June book choice 2019

For our early summer read we selected "Becoming" by Michelle Obama
Here is a small sample of the NYTimes book review 2018

The book is divided into three sections — “Becoming Me,” “Becoming Us” and “Becoming More” — that sound like the bland stuff of inspirational self-help. Which isn’t to discount how useful empowerment can be; Obama emphasizes how important role models are, especially for young women of color in a culture that isn’t changing fast enough. But this book isn’t all unicorns and rainbows. By the end of it, she ultimately champions endurance and incremental change; she will probably be lauded and lambasted accordingly." 

Kim hosted the Beehive Ladies at her lovely home. Wonderful food, and a great discussion ! 

Look at this spread 

June 2018 Book Club Choice

The Rules of Magic was the June book choice, here is brief review from the NY Times

   Hoffman’s latest offering, “The Rules of Magic,” is likely to attract particular attention because it’s a prequel to her 1995 novel, “Practical Magic,” perhaps the best-known work of her career and the basis for the 1998 film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, born into a Massachusetts family whose founding matriarch escaped Salem’s gallows by magicking herself out of her noose. 
  Hoffman has now returned to fill out their portraits, providing a back story that thoroughly upends what we thought we knew about them. The Owens sisters had a baby brother! The only male Owens in centuries was the third child of Susanna, an Owens who skedaddled out of Massachusetts as soon as she could, desperate to remove herself from the stigma clinging to her family name.

   It’s tough to top a dead body in a car, the event that drove the plot in “Practical Magic,” and Hoffman doesn’t try. Instead she goes for historical sweep, setting the Owens siblings’ saga against the backdrop of real events like the Vietnam War, San Francisco’s Summer of Love and the Stonewall riots. But this is a novel that begins with the words, “Once upon a time,” and its strength is a Hoffman hallmark: the commingling of fairy-tale promise with real-life struggle. The Owens children can’t escape who they are. Like the rest of us, they have to figure out the best way to put their powers to use.


Lovely dinner where we did discuss both Rules of Magic and Little Fires:

June/July 2017 Book choice

Our first summer read was a historic foodie book Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee by Thomas J. Craughwell 

Here is a brief overview by Goodreads:

This culinary biography recounts the 1784 deal that Thomas Jefferson struck with his slaves, James Hemings. The founding father was traveling to Paris and wanted to bring James along “for a particular purpose”— to master the art of French cooking. In exchange for James’s cooperation, Jefferson would grant his freedom. 

Thus began one of the strangest partnerships in United States history. As Hemings apprenticed under master French chefs, Jefferson studied the cultivation of French crops (especially grapes for winemaking) so the might be replicated in American agriculture. The two men returned home with such marvels as pasta, French fries, Champagne, macaroni and cheese, crème brûlée, and a host of other treats. This narrative history tells the story of their remarkable adventure—and even includes a few of their favorite recipes! 


Sally hosted the dinner party 

June 2015 Book Dinner

Simone hosted the first book group meeting for the summer of 2015 in her charming Cottage Garden.
We had a San Francisco inspired feast and lots of great discussions. The night was still but the group was sparking. I went home and watched the classic Bogart movie of the book and found it to be very true to the text.

June 2015 Book Club Choice

This month we have decided to read a classic The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Here is an overview and what critics have said about this novel...

A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man name Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett’s coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers.

From the Publisher

“Dashiell Hammett . . . is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer.” –The Boston Globe

“The Maltese Falcon is not only probably the best detective story we have ever read, it is an exceedingly well written novel.” –The Times Literary Supplement(London)

“Hammett’s prose [is] clean and entirely unique. His characters [are] as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction.” –The New York Times

New York Times Book Review

If the locution 'hard-boiled' had not already been coined it would be necessary to coin it now to describe the characters of Dashiell Hammett's latest detective story. . . there is plenty of excitement. -- Books of the Century; New York Times review, February 1930

June 2014 Bookclub Dinner

A cooling Delta breeze created the visitors as the arrived to celebrate the May June book choice "Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore" at Michele's home of loveliness. It was a small but lively group with a variety of Google inspired salads and NYC vs SanFran. dishes as well as sourdough bread and the classic Rice a Roni . What do you read "on" an electronic devise or an actual printed book? Is one better than the other? What is the future of bookstores? These and many other questions were discussed. Also we are setting our plans for the next 5 selections taking us into 2015!

May-June 2014 Book Club Choice

May June is always a very busy time for many of our group members so we decided to add extra reading time to this choice. Our book is Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Here is a bit of the NY Time review December 2012

We take an arrogant pleasure in the notion we might be the generation that renders so ancient a technology obsolete. “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” by Robin Sloan, dexterously tackles the intersection between old technologies and new with a novel that is part love letter to books, part technological meditation, part thrilling adventure, part requiem.

Clay Jannon, an unemployed Web designer, takes a job working the graveyard shift at a 24-hour bookstore, owned by the strange Mr. Penumbra. The store is just as inscrutable, with two kinds of customers — random passers-by who stop in so rarely Clay wonders how the store is able to stay open and a furtive “community of people who orbit the store like strange moons. . . . They arrive with algorithmic regularity. They never browse. They come wide-awake, completely sober and vibrating with need.” These customers borrow from a mysterious set of books, which Clay has been warned not to read. He surrenders to his curiosity and discovers that the books are written in code. With the help of his roommate, a special effects artist; his best friend, a successful creator of “boob-simulation software”; and his romantic interest, Kat Potente, who works for Google in data visualization, our likable hero goes on a quest.

“Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” is eminently enjoyable, full of warmth and intelligence. Sloan balances a strong plot with philosophical questions about technology and books and the power both contain. The prose maintains an engaging pace as Clay, Mr. Penumbra and the quirky constellation of people around them try to determine what matters more — the solution to a problem or how that solution is achieved.

There are charming moments. When the friends are staking out the Unbroken Spine, Clay observes, “Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.” We are reminded there are two kinds of people — those who function in an analog world and those who are so enamored with technology they cannot.