Book Club - Crossing To Safety

We had book club via video chat about a week ago and what a delightful chat we had, which lasted nearly 2 hours.  In those 2 hours, I think we talked about the book for about 15 - 20 minutes.  It was fun to catch up and hear about each other's lives.  Melina's little girl "Is" came to visit us halfway through our chat.  I learned that Is and I share the same affinity for ceramic gnomes.  After I showed her my gnome Jonnifer, she kept saying to Melina, "Mama, she has a gnome."  Too cute.  While Is met all of us last summer, I think it was hard for her to remember.  Out of all of us, she liked talking to Danny the most and told us that "He was a nice boy."  Haha, love it.

Anyway, the book we read for book club was Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. This book revolves around the lives of two couples, Larry & Sally and Sid & Charity.  These two couples meet in Madison, Wisconsin in the 1930's while Larry and Sid are teaching as professors at the University of Wisconsin.  They become fast friends and enjoy great times and hardships together over decades of their enduring friendship.  The book is really about life and relationships, the twists and turns that each of us experience and how different personalities handle it.

I think the three of us agreed that we all liked the book and that Stegner was a great writer.  I may have had higher expectations than I should have, because I heard about this book from another's friend blog and she really talked it up.  I liked it, but I didn't find it life changing.  I found the different relationships and the idea on how different people enter our lives really interesting.  There was one marriage that stood out as a strong example of how I don't want to be, but I liked having that example because it caused me to think about how to avoid this couple's disappointment in their life together.  It also got me thinking how unpredictable life is.  Talena, Melina and I discussed this theme a lot, within our own lives and the lives around us.  As pretty much everyone knows, the three of us have been close friends since our sophomore year in high school.  It is fascinating and at times sad to see where life has led mutual friends from high school and our hometown.  One can never tell what is around the corner.  I feel like Stegner really captured this idea, not in a dramatic way, but in a realistic way.

One thing I didn't like was that the narrator of the book, Larry, came off as arrogant because he was quite proud of himself for being an intellectual and academic.  Also, is that how guys are friends with each other, always sizing themselves up against each other?  That kind of bothered me and he just rubbed me wrong sometimes.  The character, Charity, also rubbed me wrong with her need to always be right and having to be in control.  I guess that made the book even more realistic, because there are people in life who just get under your skin sometimes.  I also freaked out in my head when it talked about the wives getting drunk while pregnant, but remember it was set in the 1930's.  Some of the rants of the author were a little slow for me as well.

Anyway, here are pictures from our book club...

The back of our heads while we chat with Melina.

Melina on  the computer screen.

We like to incorporate treats that have to do with the
book for our book club.  Tea played an integral part in
one of the stories in the book.  Because of this, we
thought herbal tea and biscuits were a fitting snack. 

This is what Talena and I look like when discussing literature.  

Oh, I have to share one more thing that I loved from the book and now daydream about all the time. In the book during a summer break after school was out, both couples stayed at this quaint cabin with Charity's family where there was a cook who prepared every meal, hiking trails, a lake to swim and go canoeing in.  It sounded blissfully amazing.  How does one make that happen with 2 weeks of vacation time each year?  One can dream, right.  I shared this dream with Danny (as I often do) and I found this picture on pinterest today which completes the idea of what this summer escape would be for me.  I emailed it to Danny, who has been married to me long enough to know the best thing to do in this situation is to validate and agree.

Dream summer vacation, Banff Canada.

Ok, I think I'm getting off the subject with all my daydreaming.  Anyway, overall Crossing to Safety was a nice book and definitely got me thinking about certain aspects of life, which is always good.

Jan's Rating: