Our November book club meeting with feature Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by by Gail Honeyman and set in Glasgow, Scotland. Note: We'll be meeting later this time, from 6-8 pm. Hopefully that gives more people the opportunity to come by after work.
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.
But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.
Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes.
As always, if you don't have a chance to finish or read the book, come anyway for good food, drink, and conversation.
We had suggestions for the short story collection, Dangerous Women, eds. George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois. I hesitated to choose it because the book is over 700 pages long. One can, of course, just read a few stories rather than all of it. If you'd like to see Dangerous Women as the book for a future meeting, leave a note below. Or if you think it's just too long, say that too.
