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JCSG and I are working really hard at catching up. We are! Here we discuss David Sedaris’ When You Are Engulfed in Flames. And I admit to wanting to mess around with Tim Gunn.

Pardon the delay - and I’m sure the BCB website is going to be updated soon - but here it is, the JULY edition of Bookclub Bitches.

Bookclub Bitches #14 - It’s a Bird by Stephen Seagle.

dear stephanie meyer,

you almost had me. i tore through “Twilight”. “New Moon” and “Eclipse” in a matter of days. although i didn’t buy the hype around the last book, since i only discovered you a few weeks ago. after “Eclipse” i couldn’t wait to continue on the journey with bella and edward and now that i have cracked the first hundred pages of “Breaking Dawn” i gotta tell ya, it stinks.

there are rules in vampire novels, rules ms. meyer! sure i get that your success has allowed you the idea that you can break those rules, but seriously? a vampire baby? come on nah! didn’t you see Van Helsing? and that was far-fetch for a far-fetched idea anyway!

you have built such a wonderful, tragic romance with bella and edward. it took you three books to get them to the alter and when you did, naturally you had the rejected boyfriend show up and cause some tension, it was great. but to then just whisk them off to an island and completely gloss over losing your virginity to a vampire?! well that’s a damn shame.

ms meyer, let me tell you something about the 12-13-14 year old girls that are reading your books, they are panting for their heroine to fall - they want to know what it’s like to be flawed and desirable - and they want details. to get our favorite couple FINALLY to the point of sex and then pan left to show billowing curtains in the island breeze is a cop-out! a hugely disappointing cop-out! your core audience of teen girls and their moms want to read about sex with a vampire, since it’s the closest we’ll ever get. and don’t give me any bullshit about your squeaky clean image and keeping bella pure ms. meyer. your core audience has been waiting for three goddamn books for the good stuff and you literally give us feathers. AND don’t give any other bullshit about not writing sex for teens. cuz i will cram “Forever” by Judy Blume down your throat so fast you’ll be shitting out pages 23-66 tomorrow.

i hope and pray something wonderfully bloody and tragic happens now, cuz if i just want to see a 19 year old girl marry the wrong guy i’ll just hitch myself a ride down to Georgia.

you better redeem yourself by the end of this tome or i’ll sick the bitches on ya. and we are a might to be reckoned with, ms. meyer. just ask that vampire hack mary janice davidson.

yours truly,
jodie

The Importance of Music to Girls
by Lavinia Greenlaw

yes, the bitches did a podcast of this, but for whatever reason it’s not available yet. JCSG and i are doing the 12 hot, fresh episodes, we’re just not able to post them on time. what do you expect from a bookclub bitch huh? it’s the middle of summer and there is SO much going on….blah blah blah. one of these days JCSG will listen to me when i tell her we need to take July off. maybe next year.

so, for now you get my written review. trust me, it’ll be short. i didn’t even finish the book. it’s not that the book is bad, it’s not. it’s very well written, just not well written about anything significant. there is no sense of “musical” importance here because greenlaw keeps her readers and herself an arms length away. no thanks. if you aren’t pulling me out of the bag, throwing me in the toaster getting me all warm and yummy then slathering butter on me, forget it. greenlaw puts me in the back of the bread drawer waiting for me to butter myself. i’d rather get moldy and be fed to the ducks.

there are some wonderful, very flowery passages in the first sixty pages that i read. nothing of importance though. in a way, i’m very disappointed that i actually spent money on this book. i really wanted something special, something that i could relate to. greenlaw grew up in London in the 70’s and 80’s. now if that isn’t a fucking goldmine of musical importance, i don’t know what is! but it never penetrates her. it simply happens to her and she then describes what it was like bouncing around in the echoes. i would wait for hours, HOURS, sitting by my radio, finger cramping on the record button, for one song. because i loved it, because as a tween it said something more than what i could say for myself, it stirred my imagination and made me wish. the first few screams from “I Want You to Want Me” live at the Buddakan to this day give me goosebumps. greenlaw would describe the wallpaper.

a few things that really bothered me, and my apologies if i’ve mentioned this in the podcast. first of all, this book was billed as a memoir. now, i’m not of the school that memoir is fact. memoir is memory and that isn’t always reliable. but memoir is an account of someone’s life, of an event in someone’s life. and that should be true, the details surrounding the event, those can be soft and open to interpretation - since not everyone remembers the same event in the same way. but something has to happen and nothing happens to greenlaw. the music never happens. secondly, the reviews were great for this book and that just makes me mad. good writing doesn’t always mean good storytelling and vice versa. while greenlaw is a good writer, you need to be both. and if this shyte is getting published and lauded, well fuck! let’s all get up off our asses and write a novel, our chances look good.

in a way though, i’m really proud of myself for not finishing this book, for simply closing it and putting it down. i saved myself a lot of time and anger doing that and that makes me feel good. i don’t even want to mooch this book, i seriously want something for it. that’s how strongly i feel let down. even if it’s something stupid - an expired coupon maybe, or a can of RC Cola - having something else to replace the book would mean more to me than the book itself. so i could say, here is the can of RC that i got for a shitty shitty book, i like the can better.

wherein Jodi and I bitch on the Bitches.

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so i am doing homework for the upcoming Bookclub Bitches podcast. JCSG and i decided that we are doing a retrospective of all the books we’ve read so far. i’m listening to all our podcasts keeping stats and making notes. i’m SUCH a dork!

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clearly Bret Michaels trumps any literary ambition.

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The Bookclub Bitches maintain their commitment to bring you a hot, fresh podcast every month. Hopefully, thus ends the sober podcasts. My apologies for how tired and pregnant I sound.

i’ve been going back and forth in my mind as to what really to call this book. i wouldn’t say it’s a graphic novel, since, in my mind, graphic novels have more of a mythology behind them. also, the artwork in graphic novels helps to tell the story, part of why we read graphic novels is too see the art. the pictures and they story go hand in hand.

Persepolis on the other hand has been marketed and called a “Comic Strip Memoir” since it deals with the real life of the author - who simply chose to tell her tale in comic strip format. the art work is good, since Satrapi herself is a graphic artist. but in my mind, graphic novels are more 3-D and Persepolis doesn’t want to be more than what it is….a memoir told in comic strip format.

and while The Bitches categorized this as a graphic novel, i think that’s wrong. a novel is fictional prose, while a memoir is a personal account. the pictures should have nothing to do with it. so i’ve convinced myself - comic strip memoir.

now a word on that memoir - while reading Persepolis i became grossly aware of how ignorant i am of middle eastern culture. Satrapi tells her tale of growing up in revolutionary Iran, and while i remember hostages and being afraid of the Ayatollah, i was a kid at the time, and foreign affairs didn’t really concern me.

but to read how a young girl had to completely change her ways, because of a new regime in the country, to do things, silly things, just because you were told. well that sparked in me a certain anarchist kinship.

i felt some what lazy reading how Satrapi spent her teen years. while i was guzzling mountian dew and eating cheetos and pop-tarts, she was reading philosophy. something i was only forced to do in college. with our western age of cable TV, no one my age was interested in what the government was doing. since it didn’t affect our daily lives, what did we care.

on the other hand, Satrapi was affected constantly with government regulations of what to wear and where to go. that i cannot imagine.

there were parts of her story that i didn’t find all that interesting, it didn’t seem that different from other young girls’ tales of growing up, fighting with your parents, listening to rock and roll, and waiting to be loved. it was the setting that was intriguing, or rather the story within the setting. and by setting i mean Iran and the comic strip.

i’ve never read Cormac McCarthy before, so all this talk about how he’s the next great American Novelist is lost on me. i don’t know him from adam and No Country for Old Men book didn’t make me want to cross any rooms to meet him either.

i bought this book for hubbin for x-mas because he wanted to see the movie, and as you may have guessed, i’m of the school that you should read the book first, it’s always better. period. always.

one of the comments he had while reading it was that the punctuation was off. i noticed this too. it wasn’t that i found it distracting, but i generally think that when authors purposefully go to such lengths to break the rules, there must be a reason for it. that it must enhance the story in some way, and in NCfOM i just didn’t get what that might be. it did make me pay more attention though. you really had to pay attention because none of the dialog was separated from the narrative. so it was to know what was being said vs what was being thought.

also, there was a seemingly important character that was introduced for the first time well into the book, and the character was killed off almost instantly. again, i didn’t see the point of that.

the story itself is pretty cliche cat-and-mouse. it reminded me a lot of A Simple Plan, which i read years ago. the assassin had a cool weapon, but that’s about it. he was a cold-blooded heartless killer - big surprise. the man who he is after didn’t have much of my sympathy since i was unclear as to what his motives are. seems too easy that he just wanted to keep the money. also, and probably the best part of the book was that the sheriff doesn’t get his man. the killer is never caught. and all of the sub-story surrounding the sheriff wasn’t that compelling.

all in all, i wasn’t impressed. sure the villain is kinda cool, but villains are always the most interesting character. too bad we never know enough about him, but you’ll never know anything about the rat-bastard who shoots you dead anyway.

maybe the movie is better.