Why I Started a Book Club

Reading a book. It's one of the most educational, mind-expanding, self-caring things you can do for yourself. 

Do you remember when Oprah started her book club back in 1996? She had a powerful effect on reading for pleasure and discussion. In 2008, an article in Time magazine stated about her club, "It's the greatest force in publishing today, with the power to raise authors from the dead (Leo Tolstoy) or crucify them on the national stage (James Frey)."

 I've always loved the idea of a book club. What could be better than reading a book, then talking about it with other bibliophiles? Add some wine and a few appetizers, and you have a close-to-perfect evening right there.

My mother's book club has been meeting for well over thirty years, so it's not a surprise that I would want to follow in her footsteps. I tried a few book clubs at local bookstores, and a club online, but neither option quite jelled for me. So, I decided to start one of my own. I included friends that I thought would mix well. The only requirement? Read the book!

This group of funny, smart, caring, insightful and just plain fun women has been meeting for almost 7 1/2 years. We've had a few members drop out for various reasons, and new members have joined us; so that we're at the comfortable number of 12. We meet once a month at different members' homes, and vote on the books we'll be reading next. One of my favorite things about this monthly meeting is how everyone has bonded over time. We often spend the first half of the meeting catching up on everyone's lives. 

I spend a lot of time online: reading articles, writing, publishing, and collaborating and communicating virtually, so getting offline to hold and read a book, then discuss it face to face is a treat.

 I started "officially" tracking our reading list a few years ago on my Facebook page; sharing it with friends looking for reading recommendations.  What better way to share the power and love of reading and connect with others who feel the same way, than with social networking? So I decided to share our list here on my blog, and solicit your favorite books while I was at it. (Readers are very generous about sharing their favorites.)

Wednesday Night Book Club Reading List (so far)

10/06 When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler
11/06 The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
01/07 Sleeping with Schubert by Bonnie Marson
02/07 Dispatches From The Front by Anderson Cooper
03/07 Memory Keepers Daughter by Kim Edwards
04/07 The Tender Bar by J. R. Moehringer
05/07 The Secret byRhonda Byrne
06/07 Water for Elephants bySara Gruen
07/07 Thousand Splendid Suns by Kaaleb Hosseini
08/07 The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
09/07 Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
10/07 One Good Turn: A Novel by Kate Atkinson
11/07 My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
01/08 Never Let Her Go by Jennifer Tynes
02/08 Away by Amy Bloom
04/08 Nature Girl by Carl Hasson
05/08 Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
06/08 The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman
07/08 The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
08/08 Pigs In Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver
09/08 Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson
10/08 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
11/08 The Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrel
01/09 Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
02/09 Not a Genuine Black Man by Brian Copeland
03/09 Red Scarf by Kate Furnivall
04/09 The Russian Concubine by Kate Furnivall
05/09 A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
06/09 I Wish I Had a Red Dress by Pearl Cleage
07/09 Funny In Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas
09/09 The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle
10/09 Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa Lee
01/10 Blessings by Anna Quindlin
02/10 Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan
03/10 A Reliable Wife by Robert Godrick
04/10 Delusions Of A Grandma by Carrie Fisher
05/10 Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
06/10 Middlesex by Jeffery Eugendes
07/10 The Art Of Racing In The Rain by Garth Stein
08/10 Magnificent Bastards by Rich Hall
09/10 An Inconvenient Elephant by Judy Reene Singer
10/10 Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penny
11/10 Princess by Jean Sasson
1/11 Moo by Jane Smiley
2/11 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
3/11 Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen
4/11 Ladder of Years: A Novel by Anne Tyler
6/11 The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
7/11 The Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue
8/11 Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A Novel by Tom Franklin
9/11 Just Kids by Patti Smith
10/11 The Paris Wife: A Novel by Paula McLain
12/11 Henry's Sisters by Cathy Lamb
1/12 Ape House: A Novel by Sara Gruen
2/12 The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
3/12 Catching Fire & Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
4/12 Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music by Judy Collins
5/12 The Cosmopolitans by Nadia Kalman
6/12 Ellis Island: A Novel by Kate Kerrigan
7/12 Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain
8/12 A land more kind than home by Wiley Cash
9/12 Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) by Carol Tavris,Elliot Aronson
10/12 Prayers for Sale by Sandra Dallas
11/12 Snowdrops by A.D. Miller
12/12 Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity by Katherine Boo
01/13 Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
02/13 Run by Ann Patchett
03/13 The Secret Keeper: A Novel by Kate Morton
04/13  Paris in Love: A Memoir by Eloisa James
05/13 Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling
06/13 The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom
07/13 Butter: A Novel by Anne Panning
08/13 Crashed (Junior Bender #1) (Junior Bender Mysteries) by Timothy Hallinan
09/13 A Street Cat Named Bob: And How He Saved My Life by James Bowen
10/13 The Red Queen (The Cousin's War) by Philippa Gregory
11/13 Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg
12/13 The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: A Novel by Rachel Joyce
01/14 Wild by Cheryl Strayed
02/14 Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Woman's Prison by Piper Kerman
03/14 Beautiful Ruins: A Novel by Jeff Walter

What is your book club reading? What are you reading that you'd recommend to others?  Please share in the comments -- we'd love to know! (Plus I need some recommendations for the next few meetings!)

Image courtesy of Supertrooper / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Overwhelmed by Choices — How Social Networking Can Help, Part 1

Last month I spent 12 hours in a car (6 hours each way) with 2 teens and their fully loaded iPhones®. I think among the 3 of us we had enough music to listen 24/7 for at least 12 days straight, with no repeats.

I heard a lot of music called Dubstep, totally new to me, which Wikipedia defines as: "a genre of electronic dance music that originated in south London, England. Its overall sound has been described as "tightly coiled productions with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples, and occasional vocals." Some of it I liked, some of it I despised. We had some overlap in taste on some pop music, and a few of the non-misogynistic and non-sex-filled rap songs. It was an informative trip for me, music-wise.

And of course they were less than thrilled when I took over the music for an hour each way, and plugged in my iPod® with the jazz, classic rock, Latin, and pop that I like. (In fact, they both put their earbuds in and listened to their own tunes during "my" time, but I digress.)

Driving that long stretch of Highway 5 in Northern California with no distractions other than the teen music selections pumping loudly out of the speakers got me thinking about the plethora of choices we have today as consumers in every category. I could have spent days researching electronics, phones, furniture, clothing, appliances, but realized I had to limit myself (or this blog post would be a book, lol), so I chose four categories that were relevant to my life (and most likely to yours too):

• Music
• Groceries
• Online books
• Local restaurants

So we start with music. Ignoring all the other sites where you can download or listen to music, I looked only at iTunes®, which Apple® touts as "the #1 online music store". And while I knew there was a lot out there, I really didn't get it. Did you know iTunes now carries more than 18 million songs* worldwide?

I can hardly wrap my brain around that number. Doing a few calculations — if you did nothing but listen to music 24/7, it would still take you over 141 years to listen to that entire playlist. Apple has a program called Genius® that generates recommended playlists for you, based on your current library, its ratings system and collaborative filtering. But again, how on earth do you even begin to select music from 18 million songs? Staggering.

And then let's take a look at the local grocery store. When my neighborhood store was purchased a few years ago by a big conglomerate, one of the first things they did was whittle down the number of selections. So instead of eight varieties of Special K cereal, now you can only buy two. Yet, the average grocery store in 2010 stocked 38,718 items. You could spend hours just reading the backs of an entire aisle of cereal boxes, trying to decide which box is the healthiest, cheapest, lowest sugar, most fiber, least preservatives, ....

The third item on my list is electronic books. Do you own a Kindle yet?  I don't, and I'm back and forth on it, because I love the feel of an actual book in my hands, and I enjoy turning pages — I'm not sure I'm willing to give that up. My son got one for Christmas last year which he is enjoying immensely, and I have a quite a few friends who love theirs. My son and my Kindle-owning friends can choose from more than 950,000 books, including New Releases and 110 of 111 New York Times Bestsellers, all available on amazon.com.

And now to my last example. I queried how many restaurants there are in my hometown of San Jose, California. Guess what?  4,084. So if I ate at two restaurants a day — say lunch and dinner, every single day, I should have eaten at all of them once in a little under 8 years. (I remember doing a similar exercise a few years ago about the number of wineries in California, and I know it was several years worth if you visited one a day. :-) )

We, American consumers (and this is probably true for most first world countries), are flat out overwhelmed with choices in every part of our daily lives. How do you find new musical genres or artists? Select books or restaurants? Or choose what you want to cook/eat at home? I don't know about you, but sometimes I'm almost paralyzed by the choices. I want to close my eyes and do the eeny, meany, miney, mo selection process, which I guess is one way of dealing with it.

And yes, you can ask around, call your friends, bring it up at the gym, but chances are those particular friends haven't been searching for a great vacation read, or some really crazy running music lately. So where do you turn?

Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog post coming soon. :-)


* From the iTunes website