What We've Read

Here is the complete list of books we have read, in the order we read them:

1. The Book of Bright Ideas
2. The City of Ember
3. A Long Way Gone
4. Night
5. The Princess Bride
6. The Pleasure of My Company
7. The Thirteenth Tale
8. The Bell Jar
9. The People of Sparks
10. The Reason for God
11. Escape
12. The Taming of the Shrew
13. The Name of This Book is Secret
14. Sarah's Key
15. Twilight
16. Spirit of the Rainforest
17. The Neverending Story
18. The Year of Living Biblically
19. And Then There Were None
20. Same Kind of Different As Me
21. We
22. A Thousand Splendid Suns
23. Enslaved
24. Shadow of the Wind
25. The Nanny Diaries
26. The Year of Fog
27. Agnes Gray
28. The Elegance of the Hedgehog
29. Mr. Lincoln's Wars
30. The Hunger Games Trilogy
31. The Maltese Falcon
32. Little Bee

The Maltese Falcon

Hello! This is Erin, blogging to you about an hour and a half before we will meet to discuss the book that we picked after this one, so I figured it was about time to post my blog entry!

I knew I was going to have a really hard time picking a book to follow The Hunger Games trilogy, so I didn't even try very hard. I picked three book options that I had picked for earlier book clubs, but were not picked. The choices were White Noise, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and The Maltese Falcon. We ended up with The Maltese Falcon, and I was excited to read one of the books that had made it on to several lists as one of the best mysteries of all time.

We got together in late January to discuss the book. I had set up a "Maltese Falcon Malt Shoppe" dinner for the girls, which really had nothing to do with the book other than "Malt," but I thought it would be fun anyway. We discussed different points of the plot, but focused on the novel's main character, Sam Spade. Sam Spade, detective, and womanizer, seemed pretty consistent throughout the book until the very end. We all agreed that his actions in the final scene were very surprising. We all expected something different from him or a bigger twist, like some of the more modern mysteries we have grown accustomed to. I enjoyed the old, film-noir feel (can you say that for a book?) throughout the whole story. However, overall, I think we were a little disappointed.

Our ratings for the book were:
Stacey: 6.25
Camille: 6.5
Allison: 5
Kristin: 7
Erin: 6.5

I'm curious if our ratings would have been any higher if we hadn't just read one of the best book trilogies of all time right before it. Probably not.

Look for our next blog, which will be written by Stacey about Little Bee!