November Meeting

Hi ladies!

We meet this week for our November meeting. It will be held Wednesday, the 28th at 6 pm. We will be meeting at Bite Me BBQ located at 132 N St Francis. Between Douglas and First street downtown.

I will bring a few books to present for next month's reading choice. I hope to see you all there!!

Happy reading!!

November Read

Sorry for the delay in posting ladies, it has been a hectic week!

Last week we met at Lotus Leaf Cafe for discussion and dinner. We had a nice turn out, as well as a good discussion. After a brief discussion, we voted on the books nominated for November!

The winner is...

From Goodreads:

Alice Howland - Harvard professor, gifted researcher and lecturer, wife, and mother of three grown children - sets out for a run and soon realizes she has no idea how to find her way home. She has taken the route for years, but nothing looks familiar. She is utterly lost. Medical consults reveal early-onset Alzheimer's.

Alice's slowly but inevitably loses memory and connection with reality, told from her perspective. She gradually loses the ability to follow a conversational thread, the story line of a book, or to recall information she heard just moments before. Genova's debut shows the disease progression through the reactions of others, as Alice does, so readers feel what she feels - a slowly building terror.

There are copies at the public library, as well as on Kindle and Nook.

Happy reading!! 

October Meeting

Hello ladies!!

I hope you are having a wonderful month filled with lots of reading and relaxation!

Remember, we are meeting THIS WEDNESDAY, October 24th at 6 pm.

This month's meeting will be held at Lotus Leaf Cafe in Delano. (613 W Douglas, Ste A)

 

We will be meeting in the back room. They do serve food here. Parking is on the street, and there may be a short walk since there are a limited number of spaces near the restaurant. We will be discussing Anna Quindlen's book Blessings.  I am nominating books for Novemeber, and will be surprising you with those choices at the meeting!

Hope to see you all there!! Happy reading!!

Anniversary Meeting Recap

Greetings and salutations!

Tonight we celebrated our 3rd anniversary of The Book Club. We held the meeting in The Starry Night Room at Watermark Books. At the beginning of the meeting, we had the opportunity to listen to a presentation on popular book club selections and New York Times Best Seller list. There were a bunch of interesting titles on the list, and I no doubt we will be seeing some in future club recommendations!

After the presentation, we began our anniversary celebration! The few members who attended played a game where they needed to match the title of one book to a picture that described the book. It was a big hit!! We also took a vote on Biggest Tear Jerker of the year, Best Discussion of the Year, and Best Book of the Year.

Best Tear Jerker: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet - (chosen by Rene)

Best Discussion: TIE - The Gift (chosen by Karen) and People of the Book (chosen by Wendy)

Best Book of the Year: People of the Book (chosen by Wendy)

The lady who suggested the winning book of each category won a gift card!!

Since very few people were able to read last month's pick, The Reluctant Tuscan, we had an extremely brief discussion. Mostly that we liked it, and wished more would have had the opportunity to read it! To kick off the 2012-2013 season of The Book Club, Sharon nominated our first round of books.

Every Last One by Anna Quindlen

One True Thing by Anna Quindlen

and our winner....

Blessings by Anna Quindlen

Late one night, a teenage couple drives up to the big white clapboard home on the Blessing estate and leaves a box. In that instant, the lives of those who live and work there are changed forever. Skip Cuddy, the caretaker, finds a baby girl asleep in that box and decides he wants to keep the child . . . while Lydia Blessing, the matriarch of the estate, for her own reasons, agrees to help him. Blessings explores how the secrets of the past affect decisions and lives in the present; what makes a person or a life legitimate or illegitimate and who decides; and the unique resources people find in themselves and in a community. This is a powerful novel of love, redemption, and personal change by the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer about whom The Washington Post Book Worldsaid, “Quindlen knows that all the things we ever will be can be found in some forgotten fragment of family.”

There are currently 8 copies of the book at the Wichita Public Library (and a book on CD for Wendy!!!). Our next meeting is being held on October 24th at 6 pm. Please be sure to make a note, as this is NOT the final Wednesday of the month. I will be sure to send out another reminder email in the week preceding. Also, please let me know if you'd like to sign up to host a month.

Thanks again to everyone who attended our meeting. Can't wait to see you all next month.

Happy Reading!!

Anniversary Meeting Details

Hello ladies!

I hope you are having a book filled month. Who is enjoying the anniversary pick, The Reluctant Tuscan? I am very much enjoying the humor in this book!

The next meeting will be held at Watermark Books on September 26th at 6 pm. We will be having a short speaker as well as discussion.Sharon will be nominating 3 books for the group to read during October.

Happy reading!

Hard News

Hello ladies,

For anyone who doesn't have Facebook, I spoke with Sharon earlier today. She wanted me to let everyone know that Susan's husband passed away on Sunday.

I don't have service details, but if we could all send her and her family our prayers. I know it would be appreciated.

John Duff, husband of book club member Susan Duff, unexpectedly passed away Sunday morning 9/2 from a heart attack.  Service info pending.  Condolences can be sent to Susan at 1307 E Carolyn St, Derby, KS 67037-2039.

August Meeting

Hello ladies!

I just wanted to pop in really quick and let you all know the details for our meeting next week!

We will be meeting on Wednesday, August 29th at 6 pm at Caffe Moderne.

We will discuss Freakonomics and take the final vote for our anniversary read choice.

I would like to suggest that we, as a group, decide upon the meeting location for September, as no one person will be in charge. Feel free to leave a comment on here, or bring your suggestions to the meeting next week.

Happy Reading!!

A Great Idea

Hello ladies! 

Just thought I would pop in and see how everyone is coming with this month's book choice, Freakonomics?

I have to say I cheated a bit, and have already watched the documentary (its on Netflix and its super good!). There are some examples in the documentary that aren't in the book, so I recommend reading and watching both.

Source

How cute are these cupcakes?! I saw them on another blog I read, and couldn't help but share! These are made by a baker in London. I wonder if I could find someone in Wichita to make them for our anniversary meeting?

Hope your August is going well!

Happy reading!!

Anniversary Book Voting

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July Meeting Recap

Hello Ladies~

At our Book Club meeting last night, we discussed The Shadow of the Wind, which was a great mystery read if you ask me.  Our group was very small but productive.  Kirsten shared her book recommendations with us, which were Freakonomics, The Reluctant Tuscan, and The Seamstress (see summaries below). The winner was – Freakonomics!  We have never read anything like this as a group before, so our discussion should be fun and interesting. 

It’s time to get your Freak-on- omics on… J 

Our next meeting will be held on 8/29 6:00 pm with the place TBD.  Sam will be sending a listing of the books which were recommended throughout the year for you to choose from in order to narrow down the choice to 3.  This is our annual recycle and Book Club Anniversary.  I’m not sure if we will hold a party like we have the previous 2 years or if we might make it a regular BC meeting - so, stay tuned for more details.   

Happy Reading!

Wendy

July Book recommendations:

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything 

By Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to sports and child-rearing—and whose conclusions turn the conventional wisdom on its head. Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.

Freakonomics is a ground-breaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They usually begin with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: Freakonomics.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives—how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.

The Reluctant Tuscan  By Phil Doran After years of working on a string of sitcoms, Phil Doran found himself on the outside looking in. Just as he and his peers had replaced the older guys when he was coming up the ranks, it was now happening to him. And it was freaking him out. He came home every night angry, burned- out, and exhausted. After twenty-five years of losing her husband to Hollywood, Doran’s wife decided it was finally time for a change—so on one of her many solo trips to Italy she surprised her husband by purchasing a broken-down 300-year-old farmhouse for them to restore. The Reluctant Tuscan is about the author’s transition from being a successful but overworked writer-producer in Hollywood to rediscovering himself and his wife while in Italy, and finding happiness in the last place he expected.  In the witty tone that made him a success as a writer in Hollywood, The Reluctant Tuscan captivates those who simply love a good travel narrative as well as anyone who loves the quirky humor of Bill Bryson, Dave Barry, and Jerry Seinfeld. The Seamstress  By Sara Tuvel Bernstein A striking Holocaust memoir, posthumously published, by a Romanian Jew with an unusual story to tell. From its opening pages, in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania between the wars and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father's orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher's vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him. Ashamed to return home after her expulsion, she looked for work in Bucharest and discovered a talent for dressmaking. That talent--and her blond hair, blue eyes, and overall Gentile appearance--allowed her entry into the highest reaches of Romanian society, albeit as a dressmaker. Bernstein recounts the growing shadow of the native fascist movement, the Iron Guard, a rising tide of anti-Semitic laws, and finally, the open persecution of Romania's Jews. After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in RavensbrÅck, a women's concentration camp deep in Germany. Nineteen out of every twenty women transported there died. The author, her sister Esther, and two other friends banded together and, largely due to Sara's extraordinary street smarts and intuition, managed to survive. Although Bernstein was not a professional writer, she tells this story with style and power. Her daughter Marlene contributes a moving epilogue to close out Sara's life. One of the best of the recent wave of Holocaust memoirs.