WEM Book Club

When you think of Book Club, what comes to mind?  Ladies, sitting around on couches in someone's living room, laughing and talking?  Some snacks near-by?  Meets once a month?  The hostess decides the book?

Well, my WEM book club is not like that!  I have only met three of the members in person.  All of our discussions are online, although we do laugh and talk, just not in person!  The books are already chosen for us by Susan Wise Bauer.  Take some time to read her bio - very impressive and shows she knows what she's talking about.  So I can rest assured the books in this annotated bibliography were chosen with intent and purpose.  The more I read, the more I can see of the intent and purpose.

These books are not typical and are challenging in their language (seriously! Who reads Thucydides for fun? Okay, maybe Victor David Hanson but he's the only one who comes to mind.)  They are not titles I would normally pick for myself, except some of the fiction.  Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice,  Anna Karenina, The House of Mirth, Great Gatsby and 1984 are books I read before WEM but that's it!  I read to become  better educated and to be well-informed so Susan Wise Bauer's book has, in fact, given me a classical education that I never had! (And a side note about The Well-Educated Mind.  Do not read the blurbs that describe each book, especially the fiction.  They contain spoilers, which happened for me with Uncle Tom's Cabin.)

When I read these books, and a lot of others, it's with a pencil in my hand.  I underline.  I circle.  I write question marks and exclamation points.  I ask questions.  I make notes.  I mark places where I think a map should be. I note other authors and their works and the dates of those works.  I try to have a dialogue with the text and, by extension, with the author when I read these books.  This helps me to spotlight important points, which then helps me answer the questions our fearless leader Sarah posts every Monday over the assigned reading segments; Sarah breaks the books down for us into manageable sections. The group then proceeds to have an email discussion of the questions Sarah asks, the comments and observations the group members make.

We don't get to read fiction anymore.  That was the first section and included such titles as the ones above plus  Moby Dick, Madame Bovary, The Trial, Song of Solomon and Possession to name a few.  I confess, I much prefer fiction.  However, I really did not like Madame Bovary.  It gets my least favorite vote, yet it has an important place in literary history.  (Egads, feminism is everywhere - I did just finish The Feminine Mystique.)

"The Story of Me: Autobiography and Memoir" is the next section of the WEM books.   We proceeded through the lives of such people as Augustine, Rousseau, Booker T. Washington, Hitler, Malcom X, Charles Colson and Elie Wiesel.  That's right, I read Mein Kampf.  Are you shocked?  Don't be.  He was quite mad.  You should see all the highlighted parts and comments in that book.

And now we are at "The Story of the Past: The Tales of Historians (and Politicians)."  Herodotus, Plato, Machiavelli, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Marx and Engel, and Kenneth Galbraith were some of the authors of these historical tomes.   The best book, by far, was Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day about the D-Day Invasion.  I highly recommend it, and will be adding it to Caleb's readings when he is in high school.

While reading this section, I began to envision our readings as a spiral vortex where the same authors and themes which shaped culture and influenced thinking across the globe were showing up in different literary genres.  Thomas More's and John Locke's ideas of government shaped Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Flaubert's introduction of a female character who did as she wanted and Wollstonecraft's ideas of women's right are are antithetical to Rousseau's but are culminated and furthered in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.  See what I mean? Feminism is everywhere.


I have finished The Feminine Mystique which lead me to start The Feminine Mistake.  That's next week's topic, so stay tuned!