This week marks the nine year anniversary of our book club. I was about to do a post about the unprecedented drama we’re currently experiencing around our book choice for next month, (which is going on it’s 3rd day and 3rd tie-breaker challenge – more about that at the end of the post) – But then I remembered that the REAL drama was during our book choice back in 2014 which inspired the post that follows. The original lives on my old “The Dusty Parachute” blog, but I’m sharing it here because I keep getting warnings that the Dusty Parachute blog is “unstable” and “susceptible to breaking down” at any moment (same, blog, same).
Today marks the two year anniversary of our book club.
For the past two years, I have had the pleasure of meeting up every month with a group of seven of my favorite women to discuss a wide variety of books that we select as a group.
We pride ourselves on being a book club that actually talks about the books. On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being spending most the time discussing things like which checkers we prefer at the local grocery store and 10 being a non-stop discussion of the themes and character development of each book), I would say that most the time we stay at about a 7.
But then there are nights like February 17, 2014.
Nights when instead of just discussing the book, we decide to try to line up the next six books we’re going to read.
Nights when the number of bottles of wine consumed is greater than the number of people in attendance.
Nights that involve a chalkboard, whiteboard, flipchart and facilitator.
Nights when I have to post notes like this to our book club Facebook group to help translate my drunken notes from the evening.
In my defense, this is what I had to work with:
At last, we did it. We had our 6 books in an almost-readable list.
We said our farewells, stumbled home (we all live walking distance from each other) and I filled (and I mean filled) up my recycling bin with wine bottles and went to bed………
Fast forward 7 months.
My daughter was cooperating with a forced cleaning of her room and brought me a bunch of folders and papers to recycle. Since she’s a talented artist and often trashes pictures of hers that I consider treasure I decided to sort through the piles.
As I was flipping through, this caught my eye, and I didn’t have to even think twice about what night this was from.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one taking notes that night (and hers are actually easier to read than mine).
She also did a sketch to document to two primary offenders who appear to me and my friend, Jen. (I’ve deduced this based on where we were sitting that night, not based on actual physical characteristics.) Also, apologies to “Mrs. Cook” who was not even in attendance that evening.
But she didn’t stop there. She went on to keep track of just how noisy 7 drunk book-lovers can be.
And to be clear, that heart was not intended for us. It simply bled through from something on the other side that didn’t completely drive her crazy to the point of tracking tic marks of noises. (However, in our defense, some of those tic marks appear to be attributed to ‘bird sounds’ she heard as well.)
I’m not sure if she just gave up because she ran out of room or passed out from sheer exhaustion.
I showed it to her the other day to get her permission to post it and she said she doesn’t even remember doing it.
Which is a good thing, because guess whose turn it is to host book club again this week?
For anyone curious about this week’s book choice drama – here’s where things currently stand. Follow along on Facebook for the final winner!
Given the selection of Oh William, Such A Fun Age, Malibu Rising, The Push and Rock Paper Scissors, we had the semi-final results:
We then did a tie breaker of the final two books: Oh William and The Push. As expected, we ended up back in a tie-breaking situation.
The level of difficulty of the choice was increased by the fact that Oh William is apparently book 3 in a series, which resulted in a deep dive into reviews to determine if it could be read as a stand alone or required books 1 and 2 to maximize the enjoyment of the book. As with any strong democracy, a decision was made to throw in a third, completely new contender at the last minute (foreshadowing the 2024 election…)
Pop over to my Facebook page to provide critical feedback to help sway my vote!
