Book Club

Tonight I'm going to my temple's ladies book club.  I had been hearing all month what a beast this book was to read, so of course I didn't really start it until a couple of days ago.  Despite having not read it, I volunteered to "facilitate" the discussion when the original facilitator had some health issues that prevented her from doing it.  

Usually when someone facilitates they have done research about the book on the internet and have printed out questions for book clubs that they have found somewhere or other.  These days books often even have a book club guide in the back.  Yikes.  It reminds me of high school when you would read some great piece of literature and then be expected to answer a list of questions about it.  Why do you think the main character kills his arch enemy?  Mmmm.... because that's what you do with arch enemies?  Lax gun control laws?  I always felt like those questions took you out of the magic of what you had just read and crushed you by turning the experience into some kind of pseudo psychological test.  Needless to say, I never read the book club guides at the end of books.  No more magic sucking for me.

My friend Laura and I went to see an art exhibit in Las Vegas once.  (That isn't why we went to Vegas, there just happened to be an exhibit.)  When we walked in a man handed us ear phones.  You were supposed to put them on and get a guided tour of the exhibit.  Music was playing while some narrator told you how you were supposed to feel while you looked at each painting.  I turned right around and gave my ear phones back.  There is a lot that I don't know about art, but I know that it's between me and the artist and that I don't need mood music to help me come to the "right" answer.  I have been profoundly impacted by paintings that I knew nothing at all about.  Sometimes you come around a corner and a piece of art hits you like a ton of bricks.  Once I even burst into tears when I saw a landscape by Van Gogh.  It was not the famous Starry Night.  It was one I'd never seen before.  Picasso said, "Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?  Can one really explain this?  no.  Just as one can never learn how to paint." 

So tonight I will go to book club still filled with powerful images of this book (To The End of The Land by David Grossman) and see where the discussion goes.  It's a great book, so I have no doubt that it will be a great discussion.