Dang Book Club

Went to book club last night, had several drinks in celebration of my first club meeting in over a year where I could both a) drink and b) stay later than 9:45. (Whoo, pregnancy/nursing!)

The book was Momzillas. I don't remember the author's name, because I only got about forty pages into the book before deciding I don't have enough spare time to be reading a book I actively hate. The writing wasn't bad, though a little heavy on unexplained and unnecessary flashbacks (at least in the 40 pages I read). There were glimmers of real humor, here and there, and she kept throwing in references to a surprisingly wonderful list of movies. But I couldn't get past the Mom-Competition thing. Which was the whole point of the book, I know, but... Seriously, I have enough issues with worrying about whether people are judging me and my parenting as it is without having to put up with even a fictional set of judges. (I do like "momzilla" as a nickname for these people, though.)

Also, since I skipped ahead and read the ending when I decided that I wasn't going to bother with the middle of the book -- the ending was trite, insipid, and too "perfect" for believability. (Spoiler warning... Skip to the next paragraph if you actually think you might read this.) Okay, I can kind of buy the best friend suddenly winding up with the husband's best friend because that kind of thing does sometimes happen in real life. But the gargoyle mother-in-law suddenly becoming warm and caring just because the husband finally stood up to her? HA. HA. HA. Yeah, maybe she finally shut her mouth -- but actually changing her attitude? No way. I say this in all honesty with the perspective of someone who still feels kind of inadequate in the MiL's eyes, despite an honest, unforced increase in warmth from her -- I can't imagine an ultimatum actually changing her opinions, and I can't imagine her opinions not making themselves known, subtly, even if she's technically toeing the line.

Also, the whole person-by-person epilogue blurby thing... that's a device for movies that don't have time to actually tie off all the threads properly. One real epilogue chapter in the book could have easily gotten across all those tie-offs without being nearly so gimmicky. Ug.

Anyway, that's my quickie review. The book club was divided about evenly between "loved it" and "hated it" -- and sometimes that leads to interesting discussions of the book, but this time, the book being so fluffy, we mostly just talked about the real momzillas in our lives and segued off into stories about the kids and such, as usual.

But while we were there, Kris and Tammy talked up Facebook and kind of pushed the rest of us to join, so... *sigh* I did. I'd managed to avoid social networking sites up until now, but I suppose it was inevitable, eventually. More shocking yet -- it's not blocked from my office. I have to assume some higher-ups are using it as a networking tool, because I can't imagine a major site like that actually escaped the notice of the content-blocker gargoyles. You know, 'cause I really needed another thing to eat up my time.

Especially since my boss decided it was time for me to dive into proposal management, so in the grand spirit of "throw the baby in the pool and see if she floats," he's given me two proposals to coordinate, both of which are on tight schedules. (Even tighter than most proposals, in fact. Which is really saying something.)

Whee...