Book club snob

I have belonged to book clubs off and on for several years and finally found one that fits me. I’ll have to admit it is all women which is quite the change from some of the testosterone book clubs I’ve been in. Book clubs are much like any other group meeting and I’ll be sexist and say it men tend to dominate more than women.
Even in our nice “little ladies who sew “book club though there will always be one or two opinionated individuals who speak more than others, and, I admit, sometimes that person is me. (Okay it is frequently me and I know I annoy others….)There is going to be the person who just wants everyone to get along and who only wants to hear nice things about the book and, a bit more socializing than perhaps would be tolerated in other book clubs also occurs.
Our books tend to fall into "Oprah" inspirational, you should be getting a message from this book"; women's fiction; or theme books of some sort. World War II seems to be a recurring theme. I don’t know if this is because there are just a lot of WWII books out there or if we tend to gravitate more to that type of historical fiction. Rarely though are the books going to be ones that will survive the test of time, that will continue to be read and discussed into the next century and I’m afraid this is where my snobbishness shows. You may legitimately shake a finger at the self professed genre reader ( I know zombie books, how can I be a snob?) but I always feel a little like I’m slumming with the Jody Picoult and the Jennifer Chiaverini type books.
However, I have a confession to make, sometimes even though we aren’t reading Dostoyevsky or James Joyce I still find one or two of the books that really move me. I forget to be a snobby little snot and simply become engrossed in a story. One of those was the Book Thief and another was last month’s selection The Help. I know this book will be forgotten in 20 years but the author made the characters seem so alive I didn’t want the book to end, I wanted to continue to peer into their lives until I knew everything about them, what they’d be like in 10 years, if they would survive the changes they were undergoing. The story is basically about three women, two black and one white in a small Southern town in the early 1960s. The two women are maids and the white woman persuades these women to tell stories about their working life and by doing so exposing the cruelties done to other human beings based solely on the color of their skin. Some of the things done are so difficult to believe that you think “well this is fiction” and yet the author forces you to understand that these horrible things did happen just through the use of simple narrative on the part of the characters.
I guess what I’m trying to say is read this book, don’t be like me and be a little snot and think that just because a book is a best seller does not mean that it is merit-less. You may very well find a diamond in amongst the rhinestones. Even if you don't maybe you'll still just have a good read and sometimes that's enough.