“Door Into Summer” Recap
April 18, 2012 in recap
Look at me! Posting a recap a mere 5 days after book club. I WIN! I win nothing but I’m still impressed with myself. Maybe I’ll actually remember something from the event…
Let’s see, we started off the evening with our traditional catch-up-on-everyday-things over the appetizer, provided by Sarah (dip with veggies and Baked Lays). The everyday things in question include Easter break, preparation for Des’s defense presentation (tomorrow!), Sarah’s workload and wedding prep, and my broken AC and (potential) new car hunt. We continued meaningless (but very important!) chatter over dinner: hot dogs with diner’s choice of toppings including Cincinnati chili, onions, cheese, pickles, hot sause, ketchup, mustard, etc. all on a very over-toasted bun. Would have been nice to have a salad with dinner but alas, Sarah left a perfectly good one on her counter and I am apparently incapable of thinking ahead.
We finished up with Des’s desert, homemade baklava. You may note, fair reader, that I have moved into a new paragraph and there is a reason. It’s because I need to give some serious time and space to the discussion of Des’s baklava which was – without question – the best baklava I have ever eaten. I’m not usually a huge baklava fan. I mean, I like it, but it hasn’t generally been something I’d knock people over to get to. This, I would knock people over for. And potentially kick them while they’re down to give me time to snag a second piece. I think Sarah liked it too; she only left me with three lousy pieces and rumor has it she ate all of hers the next day.
We then moved into the intelectual portion of the evening (stop laughing! We’re “intellectual”!). We began with the book, which is a switch. We had some interesting discussion in light of the similarities to last month’s book, “The Time Traveller’s Wife.” These similarities included time travel (duh) and the icky factor with the older men and younger women (aka, children) relationships in both. What is wrong with these authors? Pedophilia warning! We all agreed that this was more egregious in “Door into Summer”, perhaps because the book was older and perhaps because we also agreed that the characters were less developed in “Door” versus “The Time Traveller’s Wife.” We also noted that “Door” was first released as a series of stories published over some months in a sci-fi journal. In 1956. Again, old book. In general we agreed we liked the book – it was interesting to see the past from the perspective of the distant past, and the book was a pretty easy read. Plus there was an awesome cat! But we did agree it could have been more fleshed-out and less creepy.
Our CD for this month was a change and one that apparently worked pretty well. We decided that instead of each making our own CD we would all submit 5 of our own songs in the category in question. The category this month was “instrumental” – so no singing, unless it was just voices and nonsense words, which was allowed (yeah, yeah I cheated a little). We ended up with a very eclectic pile of music if I do say so myself. A little Broadway action (Des), some country (Sarah), some soundtracks (Jen) but all in all a nice CD.
We then proceeded to our current events discussion. We talked briefly about the worker situation at the Apple plants in China, since there’s been several stories on this on NPR over the past few months. I think I came across as a cold-hearted bitch but to my friend’s credit they didn’t come right out and say “Damn, Jen! You’re a cold-hearted bitch!” so that was nice. We talked about the woman who put her young (7, I think) daughter on a very strict diet and berated her mercilessly both privately and publicly until she lost 16lbs. Horrible. We agreed that you can’t take a child away from her mother for that (in contrast to the overweight child who was taken from his home after being found to be excessively overweight) but we also agreed that this little girl will probably never have a good relationship with food in her lifetime- sad situation.
We reviewed a list of the ONLY times screaming is permitted (someone needs to distribute that info to the nation’s sixth graders and anyone in line for Bieber tickets) and that lead to some very funny videos about dumb white bitches at clubs and things we chicks do while driving. We got all excited that Philip Rivers was coming to do the commencement speech (almost a scream-worthy event!) and then all bummed because apparently he’s a Rick Santorum supporter (and you almost screamed over that man!). And we chatted about the moments in our academic lives when we realized the level of work (or in some cases, the type of work) we did in high school wasn’t going to cut it for college life.
We wrapped up around 10pm which is a little early for us but we still managed to take up 3.5 hours of our lives. I never understand how we do that – it doesn’t feel nearly that long! I guess that’s what happens when you’re talking about cool stuff with cool people. 🙂
And then we all went home and ate baklava. The End.
