Meeting #3: This Is Where I Leave You

Last night was our third meeting and maybe the best one yet? There was a collective agreement that Marissa sets a high standard for hosting a book club meeting (crunk juice, anyone?). Thanks, Marissa! In attendance were: Marissa, Katie, Emily, Erin, Elyse, Mike, Lin, Seshie, Jhani, and special guest, Deep, Marissa's husband!

So far, book club has established one rule which is that there are NO APOLOGIES whether it's because you didn't finish the book or can't make it to a meeting or whatnot. I'm hereby declaring three more rules for all knickerbookers:

• take more photos during meetings!
• be open-minded in people's book choices; your turn to choose a book will come! No bad vibes in book club, por favor. 
• Lastly, this is just a reminder that anyone can invite anyone to join book club. This book club does not belong to any one person. :) 

As for last night's meeting, there were a lot of people partaking in several different discussions and because my hearing-aid hasn't been working, I can't give a full update on what we talked about! So for those of you that were there, please comment and remind us all what we discussed. For those of you that missed the meeting, tell us what you thought!

the spread

crunking

crunking some more

Things we discussed: 

• All of us agreed that this was the best book we've read so far.
• Some of us didn't like the dream sequence chapters. We felt that the author did a good enough job portraying the unraveling of Judd's character and his heavy struggle without his melancholy dreams to use as analysis.
• We had mixed feelings about Hillary's relationship with Linda. Some felt it was introduced awkwardly and didn't seem realistic. Some couldn't figure out what the actual relationship was until it was plainly revealed. Some of us felt that it was morbid that this relationship was developing while Mort was on his deathbed but others loved the fact that Mort knew about it and supported it. 
• We loved the author's way of setting up the story up visually. We could very much picture the home and its rooms and its backyard and pool, etc.
• We just plain felt bad for poor ole' Penny. 
• We had mixed opinions about Jen; love her? hate her? feel sorry for her? want to strangle her? 
• This book had an interesting approach in that it was heavy and depressing but also highly entertaining. This was a dysfunctional family in every sense of the word but the jabs and the sarcasm and the insults were laugh-out-loud funny.