November's pick was Endurance by Alfred Lansing, with Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng on deck for December. It was a great turnout~ thank you to everyone who attended and made the conversation plentiful!
Looking ahead, a suggestion was made, and widely welcomed, that for the next round/year of voting we reserve 4 or 5 of the twelve selected books to dedicated genre's of our choosing. For example, we may choose to nominate and then select a book from the Mystery, Contemporary, Memoir, MN Author, and Crime categories, while leaving the remaining 7 slots vacant for regular open nominations. After a round/year of trying out dedicated categories, we thought we'd reassess to see how we liked it. At that time, we can make any changes or scrap the idea altogether. In the meantime, please give the idea some thought, and be thinking of any requisite categories you'd like to see included (Young Adult was recommended during the meeting!) on the nomination ballot and either bring those suggestions, along with any questions you might have, to next month's meeting, or leave a comment down below! If you're feeling like this suggested idea isn't a good fit, let us know that too!
Without further ado~
In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization. In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.
This book was liked and appreciated by the majority of the group. A small few found it hard to get into and stay invested in, others found it difficult to read about the vast amounts of cold, and wet, and wind, and suffering. It was said that all that cold, and wind, and wet seemed to become a character of it's own midway through the book, much like an earlier book club read, Into Thin Air, by John Krakauer. Unanimously, Ernest Shackleton was decided to be a tremendously admirable leader, even in and especially throughout, the most challenging times of the almost 2 year voyage. We tried to speculate about why there was so much competition to become one of the members of the crew, and why this trip was so important in the first place. Was it a lifelong aspiration of Shackleton's? Something each of them need to do to prove something? A genuine sense of adventure or curiosity? A simple desire to be the first ever to do it? Notoriety?
There were several comments about how incredible it was that not only everyone survived the expedition, but that they did so with very little supplies, training, and gear, and yet without much argument, complaint, and/or strife among the entire crew. It's interesting sometimes how if books such as these weren't undoubtedly nonfiction, based largely on actual journals, letters, and interviews with the original individuals themselves (and we really like it when they are based on these things), no one would believe the tale. "The truth is stranger than fiction."
At the end of every book club
discussion we ask three questions and track the average answers:
Would we
recommend this to another book club for discussion?
"YES"
Would we
recommend this to a friend to read?
"YES"
Rate the
book 1-4 stars with 1 being the lowest rating:
3.5 stars
