I have two book circle discussions coming up tomorrow and I thought I’d better do a small reflection on my own before I head to the discussions.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville has raised a lot of interesting discussions throughout our reading. On my own, I probably wouldn’t have finished it – not because I didn’t like it but because I found it quite boring and it was long. It did have a poetic language and I appreciated others reading quotes from it, I just didn’t pick out those by myself. It did have some highlights that I appreciated more than others but mostly I zoned out a bit while reading. We were all a bit pleasantly surprised that Herman Melville seemed to be pretty progressive in some areas, that was a fun discovery. Our prejudice on old authors was challenged to the better. It was an okay read.

The Names by Florence Knapp was a book I almost gave up on, I would have if we hadn’t moved our discussion one and a half week forward in time. This is one of those books that I have a hard time rate because I disliked reading it so much but I think it perhaps was well written and therefore deserves a higher rating. I have a hard time reading about domestic violence so I felt really bad throughout the whole book always expecting the worst to happen. It will be interesting to have our book discussion about this book to see what the others felt about this book. I perhaps felt a bit unsatisfied by the ending and am perhaps thinking that I could indeed have ended the book when I almost did? It’s an important topic and I though that perhaps the author would have a comment about it in the afterword as well.

Have you been reading anything for a book circle/book club lately? Did you enjoy the reads?