How did I just join two book clubs for the new year?

Make new friends, but keep the old,
one is silver and the other gold.

One believes you when you say you'll read an 800 page book,
the other knows about your dating habits going back to high school and knows not to bring up the topic of commitment.

Meet new people, I thought.  Ok, more precisely I was thinking, you need to meet more women in a platonic way - you know an ever diminishing number of women and you don't want to date anyone right now.  Book club! Smashing idea.  Doesn't matter that you've never really been in any book club except one you started back in college, where you all read Harry Potter novels.  How hard can it be?  And for that matter, how much harder can two book clubs be?  Bring it on!

I've got about a month and a half to read the following now --

"There Once Lived a Girl who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories" by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya  (this and the following soundbites are from reviewers in the book's blurbs on Amazon's:) "These strange, violent, and devastating stories of love warped by poverty, anger, and pain embody the Soviet era’s soul-starving shortages of dignity, shelter, and freedom." (this fortunately is a mere 200 or so pages, as it's a short story collection.  When the Russian auther is writing the shortest book of the bunch what's happened with the world?)

and EITHER

"The Goldfinch"  Which among other things is about death and family loss and addiction and depression and "clocks in at an unwieldy 784 pages."

OR

"The Luminaries" "Go ahead and call Eleanor Catton a prodigy. At 28, she's the youngest author ever to win Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize for THE LUMINARIES, which warrants every one of its imposing - yet surprisingly breezy - 848 pages."  I'm 28 and temping and have never published a short story.  Great.

You know the last novel I read?  It was an erotic romance novel about bees and fairies by Theolyn Boese.  It was hilarious and full of information about bees and sex and fairies doing laundry.  

I'm feeling pretty intimidated right now.