June 28 - 'The Atomic Weight of Love'

Eight of us gathered for our June meeting, and a terrific meeting it was. Food--are you kidding? We were at Rebecca's! She had a scrumptious curried chicken salad and several different types of puff pastry with savory toppings, along with finger veggies for munching (and I may have missed something!) Lisa made yummy cheese sticks for an appetizer, and Heather concocted a seafood dip shaped like an apple. Karen brought "atomic" tabbouleh, and I brought an arugula salad and spicy popcorn. We had two wonderful seasonal desserts: Susan's multi-fruit parfait (Susan, I'm sorry, I know it had a name and you were talking about a chef...) and Michelle's strawberries and angel food cake. Darla added to the fun by bringing not food, but summer-vacation gifts for us all: bubbles and decks of cards.

We had quite the discussion of the book, Elizabeth J. Church's The Atomic Weight of Love, with its protagonist a brilliant woman who came of age in the late 1930's-early 1940's and gave up graduate school because her physicist husband chose to work at Los Alamos. We reacted from our vantage point post-women's movement, and talked about people we knew and what influenced them. We were united, I think, in not liking the way the affair between the middle-aged woman and the young Vietnam vet was written. One of the longest discussions we have ever had, methinks.

NEXT MEETING
Where: Darla's, at the pool!
When: TBA
What: LaRose by Louise Erdrich

We chose the book from the IndieNext Summer 2017 Books for Reading Groups circular. Here are the books that were runners up (3 or more votes):

News of the World (4 votes)
Rabbit Cake (4 votes)
The Soul of an Octopus (3 votes)
Dark Matter (3 votes)
All the Birds in the Sky (3 votes)