2011.02.28 Meeting Notes

Here is your long overdue update from the February meeting.
We had a smaller number than usual at the meeting last month. We all seemed to like Harlan Coben's Caught. Some of us gave it quite a high rating and others were pretty entertained, but didn't think it would win any awards. David, who was least excited to read the book actually liked it too, I guess Harlan won him over. Either that or the plot wasn't as hokey as he'd originally expected.
The book was most notable for it's quantity of twists and turns, which Harlan himself (in an interview) admitted was his favorite thing to do. Most of us liked all the twists, but some got a little lost and/or irritated that there were so many.
It was the general consensus that Ten-a-fly was irritating, not amusing. We hope to never see a character like him again and are all working very hard to get his rap songs out of our heads. 
We had an interesting discussion of high school kids in the real world, discussing the issue of parents providing alcohol to their kids and their kids' friends. We also discussed the whole media set-up of pedophiles and the reporter in the book's quest to nail Dan Mercer. It was interesting that many of the club members didn't care for the reporter in the book and Harlan mentioned in an interview that she was one of the characters he was most proud of creating. Forgiveness was a theme in the book and a lot of us agreed with the reporter in not forgiving the drunk driver who killed her husband.
I want to thank Kim for providing awesome cookies for our monthly snack. Very tasty!
I think there were a couple of lessons we could gleam from Harlan and I've jotted them down as our February lessons to live by:
1. If you lose your job, don't think you're going to sell crap on Ebay to make money. Your spouse is just going to buy it all to try and raise your self-esteem.
2. When a troubled teen calls and asks you to come to her house, DON'T GO - IT'S A TRAP!
3. White, middle-aged, unemployed men from New Jersey should NOT become rappers.
See everyone on March 28th to discuss Jack Reacher in his latest adventure, 61 hours. Monday, 3:30pm......... 339 hours to go.
Kerry