AHEB #2

Fun meeting on Tuesday night :) Cristina, Amy, Gerald & I had a great discussion about the AHEB book and its members. We talked about characters in the book that we can relate to. It's interesting to see how the characters are so developed, but also sort of cliche. The cliche hippy in the book, Slip, can sort of be applied to Cris, but not wholly. These are the types of chats we have at our meetings!

On Oprah yesterday, they were talking about happiness. One way to increase your happines as much as doubling your salary is to join a club! I can say from experience that this club has not only given me something to look forward to on Tuesday evenings, but it truly has increased my sense of happiness. We are able to come together and discuss our perspectives - and I think each of us leaves with a sense of contributing to something real & intellectual. It's fun & thought provoking, and I thank each of you that have attended a meeting and shared in this experience. I hope you feel the same happiness that I do with our conversations!

This Tuesday, we're supposed to read up to part 4 - but feel free to read ahead & finish the book. I found that as I finished up Part 3, I really wanted to keep going. We can talk Tuesday about how far everyone got...

Happy (really!) Reading!
Nikki

AHEB meeting #1

Fun meeting! Welcome, Gerald to the book club!! Our first male perspective :)

Admittedly, no one was totally caught up with the reading for this week. For next week, we're planning to read Part 1 & Part 2 of the book. (There are 4 parts, so we figured to plan on one each week).

There are a TON of discussion questions online for this book - we'll begin to tackle those next week! Hope to see you all then!

Discussion :)

Thanks to our new friend Amy for coming to tonight's meeting! We had an excellent time discussing "The Scent of Rain & Lightning." Here are two questions from LitLovers to ponder as you finish the book:

• The book revolves around the theme of revenge. What does this novel tell us about the nature of revenge?
• The theme of forgiveness also plays a large role in the novel. How does this story reveal the challenges of forgiveness? Are the characters clearly in one camp or the other (revenge or forgiveness)? If so, how would you divide them? And which characters bridge these emotions?

We've also picked our next book! Two weeks from tonight, we'll have our first discussion of "Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons." It's available super cheap on Amazon - try buying used if you've never done so before! It has 448 pages, so we'll plan on reading the first 100 (or so - wherever that chapter ends) for the January 18 meeting.

Happy Reading! Hope to see you all in the next couple of weeks :)

Recommendations?

I just logged into my Amazon account and had a new recommendation for a book called "A Scattered Life" by breakout author Karen McQuestion. If you're a Kindle user, it's only $2.99.

Here's a link to the Amazon page.


Feel free to comment on this book or to add your own recommendations!

For next Tuesday, read the first half of "The Scent of Rain & Lightning." If you haven't had a chance to look for it, and you're in the Bridgeport area, it is NOT available at our Borders or Target store - so you may have to order online.

Happy New Year!

New Book!

First off, next week, December 28, we will NOT have a meeting. Happy Holidays :)

New book choice: "The Scent of Rain & Lightning" by Nancy Pickard is only 211 pages long. So we'll read half for the first meeting of the year (January 4), and half for the second meeting. Again, Tuesdays, 6pm @Panera.

We'll need a third book lined up since this next one is so short... so start checking out synopses & reviews!

See you next year!

The Next Book...

Hi everyone!
CDillon & Becky came to the last meeting. All three of us have already finished reading "The Help," so we discussed the questions from the publisher and our satisfaction (or lack thereof) with the ending.

We also began to debate over the next selection. CDillon came prepared with a number of synopses printed off from LitLovers.com. Paolo Coehlo's "The Alchemist" and Markus Zusak's "The Book Thief" are two that we are interested in reading. Does anyone have any additional suggestions before we make a final decision? Post it as a comment below :)

Happy Reading! Hope to see everyone next Tuesday - I have the VIP room reserved for us at Panera.

Finally!

OK, I've been fighting with my blogger account since last Tuesday's meeting and finally had to reset my password in order to login. So I apologize for not posting anything new!

CDillon & I discussed the mother - daughter relationships in the book, as well as the way the times influence the character development in the book. We had a great time :)

We should come up with some sort of snow policy since it is winter! I know there was a bit of confusion last week since there was a snow day at school. Thoughts? Often the roads are not good in the morning, but 12 hours later, they would be fine for the book club meeting. And then there are times when there IS school, but by 6pm the roads are icky. So it's hard to come up with any sort of "policy" - maybe we should just create a phone book/phone tree for the club, that way we can call the meetings off if we need to due to weather, and we'll have each others' numbers to call with any questions. Next meeting...

Tomorrow is the next meeting. I already know that the VIP room is reserved, so we'll probably end up in the dining room somewhere. I have the VIP room reserved for us next week, Dec. 21.

Hope to see you all tomorrow!
-Nikki