written in the 1950's, and for another thing, the book was written by a British woman. So, the vernacular and style were basically foreign. However, there were times when the language used was absolutely poetic. The writing is much more flowery than is found in today's novels, and in between the vague and hard-to-understand sections were beautiful descriptions.


For me, something that made the book even more difficult was that I didn't really like any of the characters. In fact, my alliance laid more with the peripheral characters in the story than Laurie or his two loves. Also, I embarrassingly interpreted all 1950's British slang as innuendo.... and I found out at the meeting that I wasn't the only one who experienced this!

The discussion of the book was one of our best yet. It was a small group this time (only six), probably because of the difficulty of the book, but six of us showed up with treats and ideas in hand. As usual, we were divided on our opinions of the book, but we all agreed that we didn't quite know what happened. Thank goodness Beth (who majored in English literature in college) was there to explain everything to us! Matt asked some great questions that really made me appreciate the story more. After having the plot re-explained to us, we discussed the symbolism in the book, and then whether we thought the book was still relevant today. We also talked about the author who wrote the book partially based on personal experience. Ms. Renault was working as a nurse during the war, and was a lesbian. She wrote the story based on gay soldiers she had befriended, and presumably also relied on her own experience while in search for her gay identity in a time where there was no such thing.


Though I didn't particularly like reading the book, my opinion towards it after our discussion is a lot higher.