GCBC - Summer Reading Roundup

As I've mentioned a few times previously on this blog, my friend Sarah and I have a book club that consists of just the two of us.  We call it GCBC, short for Grand Central Book Club, since ideally we meet in person to discuss the books, which we usually do over lunch at Grand Central Terminal.  We used to just pick a book to read together only when we planned to meet, but earlier this year we were discussing books we both wanted to read, and since we're both slightly crazy obsessive types, we compiled a list of books we both wanted to read and started aligning our reading so that we were reading more and more books at roughly the same time, as long as both of us either owned the book or could get it from the library!

So, from mid-June to the beginning of the September, we read a whopping 10 books together!  And unfortunately, various factors conspired against us so we were unable to get together for lunch to discuss.  So, we decided to do just a quick summary of our thoughts on each book, both to share with each other and for the edification of readers of this blog as well!

Virtual Book Club: The Female Persuasion and The Power

Today, I bring you a virtual book club discussion with Jennie Rothman, who was brave enough to volunteer to discuss books with me for your consumption!  I met Jennie MANY years ago when I was a summer associate and then an associate at Hughes Hubbard and Reed, and we later reconnected on Facebook and Goodreads, and she is definitely a trusted reader friend.  We both separately read the book The Power by Naomi Alderman for our respective book clubs this year, and then Jennie read The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer and recommended it to me, and suggested that discussing them together for the blog could be interesting since, although they are very different books, they both deal with feminist themes.

Our discussion took place over e-mail, a lightly edited version of which is below.  Enjoy!

GCBC: Red Sparrow, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and the Assistants

My friend Sarah and I have a book club composed of just the two of us, which we call GCBC, short for Grand Central Book Club.  Since for various reasons we have had to reschedule our last few lunches and therefore were unable to discuss our books at the actual Grand Central in NYC, we bring to you once again our conversation on the books we have been reading, conducted by e-mail and then edited into this post!

Today, we're discussing 3 books we've read over the past few months:  (1) "Red Sparrow," by Jason Matthews, a spy thriller about a young male CIA agent and a young female Russian agent who end up being assigned to spy on/recruit each other; (2) "Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda" by Becky Albertalli, a young adult novel about a gay teenage boy who is not yet out to his friends or family, only to an anonymous fellow high school student on the internet whose identity he does not know; and (3) "The Assistants" by Camille Perri,which is kind of a chick lit/satirical novel about the assistant to the CEO of a media empire, who somewhat accidentally ends up in a Robin Hood-esque expense account embezzlement scheme.

GCBC - "The Shadow Sister" and "Cocoa Beach"

A little later in this post, you will hear a discussion of the books "The Shadow Sister" by Lucinda Riley and "Cocoa Beach" by Beatriz Williams.  But first, I need to introduce you to Sarah Binder and our book club (which is just the two of us!), which we call "GCBC."

Sarah and I met many years ago at the law firm where we both worked.  Over time, we became close friends and we discovered our shared love of books.  (And those things were surely related, as our shared obsessive love of books definitely bonds us!)  So, back in 2012, we decided to start a book club at work, inviting a variety of our other friends at the office to join us.  But with everyone working hard, often people either didn't have time to meet to discuss the book, or didn't even get around to reading it, so it was often just the two of us and maybe one or two others.  Eventually, we started picking books for just the two of us, which was convenient when we both stopped working there!  Since Sarah lives in the city and I live in Westchester, we started meeting for lunch at Grand Central, and would generally pick a book to discuss when we were getting together, and finally gave our book club a name - Grand Central Book Club, or GCBC for short.  Sometimes we go months without reading anything together, sometimes we read a bunch of books in a very short period of time.  If we pick a book and don't end up meeting in person, we often end up discussing the book over e-mail.

This past month, we read two historical novels, "The Shadow Sister" and "Cocoa Beach," and we had a great back and forth about them over e-mail, which seemed like the perfect basis for a blog!  So without further ado, I present to you our conversation!