Our Book for Review in April

Twenty-eight-year-old Leigh Fielding has a new chance at life thanks to Larry Resnick, a man she's never met - or more precisely, thanks to Larry's kidney. After five years on dialysis, Leigh is given the gift of a new kidney and a renewed sense of optimism; after all, for a long time she thought she wouldn't see her thirtieth birthday. Inspired by Larry and his gift, Leigh does what anyone who has been hooked up to a machine three days a week would want to do - she gets out of her hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

A road trip seems like the perfect way to start her new life. Planning out stops along the way (visiting friends Meg and Jillian, dropping in unannounced on Larry's grandmother to thank her for his gift and find out more about him), her ultimate destination is California. There her mother disappeared to when she left Leigh, her brother, James, and their father, who killed himself about a year later. However, along the way, something unexpected happens - Leigh picks up a hitchhiker. Seventeen-year-old Denise is a runaway from her foster home, hiding from a bad boyfriend. She asks Leigh to take her along to California and Leigh, feeling daring with her new lease on life, agrees to the companionship, though she doesn't entirely trust Denise. Together they embark on a hilarious and unforgettable journey across the country and find parts of themselves scattered along the way.

This book was chosen by Missy. We will review Driving Sideways at our retreat on April 24-25.

the color purple

Has anyone read this book? I just did the other day, and ... well... it was... interesting. I'm pretty sure I loved it, but I hated lots of it. It's really well written and cleverly so {each chapter is a letter... sort of. The first page starts out, "Dear God"}. It is beautiful, sad, hopeful and true. The best word for the book {that I could come up with} is RAW. Its honest, this-is-life kind of telling speaks a kind of truth, touches you, but also makes you really sad and sometimes nauseated {ie. the incestual rape scene on page one}. Yeah. I don't know if I can recommend it... or at least don't know if I can recommend it to YOU. But I loved it... I think.

Retreat!!

The time has come again to start thinking about our next retreat. Yay! We aer looking at the last weeken in April. That would be April 24-25. Let me know ASAP if there are problems with this. We will be going over to Bear Lake as usual.
There are two craft options:

Scrabble Tile Pendants

OR

Beaded Watch Bands

Here is the deal:
The pendants will be cheaper. I would bring all the supplies and we could just do them that night. You would have to provide your own chain for the pendant. Pendant would run around $2-4 a piece. You could probably make as many as you want.
The watch bands will be more labor intensive and expensive. You would have to pick out and purchase your watch face and beads in advance (I can mass order the faces. I am still looking into beads). They would be much cheaper than what you buy them for through private sellers. Somewhere around $8-15 dollars for a watch face and a band.
Leave comments and let me know how you feel about the whole thing. Or at least vote on the poll.
Lots of love to all of you!
PS- Read Becca's post below. It is a good one!

UPDATE as of 2/23
I have the chance to order beads with Leigh (our aerobics instructor in Smithfield) but will probably have to do it tomorrow, which I know is quick notice. I will probably order enough for everyone to do watch bands. If you have trust issues with me and my bead choices (or just have a specific color you want) , CALL ME ASAP!!

The average person has only read 6.

Apparently this list comes from BBC (Top Reads?), but I found it here and she had found it here. I've marked the books that WE have read, as a book club (it's about average, though slightly higher), but most of us have probably read more. Take a look. It's a beautiful list.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I've read 16. How about you???

Jayhawk

Our book for this month is Jayhawk by Dorothy Keddington. It was chosen by Leah. I am excited to read it! I am looking for a good review or synopsis online and will update this post when I find one. If you have troubles finding a copy, leave a comment so we can work things out. This is a fairly short, light read so let's get it done this month ladies!

A Different Book for May?

Hey girls I missed all of you at the last book meeting, but I have to say being in St. George was sooo nice! Anyway, I read "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard" in December and have been trying to decide if I liked it enough to still have it be our May book. I think I would like to change it to "These is My Words" by Nancy Turner. Please let me know how you feel about this. I don't want to change books if someone has actually already read Hullabaoo or has read "These is my Words" before. Sorry to be so wishy washy.

February 2009 Meeting

This month's book was chosen by Krista. She picked Zorro by Isabel Allende. This review on the book came from amazon.
Allende's lively retelling of the Zorro legend reads as effortlessly as the hero himself might slice his trademark "Z" on the wall with a flash of his sword. Born Diego de la Vega in 1795 to the valiant hidalgo, Alejandro, and the beautiful Regina, the daughter of a Spanish deserter and an Indian shaman, our hero grows up in California before traveling to Spain. Raised alongside his wet nurse's son, Bernardo, Diego becomes friends for life with his "milk brother," despite the boys' class differences. Though born into privilege, Diego has deep ties to California's exploited natives—both through blood and friendship—that account for his abiding sense of justice and identification with the underdog. In Catalonia, these instincts as well as Diego's swordsmanship intrigue Manuel Escalante, a member of the secret society La Justicia. Escalante recruits Diego into the society, which is dedicated to fighting all forms of oppression, and thus begins Diego's construction of his dashing, secret alter ego, Zorro. With loyal Bernardo at his side, Zorro hones his fantastic skills, evolves into a noble hero and returns to California to reclaim his family's estate in a breathtaking duel. All the while, he encounters numerous historical figures, who anchor this incredible tale in a reality that enriches and contextualizes the Zorro myth. Allende's latest page-turner explodes with vivid characterization and high-speed storytelling.

This book looks to be an exciting, fun read, while still holding some weight. I look forward to seeing you all on the 12th!