TB&TB Book Club Conversation about Someday, Someday, Maybe

A few of us B&Bers decided to read Lauren Graham's recent debut novel Someday, Someday, Maybe and then have a discussion.  We chose this as our June book club read and I apologize for the delay in getting this post up.  The easiest way for us to do this was via email, so please forgive the longer posts...Also, be careful of spoilers! If you want to see general thoughts, scroll to the very bottom to see the "In Short" paragraph.

Lori--General impressions, like/dislikes, did the novel "speak" to where you are in life as we suspected when we first started?

Tahleen--I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I thought Graham does an excellent job with her dialogue and Franny's inner monologue; it's very snappy and funny. I wasn't sure if it would be any good just because it's not often when actors/actresses are able to become novel writers with such success. I've also never seen Gilmore Girls or Parenthood, so I didn't go in with an image of her besides what most Americans know about her.

I was also really pleased at how much crossover appeal this book has for teens; as a teen services librarian, I would feel completely comfortable recommending this one to middle and high schoolers.

Lori--I'm with you.  I was really surprised as well at how good it was.  I love Lauren Graham, so I was going to attempt to muddle through no matter what (kind of like with The Casual Vacancy), but I was really glad to not have to muddle.  I am curious to see what her next book is like.

I think that she touched on something important--we're taught to take any opportunity that we receive because, in this climate, we're supposed to count our lucky stars when we received any job.  But she considers what's right for her.  That was really nice to see.  Sometimes we get an opportunity that just isn't appealing to us and what we ultimately want to be doing.  It's a tough decision to make.

I also agree with you that there is a lot of crossover appeal.  I think a lot of females would really enjoy this.  I don't see males enjoying it.  

How did you feel about the pages from her planner interspersed?  Good?  Bad?  Fun?  Distracting?  I thought they were a little hard to decipher at times...

Bridget--I was and wasn't a fan of the planner. I thought it was cute but also sometimes distracting and occasionally indecipherable--I always worried that I was missing something if I skimmed it too quickly.

I can't say I LOVED the book, but it wasn't really my type of book, so I didn't expect to love it. I thought Franny was pretty adorable and I loved both her roommates (obviously for very different reasons!). I don't know much about the acting community/process/etc. so I can't necessarily say how "true to life" it was, but it felt real to me. What did you guys think about that? Did it seem "realistic"?

Lori, I agree with your point about how we're taught to take every opportunity we're offered because we're lucky to get any offers at all, but I was glad that Franny was able to "follow her heart" (for lack of a less cliche term) and refuse the parts that weren't right for her. I found myself feeling oddly proud of her. I will say that by the end, I was definitely invested in how things turned out for Franny, and that, in my opinion, is the hallmark of a good story: making the readers invested in your characters! Do you guys agree?

Something random that I was kind of glad to see, even though it made things less cathartic, was that Penny actually seemed to be a nice person, not just fake nice, you know? 

In the end, it's definitely a quick, enjoyable, summery read. If I hadn't already read it, I would definitely be taking this one to the beach. 

Tahleen--I thought they were cute. I liked looking at the doodles, and it was a different way to see what happened in her life instead of just telling us as it happened.

One thing I noticed was how different the world in 1995 was for recent graduates. In today's world, I doubt many people would be able to just move to NYC without a job, then get one that will only barely cover your rent and food. Too many have student loans now; a job would have to cover that stuff as well. I'm guessing most would have to get at least two jobs if they are part time.

Lori--I agree with both of you.  I did my best to decipher them, without spending too much time on it (thus disrupting my flow).  

What did you guys think about her relationship with her dad?  It reminded me a lot of my relationship with my dad.  I know he loves me, but we don't talk a whole, whole lot and when we do he usually winds up saying something about baseball because we have that in common (whereas, Franny and her dad had books).
What did you guys think about her being named Franny from the Salinger novel?  It's been a while since I read the novel, but a quick review of the SparkNotes showed that Franny was a good match, but not overly matchy.  Dan's analysis of it was fantastic.  I loved the bit about how repeating the same thing makes it true.
I go back and forth on the issue of Clark (the guy in Chicago; her back-up plan that failed).  I thought that Graham could have done more with that thread, but at the same time, what else could she have done?  We get the point at the end of the novel that Franny will end up just fine and that thing will probably work out with Dan.

Did you guys hear about them developing a TV show based on the characters?  I am really excited about that!  I think it has some good potential.

Bridget--I thought her dad was adorable. My dad and I can be like that as well. I really liked the voicemails he would leave her. 

I haven't read the Salinger novel, so I can't really comment on that part, unfortunately.

Definitely think she could have delved into the Clark thing more. I was expecting him to take on more of a role than a voice on the answering machine. But in the end, it was a good little twist that she kept avoiding calling him back because she thought he wanted to get back together (or whatever) and then it turned out that he was engaged. Awwwwwwkward.

Oh also--what did you guys think about it being set in 1995? I guess I just expect books to either be set in present time or further back than that...although I guess that's almost 20 years now...

Lori--I thought 1995 was an interesting choice.  I think that, like many first novels, this one is highly autobiographical, so she was writing about what she knew.  Without knowing that, I think that it is interesting because it's not so far off as to be totally new to the readers, but it's not recent enough that it feels hard to relate to.  Basically, we as a society can kind of agree what 1995 was like, if that makes any sense.

What did you think of James?  I was suspicious of him from the start.  Then Penny dumped him (over the boob job thing, but at the time I totally thought it was because she was a snot) and he hooked up with Franny and said some sweet things.  But then he acted weird and in a way that would/should throw up all of these red flags.  I was so proud when she ditched him at the premiere.  What he did was so not cool.

Bridget--I was so proud when she ditched James at the premiere too!! He was definitely suspicious from the beginning. What a douche. (Sorry, but still.) The boob job thing was so weird!!

Tahleen--I liked the 1995 setting, and it allowed for miscommunications that probably wouldn't happen today in the same way. I actually didn't mind Clark not being in the novel that much; I feel like if he were, it would muddy the waters a bit and would distract from the main plot.

Lori--Good point, Tahleen!  The miscommunication and the actual communication methods (answering machine and fax, especially) play a huge part in the story.  Any earlier and the technology wouldn't be there, any later and there wouldn't be so many problems.

Clark having more of a presence would have definitely clogged the story.  But at times, it kind of seemed like a throwaway.  In the end, though, I see the purpose of him--he's there to show that part of growing up is letting go and changing plans.  If Franny hadn't distanced herself from the relationship, even by avoiding his calls because she thought he wanted to get back together, it would have impeded her ability to make the progress she made.  Obviously, they couldn't get back together because of the other romantic interests, but also it would mean throwing away her dream.  Ultimately, I think Graham used him well, but it took until the end to see that.

Bridget--Lori, I definitely agree with your second paragraph. Based on the summary from the book jacket, I was expecting a lot more about Clark, but didn't get it. But like you said, in the end it really was a good use of a character.

Kimberly--Yay! I finally get to join in!

So! Clark. I like that he was put off until the end. Because I felt like he was just there, hovering. Waiting to possibly save the day or cause problems if things didn't work out for Franny. Which was how she viewed him. So I felt like I experienced it with her.

My favorite part of this book was the descriptions of theatre life. At some points I was stressing out, reading about everything because it is SO TRUE. Especially Franny's audition nightmares, I have those all the time. Usually I'm about to go on stage and I realized that I have no idea what role I'm playing, or any of my lines. It's always the stage at my high school too... I had to put the book down every once in a while and remember that it wasn't me that was auditioning/rehearsing/performing and that I had no reason to feel so nervous.

I loved the descriptions of New York too. Makes me miss it!

Franny's reaction to the movie that basically reflected her life made me laugh out loud.

Um... what else? I was surprised at how much I ended up liking Penelope. She turned out to be so much nicer than I thought she'd be.

In short:

Basically…we all enjoyed the novel.  It definitely works for a variety of ages, from high schoolers through the twenties, and probably even is a nice look back for the thirties.  Franny is a girl that we can all relate to—she’s facing problems with work, finances, men, and dreams.  Graham’s character reacts to these challenges in a very realistic and hopeful way.  A really good read.

Feel free to link up your own review or thoughts on the novel with the Mr. Linky below!

Julia Reviews "Bossypants" by Tina Fey

Title/Author: Bossypants by Tina Fey
Publisher/Year Published: April 1st 2011 by AudioGO
How I got this book: I checked out the audiobook from the library
Why I read this book: Two of the people I work with independently recommended that I read it... actually listen to it.
Rating: 4 stars

I never was a big SNL fan. Not really anyway. But the years that had all of those strong women, including Tina Fey, had me tuning in quite a bit. When she did the whole Sarah Palin thing before the last presidential election, I was tuning more. I enjoyed Mean Girls and whenever I see 30 Rock, I end up stopping to watch. Thus, when I heard Tina Fey had wrote a memoir, I was all over that.

I heard about it from someone at work who told me to get the Audiobook because Tina reads it. I am glad I did. It was quite entertaining to listen to her emote the way that I am assuming she wrote it.

Tina covers a wide array of times in her life: from growing up not-blonde to being in crazy college situations to being a mom. I absolutely loved when she talked about how she learned about what it meant to be a women and that the most substantial of her information came from Tampon commercials.

I loved hearing about her time at SNL and how she developed 30 Rock. So many interesting tidbits. They really made my commute so much more interesting!

I could sit here and quote pretty much this whole thing to you, but the summary of it is, Ms Fey has lived quite a life and has quite a bit of words of wisdom. She coveys these words to us in a fun and entertaining way.

The Goodreads College Group is reading Bossypants for the month of August! So hop on over and check it out! (We are also reading Across the Universe which you will remember from our author interview).

So overall 4 big stars for me! Entertaining and hilarious with a nice dose of world wisdom :)

PS: This cover freaks me out. Another plus for the audio book version!

Lori's Livres--One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Book Title/Author:  One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Publisher/Year Published: My edition was Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006, but the book was initially published in 1967.
How I got a hold of this book: I bought this from Borders one summer day.
Why I read this book: The overwhelming desire to yank this book from my shelves this summer came over me and I obliged.
Rating: 4 stars.  It was a pretty good book.  I'm glad I read it.  But there wasn't a magical connection between the two of us.

This was the second book by Marquez that I've read; the first was Love in the Time of Cholera.  One Hundred Years of Solitude is known for its magical realism, which is a style that Marquez perfected and used throughout his body of work.  One Hundred Years of Solitude follows the Buenadia family through seven generations of fortune and misfortune, invading outside influences and internal strife.

My thoughts on this book are kind of complicated and intermingled.  I liked the concept of the story--following a family's rise and fall.  This book reminded me a lot of East of Eden, which is one of my favorite books, in that respect.  There is the honorable patriarch who descends into madness, at least according to everyone else, and his rotten children who mess up everything by trying to be innovative and slightly underhanded.  There were numerous ups and downs in this book, as there are in life.  Progress doesn't always lead to better things, especially in the long run.

While we're on the topic of characters...I felt that some of the characters in this book were mere caricatures who were really overdone.  All in all, I didn't like the characters of this book.  I couldn't relate to them.  And many were flat out despicable.  It was probably intentional that the characters were like this, but I have to feel invested in the characters when I read.  Also, the characters all had the same names from generation to generation, which made things very confusing.  Luckily, there was a family tree that I referred to many times.

What ultimately redeems this book for me is its style.  I really like Marquez's prose.  They are simple, direct, but also lyrical.  For whatever reason, good prose and writing style can make up for a lot in my reading experience, even less than desirable characters.  It's almost as though the prose are a separate entity, detached from character and plot.  It's his prose that have me give this book a 4.

Kelly's Review of "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides

Title: Middlesex
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Published: Picador USA, 2002
Where I Got It: My favorite thrift store
Why I Read It: Goodreads College Student's group read!


I'm not sure I would have ever picked up this book if it hadn't been a group read. I think it was really the Oprah's Book Club sticker on the front, which would have revealed to the world that I had succumbed to the masses (Oprah and I have a love/hate relationship). Nevertheless, I'm so glad I did.


Middlesex is a fictional story of a man named Cal Stephanides with a condition called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency...aka, he is a hermaphrodite. He was raised as a girl (called Calliope), but never hits puberty. That raised questions, and when he learned of his 'condition,' Cal instantly accepted and adapted himself as a boy. He basically walked out of the door, shed his girl clothes, got a haircut, and was a boy.


I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, as Cal's story and transformation is really only the last third of the book. In the previous pages, we meet his peculiar and unforgettable family. The first part of the book is about his grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. We learn about the beginnings of their extremely odd relationship and their emigration to America after fleeing the 1922 Greek/Turkish war. In the second part, Desdemona and Lefty are assimilating into American culture and trying to survive in their new country. Cal’s parents, Tessie and Milton, also come into the picture against a backdrop of economic troubles and race riots in Detroit. Finally, Cal makes his entrance in 1960, only as a little girl. We follow Cal throughout the rest of the book as he grew up, went to school, made friends and was a seemingly normal girl. It was only until he was around 10-11 that things started to get tweaky. In my opinion, that’s where the book really hits its stride and takes off.

The author does not mince words or gloss over the details. We read every detail of Cal’s awkward encounters with both males and females, his body parts, and other’s thoughts on his condition. The reader is told all of this by a middle-aged Cal, written in a memoir form. The remembrance of his life brings us and Cal a fresh new perspective.

One of my biggest problems was that the Calliope/Cal transformation is so abrupt that I felt it lacked any emotion. The rest of Cal’s experiences are filled with emotion and personal insight, but this big change almost came out of nowhere. It was hard for me to understand why he accepted this change so easily. Also, the author has a thing with names, or a lack of names. Cal’s grandfather is named Lefty, his brother is Chapter Eleven, and Cal’s friend/source of infatuation is only known as ‘The Object.’ Unknown/unexplained nicknames are a pet peeve of mine.

Middlesex is not your typical coming of age story. It is extremely awkward in places and sometimes difficult to think about. Even though it's fiction, it's still very real. Jeffrey Eugenides is a great writer and has developed an interesting plot. Even though this is not the type of book I would typically read, I enjoyed it immensely. 4 stars.

Lori's Livres--The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Book Title/Author: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Publisher/Year Published: Scribner, 1926
How I got a hold of this book: I bought it at a used bookstore in Tulsa.
Why I read this book: I bought this book a couple of years ago and finally got around to reading it this summer. I bought it because it was one of Hemingway's books and because it's on just about every "You must read these books or else" list you come across. I couldn't say that there was much of an impetus to read it this summer other than I simply decided it was time to start reading.
Rating: 5+ stars--I absolutely love this story! I’d even go so far as to say it’s a new favorite. I love the idea of traveling from site to site and being drunk almost the entire time, but still getting amazing opportunities and getting to see amazing things, but I’ll elaborate a bit on that.

This was my fourth Hemingway and I'd say it's tied (with A Farewell to Arms) for favorite. There are so many wonderful things I'd like to say about this book. But I'll just go with the strongest feeling I had while reading it--I wanted to run away to Italy or France and become a foreign correspondent for an English language newspaper. I really liked how the main character, Jake Barnes, lived. Barnes and his friends traveled from France to Spain and to another couple of places. They were drunk pretty much the entire time, but they met a lot of new people and got to see and do some really cool things, like an awesome fishing trip or the bull fights. Barnes was running up against deadlines, kind of like I am right now with getting this review done. This is a storyline that I am just attracted to…it’s the same in The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson and with Gregory Peck’s character in Roman Holiday.

A lot has been said about Hemingway's treatment of his female characters. Of all of the Hemingway I've read, Lady Brett Ashley is my favorite of his females because she's not terribly passive. She's stronger and she has (and knows) her own mind. Some people might call her cruel or flighty, but I think she just wants to explore as much as she can and is willing to play situations and people to her advantage.

I think that this novel gives an excellent feel for Hemingway's infamous narrative style. The sentences were, for the most part, short and direct. They were blunt. They told you how to feel and what to think. And I appreciated that. This would be a really good novel to read if you've never read Hemingway before because, as already mentioned, it gives a good taste of his style and it's pretty short, so if you don't like, it's not like you've wasted too much time.

In which Snickers tackles short stories and Breakfast at Tiffany's.

The Book
Title/Author: Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories (Modern Library) by Truman Capote.
Published: The copy I read was published January 13, 1994 by Modern Library (first published 1958)
How I Got It: Oh, library, how I do adore you.
Why I Read It: I read it for the Goodreads College Students group. It was one of two books selected for June.
My Rating: 3 stars.


The Review

There's something freaky about short stories. They have the nagging tendency to haunt you - you get the feeling that the characters are looming ominously over your shoulder as you read.

Breakfast at Tiffany's was much the same. The actual "Breakfast at Tiffany's" story was delightful. It was different in lots of ways from the movie, the first being that Holly was generally more of a brat. I don't think that Audrey Hepburn, fantastic actress though she is, has the capability to really bring out what a childish and selfish and fashionably bratty character Holly is. Audrey's just too classy, and Holly's too brash - the two don't mix. Secondly, while the plots were more or less the same, the beginning and ending were COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the movie. I won't go into details (since that would spoil the fun), but don't expect the happy ending you've swooned over in the movie. Still, the story is excellent in its own right - especially considering we would have never met the infamous character known as Holiday Golightly without it.

That was the enjoyable part, the part I would have given 4 stars.

The other three stories, "House of Flowers", "Diamond Guitar", and "A Christmas Memory", are what makes this edition of Breakfast at Tiffany's freaky. I found myself reading them with a cautious eye, waiting, just WAITING for an axe murderer to leap out from the pages and split my skull in two. I'm sure that this is in part due to the first collection of short stories I remember reading: Stephen King's Four Past Midnight. As a child, I vaguely remember reading some generally terrifying collection of horror stories that gave me nightmares. I can't even remember the title of the collection, only the cover image - a tree, looming ominously in faint sunlight. It doesn't help that my most recent short story read was A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O'Connor - talk about spine-chilling!

So there's nothing wrong with the stories themselves; it was mainly just my reaction to them. "A Christmas Memory" left me gnawing on my hangnails - I was just WAITING for the grandmother to die some horrible violent death, thus scarring the little boy for life. "House of Flowers" was the same. I didn't react quite as negatively to "Diamond Guitar" for some odd reason - I think maybe it had something to do with the fact that these characters were already in prison. It was all upfront from the get-go, and I appreciated this ease in my anxiety.

The catch here is that they're not supposed to be scary stories. I was able to perceive this through my haze of paranoia, which only served to frustrate me. I wasn't able to enjoy the stories as just that - stories.

Breakfast at Tiffany's is certainly worth more than 3 stars, and not just for the title story, either - the others are just as good. In my case, though, it was my deeply instilled auto-reaction to the short story what caused me to give it three stars. Short stories truly are an acquired taste.


Respond:
For those of you who've read Breakfast at Tiffany's before, go ahead. Admit that you only read it for the Holly Golightly goodness, or for the Goodreads College Students group. You and I both know it's true. Do you disagree with my assumption? Please comment, and include why you read it, and what you thought of the OTHER stories, as well.