Book Club

I love my book club.  My friend Hannah and I started it in December 2016, and we've been going strong ever since.  We meet once a month to discuss a book that we selected the month before.  There are currently six members, but it's fluctuated here and there as we invite others to try it out.  One way that we try to make this manageable for all our busy lives is to take turns hosting.  That way the burden doesn't fall on a single person, and we get to enjoy each other's homes.  We typically do have snacks at our meetings, but we try to be diligent about discussing the book and not just catching up (of course, we do some of that, too).

One of our goals is to read books that we wouldn't have necessarily picked out for ourselves, and then talk about what we've read together.  Some books have been more successful than others, some have sparked really great conversations, and some have stretched us outside of our reading comfort zone.  (A complete list of our Book Club reads can be found in one of the Pages tabs at the top of the blog.)

A few books we all loved:

• The Women in the Castle
• A Gentleman in Moscow
• A Man Called Ove

A couple books we collectively didn't love:

• A Thorn in my Heart
• The Whole Town's Talking
• Eligible

The best discussions we've had were over:

• Homegoing
• The Handmaid's Tale

One of my favorite, unique things we did was last August.  Instead of picking one single book that everyone read, we each picked our own book that dealt with a common theme.  The unifying theme we chose was that the books had to be set in Asia.  This turned out to be a harder task for me than I initially imagined.  I was almost incapacitated by the vast number of books set in Asia (not to mention Asia includes China, Japan, Thailand, Mongolia, Vietnam, Korea, and so many other nations).  How to decide?!?  I ended up using one of my favorite books - The Piano Tuner - because it is set in Burma.  The best part of this approach was that I ended up with five other books that to add to my "To Read List".

Book Club has given me an outlet to talk about books, but it's also allowed me to get to know some women that I wouldn't have met otherwise.  It is a community that is based around a shared love of reading and books, and isn't another group specifically from work or church which has stretched me in a good way.

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: 

'What! You too? I thought that I was the only one.'" 

- C.S. Lewis