October/November Book Choice 2020

 This lush novel took two months to complete but was well worth the journey. Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield provided us with a lengthy discussion and lots of wonderful moments. Here is a part of the Washington Post 2018 book review...

 " Diane Setterfield haunts familiar ground in “Once Upon a River,” an eerily mystic tale of a mute child who captivates the local townspeople after she’s seemingly brought back from the dead.

The author of “The Thirteenth Tale” and “Bellman & Black” begins this account on a winter solstice more than a hundred years ago. A near-drowned stranger arrives at a rural inn, grievously injured and carrying a young girl who, to all appearances, has already died. Despite the child’s corpse-like state,
however, the local nurse, Rita, discovers a pulse.

At different points the narrative emphasizes the powers of oral tradition, photography and performance, using stories that straddle fiction and fact to reveal essential truths to the speaker and the audience.

The river acts as both setting and character, a force in the everyday lives of its neighbors. Though Setterfield writes emotions with marvelous truth and subtlety, her most stunning prose is reserved for evocative descriptions of the natural world, creating an immersive experience made of light, texture, scent and sensation."

A perfect Tale to carry you into Winter!

November 2019 Book Choice

As we neared the end of another year, we selected  My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. 

Here is what the NPR review 2018 had to say about this novel and the desire for sleep:

Imagine taking a sabbatical, not just from your job, but from your life. How about going even further and taking a yearlong break from yourself and the world, courtesy of an extended nap? That's the desperate plan of the unnamed 24-year-old narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh's bizarrely fascinating second novel. This miserable young woman hopes she can hibernate for a year and literally lose herself — her haunting memories, obsessive thoughts, and acidic negativity — and emerge from her sleep-cure as "a whole new person." My Year of Rest and Relaxation is her hyper-articulate account of this disturbing, ultimately moving "self-preservational" project. You might call it a rest-oration drama.


Moshfegh knows how to spin perversity and provocation into fascination, and bleakness into surprising tenderness, but her dark humor and ghoulish sensibility are not for everyone. She's drawn to the transgressive and the disgusting, finding plenty of both in the offensive art at a downtown gallery where her narrator briefly works. (She has a field day mocking the ridiculous reviews these shows receive.) Reading her, you gawk and balk but can't turn away.


Suzi hosted at her charming bungalow and everyone had lots of comfort food and plenty of treats for the munchies!

End of year cookie exchange and book dinner 2014

And another year comes to a close. We have read some great books this year, traveling around the world and through time. Our end of the year book is The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Suzi hosted the dinner in her charming holiday decorated cottage, with comfortable chairs, pillows and books galore! Lots of interesting discussions on what you would would do if you could relive your life, what choices would you make, how would you do things different and why? The discussion was lively, the soups/salads were delicious and the treats oh so yummy. It was a most gay and delightful way to say farewell to 2014 and welcome in the new year and new reading.

December 2014 Book Choice

Our end of the year book choice is very exciting: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
by Claire North

SOME STORIES CANNOT BE TOLD IN JUST ONE LIFETIME.
Harry August is on his deathbed. Again.

No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes.
Until now. 
As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. "I nearly missed you, Doctor August," she says. "I need to send a message."
This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.

I am Malala Book Club Dinner

Friday November 7, Kitty hosted our book club dinner in modern cottage complete with outdoor seating and indoor lounging. Malala seems to be everywhere right now and this book provided a lot of in sight into who this young girl is and where she came from. The book opens and closes with the shooting and takes you on the journey of survival, rehabilitation, recovery and rebirth. We talked about the story from the parent's point of view too, which was a very interesting discussion. It was different to read a book that is so very current.

Completely unrelated to the book Rory brought a crazy yummy pie from Apple Hill!

October/November 2014 Book Choice

Our October/November book choice is I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban  by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb

I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday.

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.
On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive. 
Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
I Am Malala is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.

November Book Group Dinner

Simone hosted the Ghost Bride dinner party in her cozy Elmhust cottage. Food varied from Chinese and Asian selections to beyond the grave and heavenly. The book talk was just as varied and spirited. I enjoyed the graphic novel feel of the book and really learned a lot about the Chinese view of the after life, customs and traditions surrounding, life, marriage, death and beyond.  

November 2012 Book Choice

For the month of  November we chose The Great Gatsby by
F. Scott Fitzgerald, a classic tale of love and  power soon to be yet
another major motion picture.

As per Wikipedia


The Great Gatsby is a novel by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book takes place from spring to autumn 1922, during a prosperous time in the United States known as the Roaring Twenties, which lasted from 1920 until the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Between 1920 and 1933, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, commonly known as Prohibition, completely banned the sale and manufacturing of all alcoholic beverages: distilled spirits, beer, and wine. The ban made millionaires out of bootleggers, who smuggled alcohol into the U.S.. The setting of the novel contributed greatly to its popularity following its early release, but the book did not receive widespread attention until after Fitzgerald's death in 1940, when republishing in 1945 and 1953 quickly found a wide readership.

The Great Gatsby received mostly positive reviews when it was first published and many of Fitzgerald's literary friends wrote him letters praising the novel. However, Gatsby did not experience the commercial success of Fitzgerald's previous two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, and although the novel went through two initial printings, some of these copies remained unsold years later.

When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he had been largely forgotten. His obituary in The New York Times mentioned Gatsby as evidence of great potential that was never reached. Gatsby gained readers when Armed Services Editions gave away around 150,000 copies of the novel to the American military in World War II.

Today the book is widely regarded as a "Great American Novel" and a literary classic. The Modern Library named it the second best English-language novel of the 20th Century.

The cover of The Great Gatsby is among the most celebrated pieces of jacket art in American literature. A little-known artist named Francis Cugat was commissioned to illustrate the book while Fitzgerald was in the midst of writing it. The cover was completed before the novel, with Fitzgerald so enamored of it that he told his publisher he had "written it into" the novel.