May Newsletter

Dear Book Clubbers,

Last week’s meeting to discuss The Elegance of the Hedgehog was great.  Jennifer did a super job of ordering a gorgeous night to be out on her deck and of course led an excellent discussion.  Even though a lot of people (me included) didn’t get through the book, those who finished gave it 4.1 stars.  Grace tells me that we have only rated 6 books in the 4 star category since we began to keep track.

Jennifer expressed appreciation that some of the food/beverage volunteers for the meeting called ahead to remind her that they were bringing something.  She thought that would be a good thing for the snack people to do before each meeting to put the hostess at ease that there will actually be some stuff showing up.  Good idea!  Of course that doesn’t apply on nights we are all contributing.  We also discussed providing more info regarding the location of the meetings in the newsletter, but leaving addresses and phone numbers out of the blog version of the newsletter for Internet privacy’s sake.

We made a bunch of plans for the big summer picnic meeting.  We will gather at 6:30 PM (note earlier time) on Wednesday, July 14th at Barb’s.  The book for discussion is The Help by Katherine Stockett.  In keeping with the southern setting of the story, will be having pulled pork sandwiches for our main course.  Barb will be providing the pork, rolls, lemonade, iced tea and paper goods.  We will each pitch in a few dollars toward that.  Those of you who were at the meeting already signed up for something to bring.  So far the sides people have signed up for include green salad, spinach salad, potato salad, bean salad, baked beans, a veggie platter, an appetizer, and several desserts.  At the moment it looks as though we could use more appetizers and desserts.  If you weren’t there, you may call Barb to let her know what you will bring.  In an effort to keep from running low on wine (heaven forbid!), we are asking people to consider bringing a dish and a beverage you would like.  We don’t need a bottle of wine for each person, though.  Perhaps if someone likes Diet Pepsi or something, they could bring that to share.  We will let you know by e-mail if it Barb needs people to bring chairs.

We still plan on having our David Copperfield discussion (men permitted) for those who wish to tackle that in August.  We also are going to try to cram in another regular meeting, probably Shanghai Girls by Lisa See, in August or on September 1st.  We tentatively looked at the dates of 8/18 and 9/1, but I will check with Linda regarding her availability since she volunteered for the Dickens discussion.  We will finalize plans at the summer meeting.

I think that is all for now.  Hope everyone had a great long weekend and that you managed to find time to do some reading and not just yard work!

Jan