Not Your Oprah’s Bookclub

For our August meeting on the 27th at 7 pm, we will indeed be meeting at The Lemon Grove located at 122 Federal Plaza West in downtown Youngstown. Yes! They are open for business at last! I spoke with Jacob about our meeting, and he has already placed our group in their calendar.

Here is the Grove’s website:  http://www.lemongrovecafe.com/

The cafe is gorgeous! They have done a great job creating a wonderful community space. Be sure to get down there and check it out!

Happy reading,

Miriam

The potlucks have been a lot of fun and delicious, however for this month’s meeting, we will meet at the Inner Circle on the campus of YSU, Tuesday July 21 at 7 pm. This month’s selection is The Seville Communion by Arturo Perez-Reverte:

This one looks like it’s going to be a perfect summer read! If you would like to know more about this author (this is the first I have heard of him), here is his website: http://www.perez-reverte.com/SevilleCommunion/description.asp

And here is a review of the book if you would like a quick overview: http://www.mostlyfiction.com/mystery/perezreverte.htm#seville

I’m looking forward to seeing you all! Happy reading!
Miriam

Since the potluck worked so well last time, we’re doing it again. We meet in two weeks, on Tuesday June 30th, 7:00 at my (Kris’s) house* for a potluck. I’ll have meat and veggie burgers and fixings. Bring a side dish or dessert and your favorite bottle (or bottles). This month, we’re reading Mark Helprin’s Memoir from Antproof Case.

If you haven’t started it yet, get going! It’s 514 pages long (but, unlike last June’s pick, House of Leaves, you won’t have to read it upside down and diagonally). Oh, and it’s not really a memoir. It’s a fictional memoir. Although, I guess we could argue that they all are.

Here are some reviews:

• From the Brothers Judd
• From David Louis Edelman
• From goodreads.com

This meeting marks the one year anniversary of our book club, and from what I know and hear about book club success, we’re doing pretty well. We usually have ten or more people at each meeting, about half of whom have read the whole book, and we only go off topic about 60% of the time, so yay us! All kidding aside, most book clubs don’t make it this long, and I’m thrilled that we’re still going strong.

In more news, I’m going to start sharing the book club duty branch with Julie Cancio Harper and Miriam Klein who have graciously agreed to co-organize and co-facilitate the book club meetings (and I hope co-post to this blog). I’m so grateful to both of them.

So please, come out and join us for this anniversary meeting, and someone, bring a cake! Even if you don’t finish the book. You know how we are.

*If you’re a bookclub regular, you’ve already gotten an email from me with my address. If you’d didn’t receive that message, contact me at kharrington@ysu.edu.

There are several things going on with our book club over the next couple of months.

Let’s start with a shout out to book club founder, Chris Barzak. Chris will be reading from The Love We Share Without Knowing at 7:00 on Thursday April 23. The reading will take place in the Art Gallery of YSU’s Kilcawley Center. YSU Poet Phil Brady will read from his collection, By Heart, and Phil will be joined by student writers from the Penguin Review. This event is free and open to the public.

Our next book club meeting is at Charlie Staples next Tuesday, April 28, 7:00 to discuss Z.Z. Packer’s collection of short stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Come and get your “cup of love.”

Here are a few reviews

• from Bookreporter.com
• from African American Literature Book Club
• from Black Issues Book Review

The title story from Packer’s collection was published as debut fiction in The New Yorker, June 2000.

For May, we’re reading two books. Richard Bowes’s Minions of the Moon. We’re trying to arrange a meeting with Bowes, who will be in the area for a week in May. Here’s a teaser from the cultural arts magazine, Rambles: “Like all good urban fantasy, Minions of the Moon deals with magic living just below the surface of everyday life. Aside from Kevin’s Shadow, there are appearances here by angels, devils and strangers from another dimension, who want both Kevin and his Shadow for their own twisted purposes. Another character is haunted by a ghost which is tied to a disappearing book of children’s rhymes.”

This book is out of print, but ordering it shouldn’t pose a problem (except that is may take a couple of weeks, so order now). If you have an account with either barnesandnoble.com or amazon.com, you don’t need to do anything different but click on the used button on a book’s page, which will take you to a list of used book dealers with prices and book condition descriptions and you click one of those and go to the purchase page, just as you would with a new book.

The second book is Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor, the story of Tender Branson, a member of death cult. Palahniuk’s novel has been described as “a satire of commercial culture.” From what I’ve read, people either love or hate Palahniuk’s work, so it should make for an interesting discussion.

We haven’t set the date, place, time for May’s meeting yet, but we will soon. Remember, you don’t have to read both books to attend the meeting.