Category Archives: book

Book Club: Extreme Decisions

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The Good: I’m starting a book club! It’s called, creatively enough, Contemporary Fiction Club (CFC to those in the know). At least for now anyhow…

The Bad: I’m floundering in impossible choices. A good book club is a lot of pressure!

What books should my fledgling book club read? My co-founder and I think focusing on contemporary fiction would be fun. But then, I’ve picked up some poor fiction choices lately. The book should obviously be well-written and discussion-worthy. Hopefully it will lure people of all kinds into thinking CFC is the best book club ever. I feel like this is an impossible decision, and important because I want everyone to come back. Any thoughts?

And then there’s the additional worry of how to handle the meetings. Should I have questions? Let people just talk?

All suggestions welcome. Also please note, despite the above pathetic ramblings, I’m actually hosting a lovely brilliant book club full of intelligent and fascinating discussion, so it would be the highlight of your literary life to come to our first meeting–Feb 2!

That Girl With a Pearl Earring

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Jan Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1662

Remember her? I know you know her, if only from that beautifully still 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring starring the beautiful Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson. Tracey Chevalier also wrote a light novel of that name. Why nobody could think up another title, I don’t know.

But as my lovely avidly artsy readers are aware, both movie and book springboard off the gorgeous portrait above, whose subject is as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa despite the touching intimacy with which she is portrayed.

Most people think of her when they think of Jan Vermeer, that moderately successful Dutch provincial whose interior scenes are infused with incredible light. They think of women near windows or reading letters. Within his works exists an intangible beauty that is not rooted in the woman or her pose or the room but in the quality of the painting that makes me assume that Vermeer had a beautiful mind and painted his simple genre scenes with great love.

So imagine my surprise when I found that the Rijksmuseum listed the painting below as a Vermeer. Referred to as The Little Street, this painting from 1658 is the only outdoor scenes by Vermeer. On second thought, it looks exactly like what Vermeer would paint if he painted the outdoors. A quiet little street with women and children happily employed. His version of the everyday is full of peace and light.