My wife has been in 3 or 4 book clubs over the last 25 years and she has always enjoyed them. They are especially fun when the members have diverse backgrounds and opinions. Her clubs have had representatives from a wide variety of religions, political parties, ethnicities, and lifestyles. But there is one group that has been conspicuously absent from her clubs – men. So when we had the opportunity to be in a book club with four other married couples, we jumped at the chance.
The club has been going for almost a year and I now realize why men don’t join book clubs. When you are in a book club, you have to read books! To accommodate the men in our club we try to pick books that have come out on tape or have a good movie version. Our last book was 550 pages long and two hours before our meeting I had only read 53 pages. I came up with a great solution that I call the Gallup Reading Method. Gallup Polls tell us what 100 million Americans are thinking by talking to 1000 carefully selected people. Why not read just enough pages of the book to have an idea of what is going on? I decided to skip from page 53 to 60. Then I read all of the pages ending in zero. I was finished in an hour and a half.
I think I understood the book pretty well. The name of the book is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. The main character’s name is Liesel and she is a book thief. I am not sure if she really stole books or if that was symbolic of something. The narrator of the book was Death, which probably was very meaningful. Rudy was in the book too and he was either Liesel’s brother or a boy friend. It is also possible he was her father, I am not sure. But they talked a lot. They lived in Germany and it talked about Hitler so it must have been in the 1930s or 1940s. So the novel was set in a real place and time, but the characters were fictional. Actually, it is possible it was a true story. Liesel was either Jewish or a Communist and that caused a lot of conflict for the book’s characters. Death made some profound statements about humanity on the last page. It sounded like Liesel was grown up and most of the other characters were dead. Or maybe they had just moved to New Jersey. The author didn’t make it very clear.
There were five men at book club. Two had read the book the old fashioned way. One listened to it on tape. One read the first 38 pages. People seemed to be impressed with my knowledge of the book so I felt comfortable confessing that I had only read the first 53 pages and all of the others ending in zero.
The discussion was lively and at the end the 38-pages-guy pointed out that he had made the highest number of comments per page read of anyone in the group. I said that it seemed like a very good book. One of the women suggested I should go back and read all of the pages that ended in 1. Everyone laughed. Ha ha. Very funny. I make an effort to read some of the book and all I get is ridicule.
Besides, I don’t have time to go back and read The Book Thief because I have to get started on the next book. It is 336 pages long, and I only have 3 months to read it. So 38-pages-guy and I made a secret pact. He is going to read the odd-numbered pages and I will read the even ones. Then we will get together for lunch on the day of our next book club and try to put it all together. It will be a little extra work, but at least I don’t have to read the whole book.
David LeSueur lives in Littleton and is currently reading the even-numbered pages of Arabian Jazz by Diana Abu Jaber.