Hi, my name is cb and I am a reader!

Okay, I am for the first time checking into The Finer Things Book Club though I have been a member according to my profile since March 2007 so I have had an awful lot of time to think about my first posting on a book we are reading together...except that I never got past about page 4 of our first selection, Atonement, and not due to it not being engaging from the opening lines but more because the obsession with things political has consumed my reading of late including a must-read book that I highly recommend to all, John Dean's Broken Government, as well as Hillary Clinton's Living History (that is not a political pitch for votes but just an explanation of the books I have been reading that have distracted me from Atonement) and Naomi Klein's the Shock Doctrine...but I am still circling around in chapter 2 of that book, I think it is going to have to wait.  SO I am most definitely ready for relief and a novel sounds just perfect...

So I think Erin has made a particularly impassioned and strong case for Virginia Woolf...especially your description of Mrs. Dalloway including "a shell shocked veteran of WWI whose presence haunts the novel" that has absolutely reignited by my desire to read that book. I am also a big admirer of Virginia Woolf based solely on To The Lighthouse which I read in college and was mesmerized by, and recently, had purchased Mrs. Dalloway and was admittedly unable to get past the first chapter, I just couldn't and Erin has given me new hope to persevere. And Lindsay says she has not yet read a single Virginia Woolf novel and has wanted to so that obviously must be remedied.  So I say we go for Virginia Woolf and I would go with To the Lighthouse because I think it is a masterpiece and is engaging from the opening lines and would be the best pick if you had the chance to only read one Woolf book I would hate it if someone had never read To the Lighthouse.  

I also like to suggest Bella Abzug because Laura gave this to me as a gift this Christmas and I am planning to read that next (upon finishing Living History) and I can't wait to read it and continue my current obsession with strong, determined women of conviction and action...but I also think To the Lighthouse is a book I can read for our club and at the same time start my read of Bella....So I am sticking with my pick for To The Lighthouse.  And, I think my feminist obsession right now could be well met by Erica's book suggestion so I could go with that too and something humorous could be just what we need right now to balance all the serious activity of electing our next President!!!!  

Here is a preview that aptly combines in one paragraph my current reading with future reading, it is the last paragraph of Bella, Hillary Clinton speaking of Bella:

"As I travel around the world. . . I am always meeting women who introduce themselves by saying, 'I'm the Bella Abzug of Russia,' or 'I'm the Bella Abzug of Kazakhstan,' or 'I'm the Bella Abzug of Uganda.' Now what these women are really saying, whether or not they wear the hat of an advocate like Bella, is that they, too, are pioneers, that they are willing to take on the establishment and the institutions of their society on behalf of the rights of women, but not just that, on behalf of what families need, on behalf of peace, on behalf of civil society, all the many and varied causes that Bella stood for throughout her long and active life. . . She liked to say, 'First they gave us the year of the woman, then they gave us the decade of the woman.  Sooner or later, they'll have to give us the whole thing.'  She never stopped fighting for 'the whole thing.'  So when women around the world say to me, 'I am the Bella Abzug' from somewhere, I know what they really mean is that they'll never give up."