Mother-Daughter Dim Sum Book Club Tackles Dickens

Or, it might be more accurate to say, Dickens tackled the Mother-Daughter Dim Sum Book Club. Despite Great Expectations being one of his shorter works, my 11YO gave up, my 15YO only made it through 92% by meeting day, and Other Mom confessed to skimming as she drew near the end, reading only if she saw the names of main characters.

However, Dickens did garner an all-time, best-of-3 score of 9 out of 10 from Other Mom's 15YO! I consider that an absolute triumph. And her 13YO's literary analysis skills (the reason we were even doing this book club in the first place) struck me as entirely up to par. When we were talking setting, and I asked about all the fog in the opening scene, she responded that it symbolized how everything was unsure and confusing at the outset. Yup. Exactly. Pip doesn't know who is who and what is what, and if that doesn't symbolize the main theme of the book, I don't know what does!

To top everything off, Other Mom said her girls would like to continue the book club in some fashion. As a person who loves books and wants to create voracious readers, this kind of comment makes me feel like my work on earth is done.

But the summer club is ended--hope you tried one of these books for yourself (I got my book club to add The Hiding Place)--so it's time for awards.

FUNNIEST LITERARY COMPARISON DRAWN: "Miss Havisham isn't like Emily (of Deep Valley). She doesn't bounce back." Very, very good point. When Miss Havisham suffered her romantic blow, she knuckled completely under, abandoning sense, joy, proper parenting practices, and hygiene. In comparison, our valiant Emily put her hair up in a Psyche knot, fried up some frog legs, and got on with living. Well done, Emily!

What doesn't kill you makes you stranger

FUNNIEST BOOK READ: that would be Great Expectations. When we went around the table, almost everyone could point to a scene that made them laugh, even laugh aloud. And when we went to watch a movie version, there was disappointment that some of the opening jokes had been cut.

B+-EST MOVIE ADAPTATION: the 2012 version. We were annoyed by Estella's light hair (why is it movie producers can't do something so simple as to make an actor look like s/he is described in the book?? It so annoyed me that Daniel Radcliffe's hair didn't stand up as Harry Potter, and that he didn't wear green contacts.), and by how conflicted Estella was about Pip. Where was the heartlessness? Plus they cut the whole Orlick character and severely reduced Mrs. Joe Gargery's screen time, and Sally Hawkins was such a scene-stealer. Also, this interpretation of Joe made him weirdly aggressive. On the other hand, Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter were fine, and we liked Herbert Pocket. Weird to see Hagrid as Jaggers, though.

Why this version? Because it was streaming on Netflix.

BEST CHAR SIU BAO: the award goes to King's.

NOT King's, but you get the idea [dianacookswithlove.wordpress.com]

Altogether, the summer was a success, and I definitely would consider doing this again. Maybe next year can be a boy-book summer, to involve my son and other mother-son combos.

In other news:

• I'm on chapter 4 of the next book in my Hapgoods of Bramleigh series. I didn't do much writing over the summer and saw the discouraging statistic that ONE BOOK IS PUBLISHED ON AMAZON EVERY HOUR, so this might take a while...
  
• Austenprose.com gave A Very Plain Young Man a 5-star review, which was a thrill!
  
• You are what you read? An MSU study finds that readers of Fifty Shades of Grey are more likely to have abusive boyfriends and eating disorders..? 

Wishing everyone a happy back-to-school and more free time for reading!

The Mother-Daughter Dim Sum Book Club

So a friend asked if I would help her just-graduated-eighth-grade daughter with "Literary Analysis." It seems the girl garnered low marks in that category on a recent assignment, and I was to be the possible solution. Could you think of anything more unpleasant than getting together with your mom's friend to be grilled on "Literary Analysis"? I can--being the mom's friend who has to do the grilling!

Since we both have daughters around the same ages, I suggested instead that we just get together casually and talk about a book. Better yet, we pair my favorite thing--reading--with my very-close-second-favorite thing: eating.

Presenting the Mother-Daughter Dim Sum Book Club! Why dim sum? Because it's awesome and also because, a couple years ago when I asked my teenager if she wanted to do a mother-daughter book club, she said unhesitatingly, "No way." I haven't been her mother for 14.75 years, however, without knowing that she, like me, will do just about anything for food.

That's what I'm talking about

The picture above is from our most favoritest dim sum place in the whole world: the Great Mall Mayflower Seafood Restaurant in Milpitas, California. If you go there, may I recommend the seaweed salad, the turnip cakes, the pork dumplings, the char siu bao, the stir-fried broccoli rabe with oyster sauce, and the little custard tarts. My mouth waters as I type...

There's no Mayflower up here, sadly, so it is my friend's duty to locate the nearest wannabe Mayflower. Then, and only then, will I impart my vast and inspiring knowledge of Literary Analysis and How to Go About It. Everyone has their price.

The fun thing today was picking the books and giving them a quick re-read/skim. They had to be appealing to teenagers. They had to have some of the goodies Literary Analysts look for: setting, character development, conflict, a little symbolism/foreshadowing, and something to discuss and debate. They had to be, for my personal sanity, NOT dystopian YA fiction where the girl spends her time kicking a**, being ordinary yet somehow unspeakably amazing, and fighting off whichever element of the love triangle she was not currently into.

That left three books.*

*Kidding. But it did narrow the field considerably.

The victors?

Dreadful cover, I admit. Would you want to read such a book, if you were a teenage girl with any aspirations to hipness? But don't judge a book etc. etc.

If you've read my blog at all, you know Maud Hart Lovelace is one of my absolute most beloved authors of all time, so much so that I dragged my kids on a Literary Dream Tour last year to her old stomping grounds of Minneapolis and Mankato, Minnesota. The Betsy books are my favorite, but Emily's tale lends itself to more Literary Analysis. Emily is a high school grad for whom college is not an option, despite her hunger for knowledge. Instead, she has to watch her friends and cousin head off to the Next Stop in Their Exciting Lives, while she stays home to keep house for her grandfather. Depression ensues. But not for long. Soon Emily finds she can continue to grow and learn and blossom. So we have a conflict. We have character development (big time). We have symbolic setting. We have even a significant allusion to another literary work. Hooray!


Then comes another cover in profound need of an update. Ha! I'd better tell the daughters to get these books on Kindle, or I don't know if even the dim sum will hold them.

Teenagers have to read lots of WWII nonfiction in high school, for good reason, but they'll never be assigned Corrie ten Boom's awesome memoir because it's too Christian. However I think her voice is as valid as any other survivor's, and she has moving, powerful, thoughtful things to say that are still applicable in our world and time. Interestingly, she is a contemporary of Emily of Deep Valley, only she lives in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and this story takes place in her fifties.






Finally we will tackle

Yes, it's long, but I first read an abridged, textbook version my freshman year of high school, and even an abridgement holds up remarkably well. We lose a few--okay, a lot--of symbolically heavy descriptions of things, but there's enough left that there's still PLENTY to discuss. That is, I'll let the girls choose to read either the full tome or a decent abridgement (i.e., not a graphic novel or an I Can Read version). And we can celebrate finishing by watching a movie version (after our requisite dim sum)! Win-win-win.

Anywho, if you'd like to follow along yourself or with your own daughters/cousins/nieces/neighbors/friends, I'll post questions and points here as we go along. I figure we'll get through the first two books in July and the biggie in August.

One last, unrelated tidbit: University Book Store Bellevue has posted the details on my upcoming event here. But if you don't feel like clicking on the link, I'll be reading from The Naturalist and signing both it and A Very Plain Young Man on Saturday, June 28, at 5:00p.m. Hope to see you there!