With nearly 50% of the vote, our book club choice for June is Life Moves Pretty Fast: Lessons We Learned from Eighties Movies by Hadley Freeman. Check out the discussion questions, and join the discussion starting June 14th.
As always, I hope that if your vote wasn’t our final choice, that you’ll make the time to read both at some point during Cannonball Read 9 (for those that are curious, the runner up was Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann). I’ll be posting a Discussion Topics post two weeks before our discussion, which is scheduled for June 14 as a reminder to finish up and food for thought. As in Book Clubs past, feel free to visit us here on the group blog for the dedicated post or in our Facebook Cannonball Read Book Chat group where I’ll have even more topics to discuss.
Here’s a synopsis of our choice:
- From Vogue contributor and Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, a personalized guide to eighties movies that describes why they changed movie-making forever—featuring exclusive interviews with the producers, directors, writers and stars of the best cult classics. In Life Moves Pretty Fast, Hadley puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decade’s key players, genres, and tropes. She looks back on a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, where children are always wiser than adults are, where science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with giddy excitement. And, she considers how the changes between movies then and movies today say so much about society’s changing expectations of women, young people, and art—and explains why Pretty in Pink should be put on school syllabuses immediately.
And don’t forget, you can also always look through the Non-fiction category for more suggestions. Find out what books we discussed in the past and watch for info on upcoming titles on our Book Club page.