The Tutor.com Blog

Krissie Smith is the lead Sales Director at Tutor.com. While the rest of the office may be chatting about Glee or Top Chef, Krissie tends not to participate. Here, she explains why.

I canceled cable about a year and half ago.  I hate the “noise” of television, the flashing, the people screaming at each on “news” talk shows, the fake urgency of everything on, the fake laughter etc.

Television is never as good as what I imagine when I read.  I have always read a lot.  The way stories are described in a book is always so much more vivid to me than any show could portray. I always have a stack of books by my bed; I’m never bored or lonely when I have something good to read.

I love being able to go to the library get another “stack”.  How do I pick what goes in the next stack of books? I research award winners to find new authors and when I find someone I like I read everything they have ever written. It’s like watching everything by the same director!  If reading comes up in conversation, I always ask the person for their all-time favorite book. I’ve been introduced to lots of authors that way.

I’m often asked if I miss watching TV.  I loved the first season of True Blood (actually I love anything about vampires) but that was when I still had cable.  Well, by the time Season 2 was out I had canceled my cable and spent ages downloading it from iTunes.  Season 3 wasn’t available yet, so I thought “What am I doing?!  I’ll just read the books!”  (Yes, it was a book before it was a TV show!)

I got several of the books from the Sookie Stackhouse /True Blood series and of course, couldn’t put them down.  So I went back to the library and added the rest to my stack.  I had to check the publishing dates to make sure I was reading them in order. I absolutely love them. They are so much different from the TV series—they have more characters and go more in depth than the series would have time to explore.  I’m not going to succumb to the lure of TV again.

Do you often find that you like the book better than the show? Would you consider giving up TV?

Krissie would love to hear your all-time favorite books. For the record, hers is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

photo credit: claren44

My first introduction to book clubs was in sixth grade.  A group of us were selected for the Junior Great Books program.   Every Tuesday we sat in chairs in the hallway and discussed a story.  Through the program I was introduced to Ray Bradbury and “All Summer in a Day”,  Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and many other short stories.  We sat in our circle and simply talked.  There were no grades, no wrong answers and no reports.  I loved Junior Great books.   It began and ended in sixth grade and no other English class offered the same freedom.  College lit classes offered more discussion and debate, but always strongly moderated by a professor with varying degrees of student input and there were papers and grades.

Much later in my 20’s I joined my first true book club organized by a friend.  It started with four women and grew to be a much larger group with both women and men – all very different, all very opinionated.  Our book list was eclectic and included everything from classics to post-modern to memoirs, poems, short stories and plays.  Meetings were informal with lots of food and the first hour spent socially discussing anything and everything. Book discussions were sometimes heated, sometimes hilarious, but never dull.

After a move to the burbs from the city, I sadly gave up the book club as another part of my pre-children city life.  Now, thanks to my colleague Erica, I’m in a new Tutor.com book club.  We meet in the conference room over brown bag lunches and since we’re trying to fit our conversation into a lunch hour there’s less chit chat and more focus on the book.  I love that our group has both men and women and includes 20, 30 and 40 somethings in different stages of life.   We tend to have different cultural/social reference points and bring our own sensibilities to the same text.    To-date we’ve read The Hour I first Believed by Wally Lamb and discussed what it was like to be in high school during the Columbine shootings;   The Autobiography of Ben Franklin spurred a conversation about today’s politicians and a lament for more renaissance men (and women)  and The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates was not loved, but offered much to discuss.   June’s book is The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.

Picking books is an ongoing debate.  Should it be democratic with voting?  Should someone simply choose a book for the rest of the group?  What if everyone put their favorite book into a hat and we pick one each month?   Poor Erica.   It seems we’ve settled on a democracy of sorts where someone provides a few books and the rest of us vote over email.  I’ll read anything as long as I can discuss it, not write a paper or be graded.

Most of the libraries we work with and  my hometown library offer book clubs usually around a theme such as women reading women or mother/daughter clubs.   If you’re thinking about starting your own book club,  take a look at two recent articles in the San Fran Examiner that offer tips for getting your book club off the ground and picking books.