Monday Bookish Meme

From BTT. . .

What, in your opinion, is the definition of a “reader.” A person who indiscriminately reads everything in sight? A person who reads BOOKS? A person who reads, period, no matter what it is? … Or, more specific? Like the specific person who’s reading something you wrote?

Post your answer in the comments!

Friday Flashback: Naming our Group

Our book club was nameless until 2000. If you've ever tried to plan a lunch or dinner out with us you know we can be some indecisive people, so it took some effort to come up with book club names. Most of them were pretty bad:

The Miami Relatives
The Excitement
Oprah Alternatives
Triangle Area Readers
RTP - Read Talk and Prepare Food
Acute Triangle Readers
The Commuters
Commuting Readers
Food Comes First
First, the Food
To Read or not to Read
Book 'em!

OK some explanation - "The Miami Relatives" was Laura Mullins' idea. I think I voted for this one. It was at the time of the Elian Gonzalez incident and it was just funny. "The Excitement" was a reference to one of the early books we read, Angela's Ashes. In it, young Frank McCourt refers to sex, which he knows hardly anything about, as "The Excitement," always capitalized. That was one of my nominations, and I still think it's funny too.

By the way, if you're now wondering what happened to Elian, he just joined the youth Communist Party this month! The CBS news story makes me so angry - it's introduced as "Remember Elian being forcibly removed from his relatives 8 years ago . . ." without any mention of the fact that he was being taken back to his father! The whole story is sad but I'm happy he's alive and well and with his daddy. Probably a good thing we did not name our book club after those relatives.

Chock Full o' Lists

Entertainment Weekly is celebrating its anniversary with many top 10 and top 100 lists of tops in entertainment in the past 25 years - including a list of the top 100 new classics in literature, and Will Arnett's top 10 TV moments that made him cry.

Monday Bookish Meme

From BTT:

Think about your favorite authors, your favorite books . . . what is it about them that makes you love them above all the other authors you’ve read? The stories? The characters? The way they appear to relish the taste of words on the tongue? The way they’re unafraid to show the nitty-gritty of life? How they sweep you off to a new, distant place? What is it about those books and authors that makes them resonate with you in ways that other, perfectly good books and authors do not?

This is a hard one for me. I'll have to think about it a bit. Post your answers in the comments!

Friday Flashback: Harry Potter Night!

At long last, I'm posting the pictures from Harry Potter night. Almost one year ago, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released. We had dinner (and margaritas!) at On the Border and then went over to Barnes and Noble to stand in line for our copies.

What a crowd!

Luckily, Dawn and Katie escaped the attack from Cindy the Dementor:
I dominated in the night's quidditch match. Allison and Sonya were there to cheer me on. Around midnight, we lined up and started moving.

But first we had to take the obligatory nose picture.1:20 AM: Success!

"Her mix tape's a masterpiece . . . "

For those of you who still have old mix tapes from your past (preferably made by old boyfriends), you can post pictures of the tape, the songlist and a story here. I can't wait to do this with some of mine. I can only hope that one of the many people for whom I made mix tapes will do the same with one of my creations.

Raise your hand if someone put Depeche Mode's "Somebody" on a mix tape for you . . . that was pretty much the standard profession of love song by alterna-geek (and potentally gay?) boys in my high school years.

Ghostwritten: Final Results

didn't like it - 0
it was ok - 0
liked it - 2
really liked it - 4
it was amazing - 0
didn't finish it - 0

6 votes total.

Most Discussible Books of 2007

I am learning so much from Book Club Girl. A while back, she posted Reading Group Choices' top 11 most discussible books from 2007. (Reading Group Choices is another book club recommendations website.) We have read 4 of them! The complete list is:

#1 Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
#2 The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
#3 Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
#4 A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
#5 The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
#6 TIE: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
#6 TIE: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
#7 My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
#8 Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
#9 The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
#10 Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and Daivd Oliver Relin

--Barbara Mead, President, Reading Group Choices

Of the remaining we haven't read as a club, I think The Book Thief and Three Cups of Tea look the most interesting. These have been on my list for a while.

N&O Summer Reading List

I personally can never get enough summer reading lists. The N&O published their suggestions on Sunday. The printable PDF guide is here, and it is a nice list. It contains some interesting recommendations organized according to summer movies - the idea is that you can save money by reading books of the same genre rather than going to the movies . . or something like that. Apparently there is also a N&O book club blog.

Monday Bookish Meme

From BTT

Have you ever been a member of a book club? How did your group choose (ot, if you haven’t been, what do you think is the best way to choose) the next book and who would lead discussion?

Do you feel more or less likely to appreciate books if you are obliged to read them for book groups rather than choosing them of your own free will? Does knowing they are going to be read as part of a group affect the reading experience?

Well, I think we can ignore the first part of this question. Post your answers in the comments!

New Feature: Friday Flashback

Since alliterative titles are all the rage in blogging, I'm moving the memes to Mondays.

The last time I posted about our history was in February, when I posted our book selections from 2001. In 2001 we had just experienced an influx of new members and really started to get our routine down. Whereas in our first few years, our meetings would often get canceled or postponed, meetings got regular and were generally well attended after 2001. As Irina McGovern would attest, with regularity comes the need to spice things up a bit! (Sorry, couldn't resist the reference to our current book.) In 2001 we did our first mystery month in which:

• we select a mystery novel for the month's book
• it must be a "whodunit" type novel that can be figured out, rather than a basic suspense novel
• one member reads the entire book and tells everyone where to stop reading
• we come to the meeting and try to figure out who, why, how etc by asking only yes/no questions
  

It has become our favorite tradition. This is always one of the best meetings of the year. When we first started doing it, Katie had to leave early because she did not want to know who the murderer was before finishing the book. One year we paired mystery foods with the mystery selection, bringing filled foods with mysterious ingredients. This was inspired by the famous book group Mostly we Eat. (Actually I think the mystery month idea might have been inspired by Mostly we Eat as well.)

Our mystery month selections are listed below. Which was your favorite?

2001: Green for Danger by Christianna Brand
2002: Death of an Expert Witness by P.D. James
2003: For the Sake of Elena by Elizabeth George
2004: The Missing Piece by Antoine Bello
2005: Death Comes as Epiphany by Sharan Newman
2006: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
2007: Dead Famous by Ben Elton
2008: The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard

Lit Lovers!

Lit Lovers is a website designed for book clubs. It has a really cute design and has suggestions for book selections (many of which we have read!), recipe ideas (including Indian and British food that might be appropriate for our next meeting - no Russian meals or spiced popcorn though), discussion guides, and mini-courses on literature appreciation. I think I'm going to visit again. I'll post a permanent link on the bottom left side of our blog.

Oh! And Lit Lovers has a featured book club section. I have written to the developer to see if we can be a featured book club at some point. Since we have our own blog and all!!

Poetry

My cousin David is a poet (and an English professor). When I was young I would try to read this poetry books that my parent's had stacked on their book shelf (same shelf as the classic "North and the South" by John Jakes---god I loved Patrick Swayze back then). Anyway, I could never really understand the meaning of his poetry and it always made me feel nonliterary. I thought it might be interesting if I brought a book of his poems to book club...we could read a poem or two and everyone could share in their amazement that I'm related to someone who speaks so eloquently (yes, I had to use spell-checker for this entire post).

Here's a link to some of his work in anyone is interested...

Can't eat, can't work, can't sleep??

The Post-Birthday World: Is it possible not to love, but to be in love with a book? I finished it last night at 2:30 AM, basically reading the last half in one sitting. When I stood up to stretch and ruminate, I had no idea what time it was and was shocked to see the numbers glowing on the kitchen stove clock. I slept soon after, but not very deeply. Some words describing my feelings today: giddy, all stomach butterflies, completely unable to concentrate on work, and increasingly, achingly empty. I need more coffee to clear my head but I'm afraid of increasing my heart rate even more! The precipice of pleasure and pain indeed!

I remember Allison writing about needing to take a walk after Cold Mountain. On the one hand, I want to hurry up and process this book and move on because really, I have work to do. But on the other hand, I hate to let Irina, Ramsey and Lawrence go. I was considering re-reading the book immediately to be better able to discuss it next week but at this point I think that would be torture. Let the mourning period begin.

Alas

I have just discovered the person I want to be. All envy aside, it looks like it might be a useful site for our club!

Have you started The Post-Birthday World yet?

1. Are you as stunned as I am by this book? The writing is breathtaking, painful, precise.
2. Like Irina, I am completely obsessed with Ramsey Acton.
   
3. Thematically, PBW follows Ghostwritten really well - with all the events hinging on a chance, split-second decision.
4. I cannot stress this enough: be very careful when you do a google image search for snooker.
   
5. Is anyone else thinking that we have had some really awesome book club selections lately? All of our books in 2008 have been really, really good. We rock!