Discussion of Gone Girl

I feel I have procrastinated this post way beyond reasonable, so here goes:  If folks feel I missed important details here, please remind me I'll update the post for posterity!

We met July 10th to discuss Gone Girl.

In attendance were:

Dave & Mary
Darryl & Barbara
Jack & Shelia
Susanna
Catherine
Jeremy
Amy
Gayla

Our poem was selected by Barbara, who found two editions in translation of the same poem, with quite different tones.

At this point, I don't remember who finished Gone Girl and who didn't, but I think seven of us finished this one.

This was the easiest read so far for our club, and several folks expressed they were happy to have an easy read.  The three men who finished rather disliked the book, the women enjoyed it more. I think the female members liked having a strong female character to read, and probably didn't mind reading the somewhat bumbling and clueless man.  I said it before, but I personally rather identified with Nick in some respects, and other men indicated similar sentiments.  No women admitted to identifying with Amy, though at least one expressed appreciation for Amy's execution of her revenge plan.

We discussed at some length the relationship between Nick and Amy, and we spent a bit of time talking about what a "good relationship" is.  Some of us shared how much we identified (or didn't) with various characters in the book.  One of us tried lifting an idea from the book that seems romantic on first evaluation, and reported his experience trying to implement it ran very similarly to how it went in the book.

We ran through the list of questions picked up from LitLovers, but nothing new really came out of the questions.

Our club is at a strange point, where we are not well defined in terms of the purpose of the club, and there is a certain tension when selecting what to read next.  The vote approach shortened the discussion around what to read next, but I'm personally not really clear whether that is good or bad.  From votes, we have selected C S Lewis' "Til We Have Faces" for the next read.

We had already selected Guns Germs and Steel, and for various reasons the next meeting is fairly far away from the Gone Girl meeting (about 7 weeks).  That meeting will be August 28th (still 2 weeks remaining as I write this, a month late).