Book Club #2

Summary of first Book Club meeting:  Awesome.

We all ready Hunger Games and had an incredible conversation. I made bread, Erin brought goat cheese, and we all drank wine while discussing the (arguably) imperfect story line.

Summary of second Book Club meeting:  also awesome.

We decided on a number of pivotal things in our second meeting. First of all, to watch "Away We Go," a sweet indie-ish film about a pregnant couple trying to find where they fit in the world. It talks a lot about family, expectations, and home... all really good topics that we never got around to discussing.  We ate chinese take out and caught up on all of our busy weeks.

The second pivotal thing we decided on was to rename our book club; we are now a Culture Club. Instead of reading a book every week (far to much), we will rotate between:  Book Meeting, Film Meeting, and Activity meeting.  Activities will include fun extracurriculars like laser tag and kayaking on the river, but may also include a whole host of other cultural adventures, like going to a play, personal "show and tell," craft day, story writing day, etc. The books, films, and activities don't have to relate to each other, but can. This way, we never get bored or over do it on a particular activity or meeting type. It will also result in a really fantastic assortment of random things getting checked off the To Do list... all those If-Only-I-Weren't-An-Adult things we all still wish for... like swimming in a giant ball pit or having icecream for dinner.

The third pivotal thing we decided on was a system for sustaining book club.  How do we pick the next book? It was a great point of stress and conflict.  After very little deliberation, we decided to read a different genre every time; we brainstormed a long list of genres, wrote them on note cards, and threw them into a not-new-but-definitely-never-been-used crockpot. Each Book meeting, we would select a new genre from the crockpot. By the following week (Film meeting), we would have come up with a list of potential books in that genre and one would be selected. We would then have two weeks before the next Book Meeting.
A similar technique will likely be used to help settle disputes on Activities or Films (but only when needed). It's adds a really nice sense of suspense.

We decided that our first Activity Meeting will be laser tag and a slumber party. Our next book is Life, the memoir by Keith Richards.

BOOKS

Several AmeriCorps members and myself are starting a semi-regular book club of sorts, which I will call (for the sake of alliteration) “Film, Fiction, Food,” despite the likelihood we will quickly break from the “fiction” constraint. We are starting next Tuesday with “The Hunger Games,” by Suzanne Collins; it’s a novel (the first in a trilogy) about a future society that’s really, really messed up. Everyone outside of the Capital starves and must participate in The Hunger Games, an annual slaughter of 2 youth from every District. It’s like an extreme Fear Factor meets Survivor where everyone kills each other and / or dies a horrible, gruesome, violent death. Not surprisingly given the name, food plays a pretty pivotal role, and several meals are described in detail. Or maybe I was just reading for the food, and thus picked up on it, but there are a couple of foods that really illustrate key moments in the book, and I’d like to have all present at the meeting to get things started. The foods I’d like to have on hand should make a nice meal:

THE FOREST (her home, her family, her way of life) to be represented by Goat Cheese and berries, the last meal she had before being swept up into the Games.
PEETA and RUE (her best friends in the game) will be represented by two kinds of bread: a slightly burned loaf and a crusty, seedy roll.
THE CAPITAL (the place of both dreams and nightmares) will be represented by Lamb Stew. I don’t know how to make lamb stew, but I’m pretty sure epicurious.com won’t let me down.
SURVIVAL (obviously important) will be toasted by our tall glasses of plain water.

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I like lists. Quite a lot. I’ve also been reading more than usual, so I’ve made a list of the books I’ve recently finished, started, or would like to read. I obviously need more on the waiting list. Suggestions welcome.

Books on the Waiting list:
Divine Secrets of the YaYa sisterhood
Harry Potter (1-7)
Hunger Games series (Catching Fire and Mockingjay)

Books Underway:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Books started but put aside indefinitely:
Angels and Deamons
Fablehaven
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Consider the lobster
Walden
Life on the Mississippi

Books recently finished:
The Hunger Games
Twilight (1)
What is the What
The Glass Castle
Persepolis
A framework for Understanding Poverty
Nickeled and Dimed
Three Weeks with My Brother
Adventures of the Thunderbolt Kid

Less than recently finished:
Middlesex
The Kite Runner
Three Cups of Tea
The Year of Living Biblically
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Alchemist

Recent Adventures

Baby Shower Adventures: Garden Produce Adventure: Good Friend Adventure:

Goats

These are from forever ago, but I really love Greg's goats. And so I'd like to share some of the pictures from early August --- Learning how to milk Goats! More here: The Goat Album