Quarantine Book Club | Edition VII

Seven months ago, I started a solitary book club. I called it, perhaps a bit cheekily at the time, the Quarantine Book Club. I was new to living through a global pandemic, back then. And I still thought I could realistically laugh it off because better days were in the near future.

My March self was a well-intentioned but naive person. I know now that the Quarantine Book Club will be meeting every month for the forseeable future. I place my online book orders accordingly. And so, welcome, friends, to the seventh edition of the Quarantine Book Club. If this is your first time, it’s nice to meet you. For longtime members, I’m glad to have you back again – but if you need me, I’ll be reading, because I’ve already watched all of Netflix.

Like most months, I haven’t loved everything on my reading list  – but I’ve nearly made it through the entire Jane Austen catalogue! What I don’t love, someone else might. That’s part of the fun of a book club. If you’ve read any of the six books below, I’d love to hear your thoughts about them in the Comments!

(And if you’re curious about what else I’ve read, you can look back on Quarantine Book Club | Edition I, Quarantine Book Club | Edition II, Quarantine Book Club | Edition III, Quarantine Book Club | Edition IV, Quarantine Book Club | Edition V and Quarantine Book Club | Edition VI. You can also see my whole list on Good Reads.)

Izzy’s War – Isla Dewar
I don’t know how a book about female pilots in the Second World War could possibly be devoid of action, but this one was. The author started with a premise that I expected to be a page turner. But the novel turned out to be a dull, flimsy story that vaguely touched on elements of female friendship. (Mostly, the focus was on the men the women met, and how those men altered their lives. Sigh.) If this book crosses your path, give it a miss.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek
This isn’t a book I would ever choose on my own. But I’m a member of a book club at wor. And since I work in business, all the books we read are business-focussed. That means, for the most part, they’re pretty dry. This one was, too, if I’m honest. With that said, the concept at the root of it is an interesting one that is likely to get you thinking about how you approach all kinds of different things, particularly if you have a personal brand. Bonus: it’s a quick read!

The Gabriel Hounds – Mary Stewart
Mary Stewart was an exceptional writer. I always appreciate her literary turns of phrase when I read her books. But the stories are dated now, and the defined gender roles tiresome. (I don’t care what historical context they were written in, I don’t want to read more books wherein perfectly capable women sit around waiting for me to save them.) While The Gabriel Hounds proved more exciting than Wildfire at Midnight, it’s still not a book I’d ever choose to read if others might be available instead.

Vanity Fair – William Thackery
My mom won a school prize in ninth grade and was awarded a set of classic books, including Vanity Fair. That set sat on my parents’ book shelf all my life, the bent orange spines of the three Penguin books a familiar sight that greeted me whenever I passed through the dining room. I never so much as pulled one out until this year, when I found myself desperate for something new to read. Vanity Fair isn’t new, in the traditional sense. But it was new to me. And it surprised me. For such a long book, especially one without a traditional plot or protagonist, it moved surprisingly quickly.

That I sympathised with the female heroine, Becky Sharp, whom Thackery criticizes harshly for refusing to stay in the place that birth allotted her (but which her intelligence and skill made unbearable) will surprise no one. Thackery’s treatment of smart women clearly demonstrates just how much he (rightly) feared them. Vanity Fair, and its author, belong to the lengthy list of books by men who hate women (also sometimes called classic English literature.) I enjoyed reading it, but that enjoyment left me feeling conflicted.

Persuasion – Jane Austen
The shortest, and last, of Jane Austen’s six novels is officially my second favourite. (Pride and Prejudice will always be number one.) The plot is the same as in all the others: girl falls in love with boy, something gets in the way and then, eventually, they live happily ever after. But what gets in the way, in Persuasion, is what we now know as toxic masculinity. Anne Elliot’s love interest feels so entitled to her agreement to his proposal, and thus so utterly betrayed when she refuses him at the behest of her relatives, that he spends eight years swearing he will marry anyone but her. Since this is a Jane Austen novel, so I won’t be spoiling the end by saying he eventually comes to his senses. (In less than three hundred pages!)

What I truly loved about this book was the fact that Austen used it to take on such a complex concept in such a simple, subtle way. And she did it two hundred years before we’d recognised it as a concept and given it a name! She truly allows the characters actions to demonstrate who they are. And what they demonstrate proves to be incredibly telling.

Middlemarch – George Eliot
I’m starting to think classic novels are like historic churches: if you visit too many, too quickly, they all start to look the same. Middlemarch is long. Some characters more sympathetic than others. I finished it mostly just to confirm that it would end the way I knew it would by chapter five (of eighty-six.) It did. I can now say I’ve read it. If I’d read less classics this year, I might have enjoyed it more. But mostly, I felt it was long and, while well-written, not exactly exceptional.