The Handmaid's Tale

I found this book by Margaret Atwood to be very entertaining.  Mary and another buddy both told me that they put the book down.....but I was not as "turned off" by the religious fanaticism as Mary would be and I like science fiction kinds of books more than my other buddy.....My very favorite part of this book was the end.  Somehow it would have been a bit of a let down to have had any other ending.  If you are planning on reading the book, please quit reading.....don't let this spoil the end for you.  But it fit my life interests so well at the end....there is a meeting at which the speaker is talking about the fact that "society" has found some sort of "diary" that belonged to the main character of the story.....and they are trying to make some sense out of the Gillian era of history with help from the diary.....and they are piecing it together much as we would do now if we were looking at the middle ages and reading what someone had written....

The entire first part of the book could be thought of as either an imaginative interpretation of what they have found....or one can think of what they have found as clues to what we have just read as the handmaiden's actual tale.  But either way I think it is a bit of a comment on how nothing in history lasts.....and that it is impossible to interpret what actually happened....we can only guess.  And exactly what the Handmaid hoped would happen did happen....the terrible regime in which she lived did not last forever.

Joy Luck Club

I read this book by Amy Tan many years ago when I was not much older than the young women in the book.  I loved it then.  When the Book Club decided to read it for October's selection, I almost did not reread it.  But then I decided that I would listen to it on audible.  I think that I loved it even more now that I am the age of the older women in the book.  I didn't get to go to book club after all in the month of October.  I was sorry as I would have liked to hear what other women had to say.  I had a bit of trouble keeping the stories straight and figuring out to which of the characters each story connected.  I thought that it was because I was listening to the book rather than reading it.  But Mitzi said she found the same thing to be true even though she read a printed copy.  The truth was that it didn't make any difference which part of the mosaic one attributed which story to.....it was the interweaving of all of the stories which made the whole so wonderful.