Book Club Bounty

The best thing about the long commute to UCSF is that there's lots of time to read. In New York I was in one book club, in Berkeley I read so much that I can be in two.

One is a MeetUp group that I've been to three times, which represents one of my rare social outlets outside of the Haas business school community. We read challenging contemporary fiction--this month brought us Don DeLillo's somewhat impenetrable The Body Artist. Even if getting through a book is a struggle, the group's conversation always makes the read worthwhile. 

Two nights ago I attended the first meeting this year of the book club for the business school partners club. The partners have a much less intense approach; there was mostly friendly conversation and good food, with some book talk thrown in. This month we read A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini; I thought it had some good parts at the beginning, but became overwrought. Lots of people disagreed with me, but we disagreed productively. I gained modest standing in the group with my outspokenness;  hopefully my promotion of a novel by Anne Tyler next month will prove fruitful. But I'll go whatever we read.