August - A Spool of Blue Thread

 

Couldn't keep them from talking about this book before our "official" discussion even began because those who hadn't finished had questions and those who had told those who hadn't that they hadn't missed much. Those who had finished this book admitted to being disappointed, having been waiting for some reveals at the end and a more fulfilling explanation as to the title of the book. 

We were excited to get to meet in person again and Lisa W spoiled us with a great spread of heavy appetizers, lots of wine and drink holders beside every chair. It was beautiful evening and we were happy to welcome two new ladies. 

To make things more interesting and to keep things on track, we played a scaled-for-the-outdoors version of Jeopardy. Categories included What A Character and Well, That's Novel among others. We talked about the motives of the characters, how our impression of some of the characters changed throughout the book, symbolism, and the structure of the book. The game also gave us a chance to talk about memorable books about families and it was fun to see how many of us interpreted that. 

Definitely not our favorite book ever but it did give us a lot to discuss even if it was almost too dark to read the clues by the end of the evening! 

June and July - Olive, Again and Daisy Jones and The Six

 Playing catch up today before I've got three months to write up! 

In June, we read Elizabeth Strout's follow up to her bestseller, Olive Kitteridge, Olive, Again. Because Zoom was starting to wear on all of us, it was time to switch things up a bit so we turned the book into a board game. The board was modeled after the game Candyland and let's just say that even reducing the number of spots on the board in half, there were still a lot of spots to land on between the beginning and the end. We were only using one die and finally had to go to doubling that number or we would have had to carry the game over to the next meeting! It certainly made us think about what we'd read and kept us on track talking about the book but may not have allowed for as in-depth a discussion as we might otherwise have had. It's something to try again, with some tweaking.

In July, we finally got together in person again and we're hoping the weather will cooperate enough for us to continue to do that for a few more months. Lisa S couldn't be there but sent alone questions so there could still be some kind of discussion about Daisy Jones and The Six which had a lot to talk about even though it didn't have the feel of a heavy topic book. Linda was kind enough to host in her beautiful backyard. 

Both books make good book club choices with a lot a characters and themes to talk about and we found that it wasn't necessary to have read Strout's first book about Olive to be able to enjoy the second. 

A couple of points of housekeeping: 

You'll see that our Race for the Prizes is very tight this year (not having meetings in house has reduced the number of points available!). If you are not able to come to the meeting, but have read the book, please let me know so I can award you points for that. Also, I forgot to record who won the board game in June so can whoever won please remind me so I can add your points to your total?

Also, at the rate things are going, I'm starting to think that a movie in December may not be an option. I think we all enjoyed not having to read a book last December, in addition to everything else we have going on in that month, so I'd like to keep that month clear. But we may also not be able to do a book exchange in the same way we did last year. I'm pondering some ideas as to how we might yet be able to make that work but let me know your thoughts about what else we could do to make our December meeting more fun if we have to do Zoom, as I suspect we might.