Upstairs at the White House

I almost titled this blog post "Almost as good as being there" since I'm really hoping that zooming in with my old book club this Thursday is going to be a wonderful thing. My very first book club.

I started teaching when I was in grad school earning my teaching certification. I spent another 3 years in school continuing on for a masters degree. I was a single mom with three fairly young kids living at home, and did not have a whole lot of time for pleasure reading. I sat at the lunch table, envious of talk about the district book club. What they were reading, what their discussions were like. I'd never been in a book club  but I really wanted to join one. I wanted to join their book club.

Immediately after graduating, I let the folks at the book club know that I was ready to join them. I was so excited. My first book club! Then I learned that our district education foundation was the sponsor of the book club - and purchased the books for us! Free books and I'd get to discuss them. What could be better.

For the next 7 years, the book club was an important part of my life. When my kids were still little, it was my me time. (And since I was teaching fifth grade, it was my only time with adult conversation outside of faculty meetings and the lunch table at work.) I loved being in a book club and I loved this particular book club. I was sad to say goodbye to them when I moved from New Jersey to Florida with my new husband.

That first year away, I tried to read what they were reading. And faithfully each month I'd send my thoughts about each book to the woman responsible for emailing the group. She'd share my reflections with the group and then would try to relay what the discussion had been like. I'd found a local book club that I belonged to and got busy with my retirement life so eventually keeping up with the New Jersey book club fell off. Over the ten years that I've been down south, I have found myself up north twice on the afternoons when the book club was meeting and got to join them. The summer of 2014, I got together with some of the teachers when they met to select what books they'd read in the coming school year.

In December, I sent a Christmas card to one of my closest friends from my teaching days and was delighted when she wrote me a long letter back. And said, "Hey, the book club is meeting by zoom these days. Why don't you join us?" 

That brings me to Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies by J.B. West with Mary Lynn Kotz. That's the book that the New Jersey book club and I will be discussing two days from now. It's not a book that I ever would have picked up on my own, and I'm not sure that I'm dying to discuss it, but it was a pleasurable read.

West was an assistant usher and eventually the head usher at the White House, a job that is primarily responsible for the running of the Executive Residence part of the White House. West started working during the FDR administration and retired 30 years later, at the beginning of the Nixon administration. It wasn't exactly about the First Ladies, but more about the impact each of the First Ladies had upon the White House. He gives some gossipy anecdotes about each of the families he served as well some dry facts about the running of the White House. I'm not sure how much there will be to discuss in this book (other to perhaps contrast it to what I'd expect life was like for the First Families of recent years. Some stories stuck out in my mind, but others might have found other different bits more interesting.

Many times, I've written here that timing really matters in whether you like a book or you don't like a book. I think that's the case here, too. This book is so different from what I've been reading the past few months and it contrasts so starkly with all the turmoil in Washington at the current moment. It was a good escape for me, one that I'm not sure I would have enjoyed as much at another time.

Best of all, I'll get to reconnect with some of my friends from another part of my life!

Melania and Me

 

I gave Stephanie Winston Wolkoff's memoir tell-all, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady 3 stars on goodreads. It didn't give me much insight into Melania. She is pretty much the shallow person that I thought she might be. But when I read this a story of an uneven friendship that eventually exploded, that's where it held some interest to me.

Unlike Wolkoff, I was in a friendship where I gave much more than I got. Not nearly as extreme or high-profile as this situation. Plus I never felt as used as Wolkoff, nor was I thrown under the bus like Wolkoff. But I gave more than I got. And eventually I was forced to walk away from the friendship. 

Most of the "juicy" bits about Melania had already been shared on TV so I really didn't need to read them here. I also felt my eyes glaze over as Wolkoff went into the finer details of some of the inaugural stuff. I really didn't care then, I don't care now, and I doubt that I will ever care.

If you're curious, it's a pretty quick read. But that's about it.

The President is Missing

As absorbed as I can be by politics, political thrillers don't thrill me. I've read enough James Patterson to know that his style is not my style. But... when I thought The President is Missing was going to be our April community book club title and it was available in the library, I picked it up to read. It's now our May selection, I probably won't be able to make it to the meeting, but I'd started the book so I finished the book.

It's hard for me to review a book in a genre that I don't like because lots of what I think is colored by the fact that I'm already predisposed to not like it. It took me more than half the book to get into the story and then I finished the second half of the book in a couple of days. Because I wanted to be finished. And I wanted to see how this duo of thriller writer and former president wrapped things up.

The novel takes place over a few short days. After a cyber-terror threat to the USA, the president goes underground with the hacker who worked on the virus to avoid the internet - and everything associated with it (is in everything - food supply, power grid, water supply, commerce, life insurance, everything) going down.

There's a lot of political talk, second thinking presidential decisions. There is one flashback to when the president met his wife. That added a bit of personal touch to the novel. I think a little bit more of that was needed. Lots of the action takes place in a communications room where techno-geeks from all over the world try to crack the code of the virus in order to destroy it. A mystery is that there is at least one treasonous party in the president's inner circle. But who is it?

I had a few general problems with the novel.

• There really was no character development. The characters (good guys, bad guys, in between) were introduced but we never really got to know what makes them tick. There's a lot of "tell" but not a whole lot of "show" when it comes to characters. 
• No one really seemed to care that the president was "missing." Was he missing? We knew exactly where he was. And even though the vice president didn't know where he was, she was in communication with him.
• The conclusion of the book reads like a campaign speech.

If I was going to be at the book club discussion, I'd have the following questions:

• When was this book written? Culturally, how current is it supposed to be?
• Is this Clinton's way of rewriting some of his own history?
• Was there a political motivation behind the writing of the book?
• Did readers find it politically motivated, no matter what the intention of the authors was.

I'm much more curious about the authors' purpose, the authors' styles than about discussing the particulars of the novel.

I am hard pressed to say whether or not I'd recommend this, because again, it's just not my type of story.