Queen: the Definitive Biography & Chang & Eng

I finished Queen: the Definitive Biography last week. It was really interesting. I love Queen, so I enjoyed reading about how the band formed and the path their career took. I didn't start listening to them until college, so I missed the time when they were really popular, and I really had no idea how big they were, at least how big this book made them sound. Very exciting! I have been a diligent Queen fan recently - I've seen both the Queen musical, We Will Rock You, and went to see Queen with Paul Rodgers in DC just a few months ago. Both were excellent!

For book club we read Chang & Eng by Darin Strauss. I think 4-5 people finished it, a few more read part of it and 2 people didn't start. I think that's about average. While I like reading all the books, I think it's nice that in this book club, you can go even if you don't finish the book. Or even start it! I really like this group of people and enjoy getting together with them once a month. I thought the book was ok. It was written from Eng's perspective and went back and forth through different periods in their lives. I thought that was an odd, and unnecessary way to write it. I'm probably missing some important parallels that were obvious to everyone else, but I found it distracting. The book left me with more questions about Chang and Eng than I had before I started. I guess that's a good sign since I wasn't so sick of them, I never wanted to hear their names again! We had a good discussion about the book and their miserable lives. Since the book was fiction, based on their lives, I'm not sure which parts were fiction and which were reality. Were their marriages as awful as the book made them out to be? Was Chang a drunk?

Our book for next month is The Sad Truth About Happiness, by Anne Giardini. I voted for One Thousand White Women: the Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus, but was outvoted. Oh well.