tDate>I have been attending a book club in recent months, even though it makes me feel a bit like a soccer mom who will do anything (including reading books I don’t want to read) to socialize over ideas and good food.
Like some of you, I have a growing stack of books on my bedside table half-read or waiting to be read. I tend to thrive on books that have a book-club date or library deadline, because they must be read or it’s too late.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling spiritual memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, was on my list of books to read for a while, but the upcoming movie adaptation (out August 13) gave me a deadline for completion. (I follow my sister’s rule: Never see the movie before you read the book.) I recently learned that the other editors at Her.meneutics have had it on their to-read lists as well, so we hatched a brilliant idea: Have a book club of your own—on the blog.
Mark your calendars for August 12, when we’ll start discussing the book and ask readers who have read it to join in. For the uninitiated, Eat Pray Love details Gilbert’s travels after a difficult divorce. She spends four months in Italy, where she relaxes and devours delicious food (Eat), searches for spirituality in India for another four months (Pray), and ends in Indonesia, where she finds a new man (Love). The book has received glowing endorsements from Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post, among others. It is 352 pages, but it moves quickly as she writes smoothly and clearly.
While Gilbert’s book is by no means Christian, we think it will start important conversations about marriage and romance, the (perhaps limited) value of “spiritual seeking,” and the pleasure of simple gifts like eating and traveling. “This is a wonderful book, brilliant and personal, rich in spiritual insight, filled with sorrow and a great sense of humor,” “Jesusy” Anne Lamott said in her endorsement. “Elizabeth Gilbert is everything you would love in a tour guide, of magical places she has traveled to both deep inside and across the oceans: she’s wise, jaunty, human, ethereal, hilarious, heartbreaking, and God, does she pay great attention to the things that really matter.”
So get a copy from the library, order it online, download it on your e-reader, do what you need to do to join us with a virtual slice of brie and glass of wine August 12.
