April 2014: The Moon Is Down (Steinbeck)

Post date: Apr 24, 2014 8:12:9 PM

A group of 17 book club members (some of whom had not been seen at a meeting in years!) came together at Sherrill's on Wednesday, April 23 to celebrate 20 years of EBSC book club meetings and discuss John Steinbeck's The Moon Is Down.

We started off with a group shot around the cake I made to mark the occasion (a few more people came in after this):

We then went around the circle for the usual introductions, each adding a comment about when she joined book club and/or what book she enjoyed most. Some favorites mentioned: Ghost Map, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, The Tiger's Wife, Cutting for Stone, and Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (this by me, not because of the book really, but because Catherine knocked on the door with the "cop knock" and joined us in full uniform).

Browsing the list of books we've read, many were surprised to see how long ago they had joined. Jane and I were there at the inaugural meeting on March 30, 1994, for which we read Anna Quindlan's Living Out Loud. Betsey and Maggie joined soon thereafter. Kathy O was certainly at one of the first few meetings, because our book for June was Paul Bowles', The Sheltering Sky which I know she recommended. Back when we started the book club, email use was not as widespread, so the hostess for the month had to send out letters with the date, book and directions. So much easier nowadays!

We did eventually discuss the book, although truth be told, we did not spend too much time on it, and at some point broke up into groups and spent some time catching up and chatting.

There was some discussion of its form--more of a play than a novel, really--and the controversy it engendered at publication. Kathryn was not particularly taken with it, feeling in lacked depth of character compared to other Steinbeck. We talked briefly of how it functioned as propaganda (according to Wikipedia, a French language translation of the book was published illegally in Nazi-occupied France by Les Éditions de Minuit, a French Resistance publishing house. Furthermore, numerous other editions were also secretly published across all of occupied Europe, including Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch and Italian versions; it was the best known work of U.S. literature in the Soviet Union during the war.). It also evidently inspired Winston Churchill who encouraged the British propaganda office to put together a program to distribute easy-to-use sabotage materials to the populace of occupied Europe based on the ideas in the book. It did not come to much in the end, but it is an interesting tale. Read more about it here.

For more on the controversy it engendered when it was published in 1942, see this interesting link.

Thanks to all who have made this book club such a great experience for so many people over the years.