Since FFJ was busy giving birth, we decided to take a month off from reading a new book for Bookclub Bitches and instead revisit all our old podcasts and talk about if we had changed our mind on any of the books we’ve read thus far.

I didn’t. Of course.

However one book that I have changed my mind on is Dean Bakopoulos’ books Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon. I read this book back in 2005 and I didn’t like it at all. But since then I think about this book all the time. There is a penultimate scene in this book involving all the men of the neighborhood coming together in this mystical and inexplicable way. Three years, and I still think of it. That’s got to say something about this book, doesn’t it?

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For the April edition of Bookclub Bitches, FFJ and I read I am the Messenger by Markus Zuzak. This is one of those books that I was pretty much enjoying in a kind of mindless way until the very end where it pissed me off so much that it made me totally pick apart everything that came before. I am the Messenger is about Ed Kennedy a sort of ne’er do well 19-year-old cab driver somewhere in Australia who inadvertently foils a bank robbery and becomes a local celebrity for about seven minutes. Right about that time Ed gets an ace of diamonds in the mail with three addresses and times scrawled on it. Ed’s job is to figure out what the hell is going on and what the card means. Once he gets through all the diamonds, he gets an ace of spades, then clubs, then hearts, get it? Anyway, the big mystery is who is behind these cards. It’s what draws you through a novel which has a tendency to be a bit sentimental and altogether too sacharine.

Sadly you never really get to know what’s behind Ed’s mystery because the ending totally fucks over the reader in a way that is unforgivable. It’s just bad form to throw the entire believability of your story and get all meta on the last page. It’s shitty and will piss people off. You can imagine how the podcast goes.

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For the March edition of Bookclub Bitches FFJ and I read Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. We actually read both Persepolis and Persepolis 2. I don’t see how one could read the first one and not want to read the second one immediately.

To say that I loved this graphic memoir is like damning it with faint praise. Mere words cannot convey how very much I enjoyed reading Satrapi’s memoir. I loved it so much that the day I finished reading it, I packed it up and loaned it to Sister #2 so she could read it right away. It’s really that good. It’s one of those books that I think every 30something woman should read. Today.

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For February, FFJ and I read, or rather attempted to read C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. It sucked. It sucked hard and it sucked long. It was really, very quite bad. But I suppose you’ll find that out of if you listen to the podcast. For March we promise to read something good.

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For 2008 FFJ and I have resolved to update Bookclub Bitches every single month. This will, of course, prove taxing considering we’ve only done 7 episodes since we started the podcast erm, a year and a half ago.

To kick off this year we read Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff Christ’s Childhood Pal. As I’ve hinted at before, I didn’t dig on the book. At all. So, if you’re easily offended or kinda pious, I’d skip this episode. It’s a little on the offensive side.

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