It's really a good idea.  Four women, eight novels, eight "wild adventures."   A co-production of CBS and Saturn, Novel Adventures unfolds like this: Laura (Daphne Zuniga), the young wife of a Saturn dealer, feels anxious about going to her first book club in a fancy Southern California home as Desperate Housewives-type music plays.  Highly improbably, the club is reading The Old Man in the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, and they do not sit down.  Instead, they array themselves in the hallway of fancy house.  Laura attempts to find the bathroom (How true!), trying various doorknobs until the mavericky group within the group introduces themselves as the "people in the book club who don't like the book club."

So far so good.  It's very Jim and Pam from The Office, as is the faux documentary style.  The mavericky ladies then set off in an excellent looking Saturn hybrid, heading to the beach (the sea is the theme in this episode). But the true underlying theme (other than product placement) of the whole series seems to be the ogling of cute guys they encounter, you know, randomly.  By the end of the first episode, the four women paddle around the surf in their underwear with surfer dude, which actually works as an adventure, advances the idea of rebellion from the original book club and starts to cement the characters.

Alas, it's a slippery slope. In subsequent adventures, the gals don't even bother showing up at the club, though books still drive the action.  In one 'sode set outside a coffee cart, they display and discuss Girls Like Us: Carol King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- and the Journey of a Generation, not a novel by Sheila Weller. They then show up at a recording studio ("It was amazing")  for an extended and painful product placement for the singer Keaton Simons. 

For a sublime version of what Novel Adventures is trying to do, please refer to The Finer Things Club (second video on this You Tube posting) where Oscar, Pam and Toby wear berets and discuss books, art and culture.  It's very exclusive.

Let's face it, people are freaking out.  Confessions of breakups, family insolvency and general anxiety are a regular feature at book clubs these days.  And that's just during the cocktail hour. The club itself is a playground of rampant worry.

Here are a few rules for these times.  Bon courage!

• Do keep it all in perspective and refrain from blurting out fears, hopes and personal confessions to the first member you see enter the room.
• Don't clutch anyone by the arm and engage in prophecy while biting nails and looking around wildly.
• Do keep focused on the book discussion. But if you see an opening, confess your inner-most thoughts about the state of the world.  You will be surprised at how possible it is and how receptive the group might be if your timing is right.
• Do be receptive to freaking out members.  Your turn may be next.
• Do read American Wife as a piece of non-fiction, skipping over the cringe-worthy parts as you see fit. This is the last window for Curtis Sittenfeld's thinly veiled tale of Laura and George Bush. At least until the paperback release. 

It is yet another 50th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. This time, the celebration centers around the novel's American publication, best-sellerdom and its eternal role as a cultural reference point. Nabokov's lectures at Cornell were famous and later collected in two volumes (Lectures on Russian Literature, Lectures on Literature). On Cornell's website you can view an exhibit from 2005 celebrating another 50th anniversary of Lolita- its original Paris publication in 1955. (Note the contemporary photo of coeds in Funny Face homage reading in the Andrew Dickson White Library.)

Like Pride and Prejudice, Lolita has an exhaustive annotated edition, a movie version for each generation and a superb audio book narrated by Jeremy Irons, which we call "the Jeremy Irons version." It lacks the scholarly notation of Prof. Alfred Appel, but Irons successfully embodies our faithful narrator, Humbert Humbert, whose confessions we hear in the privacy of our own car.

First time reading Lolita? Middle-aged professor, Humbert Humbert moves in with the widow Charlotte Haze and her daughter, Dolores, aka Lolita. " 'Just slap her hard if she interferes with your scholarly meditations,' " Charlotte tells her husband-to-be. Though HH plots murder, McFate intercedes and Charlotte is run over. Father and now daughter embark on a cross-country car journey before settling in at the Beardsley School where Lolita has the lead in the school play:The Enchanted Hunters. After her star turn, Lolita has had enough of Beardsley. The cross-country flight continues, this time with taunting nemesis and school play author Clare Quilty.

You will find that amid the often dense literary allusions, playful language and the notorious widower's obsession with a once 12-year-old girl, there is a brisk plot, a comic-tragedy for an ending and a cinematic view of America at mid-century. You will also discover the origins of the word nymphet and a blistering satire of everything from psychoanalysis to the cabins of Chestnut Crest.

The debut novel is 556 pages and only available in hardcover -- twin daunting prospects for any book club.  The hero cannot speak and his dialogue is indicated without quotation marks.  Oh, and it's based on Hamlet.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski may at first glance be a hard sell to the club.  But its selection by Oprah is reminiscent very old school Oprah's Book Club where the patronessa first staked her claim to well-written, ingenious books that are as contemporary as they are timeless.  (See also White Oleander, House of Sand and Fog, The Poisonwood Bible.)

Edgar Sawtelle is a boy growing up on an a farm in Wisconsin.  The family raises a fictional breed of dogs that are so highly empathetic, they have almost human-like perceptions.  The author's mastery of this concept is reinforced in so many ways, especially in the idea that these dogs began their lives as regular puppies, just one of this novel's sources of comedy and, tellingly, humanity.

That is, Shakespearean.  Aside from the carefully placed ghosts, possible witches and a superb rendering of the play within a play -- with dogs as the actors! -- The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is impossible to put down. You and your club will barely be able to restrain yourselves so no talking in between clubs if you happen to run into each other. 

The publisher's discussion questions are positively not bad, though some of them feature the annoying tendency of posing too many questions within the same question.  We get it!  Assemble your own index cards -- Edgar, Gertrude (I mean Trudy),Tinder, Baboo and Essay have their own in my file cabinet --  and then try to explain your emotional connection to these characters, most of whom are canine.

If you are a newly formed book club or somehow missed Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, this would be a good time to reconnect with Lily Owens and the Boatwright sisters.  The movie is coming out on October 17th and the new edition features both young, smiling actors and big stars on the cover.  Not as groundbreaking and mysterious as the original cover that launched a genre, but that's not important: The Secret Life of Bees is a best seller all over again.

A beloved classic, the novel tells the story of 14-year-old runaway Lily Owens who seeks out and is sheltered by the sisters.  In addition to their superb Black Madonna honey, the Boatwrights have adopted various, creative survival techniques in pre-Civil Rights era South Carolina, including a homemade wailing wall for the fragile sister, May.  It is among the wonderful secrets of this groundbreaking book.

In other book club movie news, Revolutionary Road opens at the end of December.  Nominated for the National Book Award in 1961, it is a bleak story of a marriage. Frank and April Wheeler have it all on the surface and Frank's life in New York is dominated by martinis and promotions at Knox Business Machines.  Sound familiar? If you ever wondered where Mad Men came from, this would be the source text.   Revolutionary Road will also have a movie tie-in cover and that means Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Wheeler and Kate Winslet as April.  Another kind of inspiration entirely.