The Secret Life of Bees

Members present:  Christy and Gina

Venue: Thelma's Chicken and Waffles

Book Discussion:

Gina and I went through our highlighted quotes to remind ourselves what the book was about, since we read it so long ago. Here were the themes that struck a cord with us:

1. You can love something, even if you're not good at it. Like knitting, for example. Or Karaoke. Hypothetically speaking, that is.  I'm not saying we're bad at these things. 

2. We talked about how people can change for the worse like Lily's dad, and our theory is that it happens when people can't let go of the bad stuff. Especially when they can't forgive. That was one of the quotes in the book. That some people would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. Kind of similar to the theme in "What Alice Forgot:" how much those characters changed through grief, and how they were able to come alive again once they were able to let go of their pain.

3. I am a lot like May in terms of my inability to differentiate my pain from the pain of others. I wrote a blog post about it, in fact. In case you missed it, you can read it here.

4. I saw the movie before I read the book, which I think I prefer. Because the book is always better, so you never think, this book is nothing like the movie! Plus, you already have a picture of what the characters look like if you've seen the movie and don't have to be like, that is not what Lily looked like in my mind!

Noteworthy News:

That's between me and Gina. Although we talked about many of you. And not always in a good way.

Well, I will share Gina's accomplishment of placing 3rd in a bike race in Richmond a few weekends ago, because that's pretty awesome.

And I have a lot of new developments on my blog. I have my own domain, so now the address is normalintraining.com. It has a new look, too. And I finally figured out how to use Twitter. Although I don't look at it much because it's overwhelming.

We talked about "Gone Girl," which is a movie now, but neither of us is dying to see it. But if anyone does, let us know if it's better than the book.

And we ate a lot of fried chicken and waffles. Which was a good call on Gina's part to stay true to the Southern theme. Although I feel kind of sick now.

Next Book:

Gina chose  "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" because I told her I just bought it on Kindle for like, $5 or something. You can also stream it on Netflix, if you want to cheat. I heard the book and the movie are both excellent. And if you don't like it, guess you better show up next time so you have a vote!