Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion

I began this book with an admittedly bad attitude. It’s our latest book club pick, and it’s not one I’d ever have ever chosen on my own. But, I told myself, discovering books you’d never pick on your own is one of the great joys of being in a book club. After all, I’m not sure I’d have read excellent novels like The Voyage of the Narwhal without a book club’s push. So, I tried to put my cynicism aside (fairly impossible, I found) and went into this with the best attitude I could muster.

Modern Love is a collection of essays that have appeared in the New York Times style section. My fear going in was that it would be 350 pages of sappy, how-we-fell-in-love stories. I’m happy to report that it’s not; I doubt I’d have finished it if that were all it offered. The compilation is organized around various stages of love (seeking it, having children, break-ups, etc.) and focuses mostly, though not exclusively, on romantic love. The structure forms a tidy organization, but I found myself skipping around so as to avoid the tedium of reading too many similarly themed pieces in a row. There are gems in this book, and it was nice to read Ayelet Waldman’s much ballyhooed piece, “Truly, Madly, Guiltily,” in which she admits that she loves her husband (Michael Chabon) more than their four children. The essay caused quite a stir when it originally appeared in the Times, and I hadn’t read it before. I’m late to the party, but it’s still nice to know what everyone was on about.

I didn’t like this book enough to really recommend it, but the essays are short and mostly good. It would make a good read for someone who knows her reading time will be short and/or often interrupted.

I’ll wait and see how the group’s discussion goes in a couple weeks, but I’m not anticipating a rousing conversation. I just don’t see how we could talk about any collection of essays with great fervor. We’ll constantly be reminding each other which essay it is we’re talking about. We won’t be able to discuss the author’s choices about language use, pacing, etc., because there are fifty authors here. That said, I’ll still try to put my cynicism aside. The group might surprise me with a great conversation, and a good discussion can help me really appreciate a book, even if it can’t make me like it.