Midnight Book Club: Gone Girl

It should come as no surprise that I'm in a book club.  I have a small book addiction. I started my book club on Meet Up back on Feb 19, 2010- almost three years ago!  The Hubs and I had moved to a new town about 6 months prior and other than family, I was lonely.  I had started my book blog, and decided that I would join a book club!  I found out about Meet Up, and realized that I just needed to start my own book club. It's been great, and I've really made a wonderful group of friends through it, but because it costs money to run a group (but not to be a member of a group) we've decided to just switch to Goodreads and continue meeting once a month (twice now that we're adding a dinner and movie get together).  Why continue paying to use a public forum when we already have an awesome book club?  

This will be a monthly feature in which I discuss my book club selections, and since it'll be posted after we meet, there will be spoilers!  DO NOT read further unless you want to be spoiled on plot.  

Our book for January was Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Group Take:  Out of 7 of us, we all agreed that the book was total FUBAR!  In fact, if our book club had a word for the book, it would start with F and end with K.  No points if you guessed ForK.  Then ending had most of us upset, and I may have the lone dissenter.  Sandra brought a print out of Gillian Flynn's explanation of the ending- the author likes ambiguous endings. I also read the same interview, and Flynn knows exactly where Amy and Nick are 5, 10 and 15 years down the road, so I'm hoping for a sequel a decade down the line!  We all liked the book, even if we hated both the characters (Nick was weak and an idiot, and Amy was a crazy bitch) and weren't thrilled with the ending.  Most of the gals were quite happy that Amy got duped by rednecks in the Ozarks- I personally hope that Amy tracks them down someday because if anyone knows how to serve a cold dish of revenge it is Amazing Amy.  Lots of jokes flew since one of our members is named Amy, and this made for one of our best book club discussions ever!  The biggest problem we all had was how easy Amy set Desi up, considering he actually wasn't spending all his time with her and we felt that could be weakness in her armor.  All seven of us read the book, which is a minor miracle, and we were all eager to discuss it.  Amy, crazy as she may have been, was impressive, as was Nick's monumental idiocy in all his screw ups!

My Take: This was a re-read for me, and it was even better the second time around!  The first time I read it, I kind of suspected the major twist, but I also was convinced that Nick's dad might have accidentally killed Amy, so it was fun to bring up various theories we'd all had at one point.  I listened to the audio, as had a few others, and we all agreed that it's a great audio listen- well recommended.  The scope of the twists and turns of this book continues to amaze me and I really, really need to make time for Flynn's other books.  I also hope that her next book lives up to some of Gone Girl's fame, which may be hard.  But I don't need it to have a 'gotcha' moment like GG, so I'm not as hard to please as I suspect some readers may be (you know, the ones who only buy books on the top ten list and like their authors to crank out the same story with new character names every few months).  

Verdict:  Gone Girl is the perfect book for book clubs, and it was likened to another favorite read of ours, Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.  That's another jaw dropper (actually, it's a bigger jaw dropper) and a book that we discussed just as much as Gone Girl.  

Up next in February: The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling!

Am I the only one who thinks the cover looks like some 1970's porn movie cover?

Top Spot: September

I love a good meme, and the Skype Sisters are hosting Top Spot each month.  Simply pick your favorite book of the month and share the reasons why. 

Picking just one book is always hard.  But as much as I loved A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, the book that I most want to gush about is Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.

According to meme rules I can't give away any spoilers, so I'll just say that Fingersmith literally made my jaw hit the floor a few times... okay, more than a few times.  I don't know much about Sarah Waters, but her mind must be a dark, twisty, clever thing.  And I love her for that!  Fingersmith is often compared to Charles Dickens' books, but as my book club member Randy said, it's like "Dickens on acid".  It's like Dickens gave a peek to London's dark underbelly, but Waters drags you inside.

Here's the thing, I didn't particularly love the characters.  At first Sue's too harsh and Maude's too weak- in fact one of my favorite quotes is about her:

She was like milk- too pale, too pure, too simple. She was made to be spoiled.

And for a first time, it didn't matter that I didn't particularly love the characters, they were still intriguing, and I was so caught up in the plot that I honestly didn't realize I didn't have much love for the characters in it.
But now that it's been a few weeks, I guess maybe I do love the characters, despite their many, oh so many, flaws, because I miss them.

Fingersmith starts out a simple con game, you think you know the players and their moves, but nothing about Fingersmith is simple, except maybe Dainty.  The book is chock full of mystery, danger, madness, murder, and love- both twisted love and enduring love.  Fingersmith is often found in many parts of a library or bookstore- Historical Fiction, GLBT, Mystery, Romance, etc.  And it fits in all of these categories to degrees, but for me it transcends them all and I don't know if it really belongs in any other category than Awesome, Mind Blowing Reads. 

Fingersmith made for an amazing book club discussion too, one where we actually discussed the book itself for hours instead of just a few minutes before bringing up Halloween or Harry Potter (because inevitably, all things lead back to the Chosen One).   There was much talk of plot twists and motives and a lot of "did you notice this?" or "yes, but did you read the part where this happened?".  Read this book and you won't be sorry!

So what's your September Top Spot?

Thanks to Reading Angel for introducing me to this meme!