Some Housekeeping!

I've added the books for 2021 to the sidebar as well as adding the dates for our meetings. As a general rule, our meetings will always be the 3rd Tuesday of the month. Since we probably will have to do Zoom meetings through winter this year, weather should not impact us for sometime. But if there appears to be any weather related reason we might not be able to meet, please check your email before leaving for a meeting, in case we have to reschedule the meeting. Please note that our meeting in December is on the second Tuesday of the month to keep us from bumping up too close to the holidays.

For those of you who were new to the Bookworms in 2020, I'm certain that we never brought you up to speed on the competition we started a couple of years ago. With a new year around the corner, I wanted to make sure you knew about how we earn points why; this is also a reminder to the rest of you about how to earn points. Hopefully 2021 will allow us more ways to earn points again, other than just reading the book and attending meetings. I'll be trying to work in some bonus ways to earn points, starting with watching movie adaptations of books we're reading. Here's how it works:

Starting in January, you'll have a chance to earn points in several different ways. At our December meeting, prizes will be awarded. The top two point totals will win bookish prizes (and by "bookish," I might mean a bottle of wine to drink while you read a book!) and the person with the least points will win a lovely white elephant gift (I might have more fun with this prize than the other two!).

Here's how you can earn points:

Finish the book - 15 points 

Reading enough to discuss the book - 5 points
Host a meeting - 10 points

Bringing food or wine to a meeting - 2 points
Attending a meeting - 5 points
Organize a book-related, non-meeting event - 3 points
Attend a non-meeting event (seeing an author, seeing a book-related movie, go to a play, do an activity you were inspired to do because of a book) - 3 points (an extra point if you've gone with book club friends)
Introduce a new member - 3 points
Recommend a book 1 point (2 points if your book is added to our reading list)
Submit a question ahead of the meeting regarding the book - 1 point

Winning a book club game - 3 points

If you can't come to the meeting, but have finished the book or if you've gone to a non-meeting event that qualifies, please let me know by email so I can add your points. Hopefully there will be bookish events to attend in 2021 again - author visits, movies released based on books, plays based on books, etc. Let me know if you think of any other ways we could earn points!

November - Where The Crawdads Sing

A year ago we put in for a library book club bag for this book. We were all the way up to 4th in line and then Covid hit. And we sat 4th in line for 7 months. Finally, we gave up and read it this month. As of the day we met, we were finally up to 2nd in line. When do you think we might finally have gotten that bag?! 

This was the perfect book to end our serious reading for the year; we all enjoyed it (in fact, most of us loved it) and it gave us a lot to talk about. I had a list of questions but everyone just launched into talking about the book and we talked about it for a half hour before we needed any prompting. As we talk, we hit on a lot of things we agreed required a suspension of disbelief if you wanted to really enjoy the book. I always worry that when we start getting into the weeds talking about the book that it will lessen our enjoyment of the book. Fortunately, that didn't seem to be the case here. 

A heads up to any other book clubs who want to read this book (if there are any left who haven't!) - there's a big reveal way at the end of this book which is impossible not to talk about. We talked a lot about that -  whether or not we had figured it out ahead of time, if it was believable, and a specific piece of evidence. Actually, there were two reveals at the end but one of them was only marginally of interest to most of us except that we wished we had had time to go back through the book to see if it was more relevant than we thought it was. 

We kept going back to the fact that Kya's mother walked away from her two youngest children and left them with an abusive father: how that affected Kya and whether or not it was ever forgivable, why none of Kya's siblings ever came back for her, why not one single white person in the town seemed to have a heart when it came to this poor little girl. 

Whether you end of loving this book or not, we do recommend it for a book club selection. Owens' writes beautifully about the plants, the animals, the birds and the land. 

2021 Book Selections!

Remember that list of categories I gave you a few weeks ago? This seemed like a good idea to me until I started trying to pick books to fit that categories! The votes are in the categories with the most votes were: Books About Famous Women, Banned Books, Book Adapted Into Movies, Famous Nebraskans, Books With A Twist, Immigrant Stories, Books With Teachers, Books About Native Americans, Books Set In South America, Books by Canadian Authors, and Books About Books or Libraries. Several other categories also received votes so that when I was able to choose a book that fit more than one category, I selected from those categories. 

Those of you who didn't join our club in the past year are well acquainted with the fact that I may, at random, change things up. I have not read most of these books but will read them ahead of the month we are reading them. If I decide that aren't good choices for discussion, I'll change things up. But, after something like 20 hours of looking at choices and changing and changing my selections, this is what we have for 2021 at this time: 

January: I Was Anastasia by Ariel Lawhon (Famous Women)

February: The Color Purple by Alice Walker (Banned Books, Book Adapted To Movie)*  **

March: The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce (Books With Music In The Title, Love Story)

April: Sunburn by Laura Lippman (Books With A Twist)

May: Behold The Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue (Immigrant Stories)

June: The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George (Books About Books, Translated Books)

July: Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald (Books by Canadian Author)

August: The Water Is Wide by Pat Conroy (Books With Teachers, Book Adapted to Movie)*

September: I Am A Man by Joe Starita (Famous Nebraskans, Books About Native Americans) ***

October: A Long Petal Of The Sea by Isabel Allende (Books Set In South America, Books With A Body of                A Water In The Title)

November: Weather by Jenny Offill (Books With Weather In The Title)

December: Open

* Bonus points if you also watch the movie adaptation

** This is our classic selection for 2021

*** This is our nonfiction selection for 2021

October - After The Flood

What a disappointment October was - we were so hoping for one more month of nice enough weather to be able to meet in person. Alas, we have begun Zoom meeting season. 

This month we read the Omaha Reads' selection for 2020, After The Flood. I would say it's well outside our usual read but we do a pretty good job of mixing things up and it's not the first dystopian book we've read. We had a good discussion about the various characters, their motivations, and the believability of their actions. Although the violence in this one was less than many dystopian novels (and less than some Omaha Reads choices), there were still some tough to read parts that had some of us putting the book down. 

What  was the best part of reading this book, as with so many book club selections, was the discussion it lead to about our own lives. We talked about how we would react to the various trials that were faced but the most fun was having each person talk about what skills they would bring to a group trying to survive. We have a lot of gardeners so if we could find seeds, we'd be good. Some sewers, some who would be helpful in negotiating, some who are good problem solvers. Sadly, we don't have anyone who can hunt or fish so how well we would survive without any protein is debatable!