Larry what exciting news! That will be so nice to be closer to your son and also the grandchildren! I think that's a wonderful thing. Maybe once you all get settled and so forth we could meet for lunch . It's been a long time since I saw you and Pat. I will never forget our first meeting, it was so funny, she and I were both in the ladies room was it at the Senior Net thing in Wilmington?? So long ago!
And I seem to remember dropping something, I believe in the WC so to speak, and I was carrying on about it and there she was. Hahaha. I am sure she thought I was insane. She was right. Hahaha
Mary Page what an interesting reflection on the reaction you may have had from reading Gone Girl. I love that, quite introspective.
It appears they were both sociopaths, it's fascinating to see how people's minds work, and perhaps it is the me generation..... really the way it was written I couldn't put it down.
I agree Stephanie and it's funny because I never have been much of a person to want to see anybody else's house. The Christmas tours, the Garden Tours of peoples houses ....I've never wanted to be in anybody else's house. I don't care how anybody else lives, or how they decorate. But Biltmore really is a spectacular thing and it IS a piece of history, which alone makes it interesting.
The Hearst house and the swimming pool like he had, an indoor swimming pool in which you could swim from room to room was truly beyond anybody's wildest dreams. Kind of like the Biltmore bowling alley inside. And indoor pool of course. if you're going to put something in your house, a real bowling alley and a real indoor swimming pool that you can swim from room to room in I would say that's pretty good stuff. I found the indoor drying racks of Biltmore which pulled out from the wall in huge cabinets to be one of the most spectacular things I've ever seen anywhere, I wish I had some.
I think the most interesting big house I've ever been in is the Remington mansion. I had read about it in an SRA when teaching adults to read. And we were in that state and I wanted to see it. Apparently Mrs. Remington, heir to the Remington fortune, became obsessed with the ghosts of the people who have been killed by the Remington rifle.
She then set about building them, that is the ghosts, rooms her entire life, in expiation, adding on and on and on to the mansion, staircases that went nowhere, it's something else.
It's sad but it's quite interesting.
Sometimes in reading it seems we encounter things which challenge us, and also that call upon us to maybe to enlarge our understanding of the world a little bit. I think The Hot Zone was one of those books. Certainly not a subject I would normally care to read about. But, as everybody kept saying, so well-written! As usual our books DL Pat H here made a super job of the discussion That's the job of a bookclub, isn't it, to enlarge our boundaries. We can decide if we liked the experience or not. But the thing is at least to try. To try to have an open mind going in. Of course there are books nobody wants to read, I just read one. But I'm glad I did. You learn something from every book you read.
I learned a lot from that awful book. It's really quite a stark contrast between the parents's generation and the daughter's, and as such is a real heads up.
