freckles_and_doubt

Whew. A somewhat well-wined and, as usual, chatty and not too literary evening with the Tea Readers, the book club to which I and wolverine_nun belong. Tonight I hosted, which entails cooking supper (so not an issue) and, more worryingly, picking the books from which we chose this month's reads.

'Tis a curiously and terrifyingly exposed position, selecting books on behalf of a 7-person, all-female book club, some of whose members I don't know very well. In some ways it's great: I end up with books I would never otherwise look at, for example the new Isabel Allende "biography" of Zorro; but it's a dicey balancing act, trying to choose things I'd like to read that I vaguely suspect the book club members would either like to read, or haven't read already. Tricky, and, in fact, horribly self-revealing. In the event, a fairly successful selection; I snuck in both a Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors, which for some bizarre reason I don't own) and a Tom Holt, to a fair amount of enthusiasm, and had two other rejected (Chocolat and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) only because other club members already own them and can lend them. This is, after all, the book club that introduced me to the joyous reading experience that is Murukami, so I probably worry too much about alienating them. And, once everyone's finished reading them, I get to keep the books. Score.

It's alarming, though. They're making me read weird stuff that (gasp!) isn't science fiction or fantasy!. Too much more of this, and I may actually come to resemble something vaguely akin to a literature professional.