I'd Drive 75 Miles...

My never ending quest to find like-minded people with whom I can discuss books has taken me far afield this time.  About a month ago, Char suggested I might like to come to her book club.  She's been talking about this club for a long time and it sounded so much like what I was looking for than anything else I'd encountered that I said I'd give it a try.

(Actually what I really want is a handful of women sitting in someone's house drinking wine and talking about a book and their lives, but that doesn't seem to be available to me!)

The book they were reading this month was "The Rosie Project," by Graeme Simsion, a book I really enjoyed.

Don Tillman is a brilliant geneticist who probably suffers from Aspergers Syndrome.  He has decided it is time to get married and sets about finding a mate scientifically by creating a 16 page questionnaire designed to weed out any women who would not suit him.  He calls it The Wife Project.
Rosie Jarman is all the things he does not want in a wife prospect. She is also beguiling, fiery, intelligent—and on a quest of her own. She is looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might be able to help her with. Don's Wife Project takes a back burner to the Father Project and an unlikely relationship blooms, forcing the scientifically minded geneticist to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that love is not always what looks good on paper.
The thing about this book is that it could have been written by The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper, so it was fun to picture him while reading it.  A light read, but enjoyable.

That was the mini review I wrote about it at the time.  I especially enjoyed it because of how easy it was for me to hear all the words in the hero's mouth coming out of Sheldon Cooper.  I was eager to hear what others had to say.

Today was the meeting.  I decided attending Char's book club had another wonderful benefit to it -- it takes about an hour and 15 mnutes to drive to her house and that means two and a half hours of audio book time.  I was in the last parts of my current audio book, "One False Move" (a Myron Bolitar mystery by Harlan Coben) and felt that I might come close to finishing it by the time I got home from Char's.

The club meets at the local senior center (I immediately came home and checked our senior center to see if there might be a book club that met there, but didn't find one) and while we were driving there from Char's house, I asked her how many were in the club and she said it varied.  Sometimes as few as 3, but they had had as many as eleven once.

"The Rosie Project" must have been a very popular choice because there were sixteen people crammed into a tiny room in the senior center.  But there were enough chairs, though some had to sit in a back row.

It was a lively discussion with everyone having an opportunity to contribute, which is totally what I missed during my brief time in the Woodland Shakespeare Club.  They seem to be a nice group, except for one woman who dominated the discussion with comments more about her family problems than the book.  I took an instant dislike to her and was pleased when Char told me that her daughter had quit the club because she couldn't stand the woman either.

Toward the end of the discussion someone asked how many were surprised when such-and-such happened and that elicited the biggest debate of all, since there was a definite division of oppinion about the event, with people having polar opposite opinions, and everybody pulling out their copies of the book to read quotes from that section aloud.

It was a fun afternoon.  The book for next time is a heftier tome, "The Goldfinch," which I bought about 2 years ago for my Kindle and have not yet read, so I came home and started it right away.  I can already tell that unlike "The Rosie Project," wich someone in the group today called "cotton candy for the brain" this is going to be a more serious read, but I'm already looking forward to discussing it with the group.

By the time I got home, there was only 48 minutes left of my audio book and as there was nothing on TV tonight, I was able to finish it in short order.