August 2022 Book Club

 

"A patchwork story is the shame of the refugee." 

"Who owns the truth, who speaks the truth, who believes it?"

Barb hosted our book club in August. We had a very delicious, Persian themed meal with Laura providing the meat dish called Fesenjan. She also brought two different types of Baklava, one made with Rosewater. We also had fresh green beans, fruit, salad, and deviled eggs. 

Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri is a memoir with elements of fairy tale and fiction thrown in. It was awarded the J. Printz Award for Young Adult Literature and rated a 4.4.

Khosrou Nayeri's privileged life in Iran comes to a terrifying end when his mother suddenly becomes a

Christian. This is against the law and he suddenly finds himself with his mother and sister fleeing the country just one step ahead of the secret police. They end up in a refugee camp in Italy before being taken in by a family in Edmond, Oklahoma. Here, Khosrou takes the name Daniel and tries to adapt to life in place very different from where he grew up. 

Daniel attempts to adapt to life in Oklahoma where his mother remarries an abusive man, they attend a Christian church and, he tries to make friends in middle school. None of this would be an easy task for anyone let alone someone at about age 12 or 13. But, Daniel is smart and well read for someone of his age and uses the tale of One Thousand and One Nights as a backdrop for the stories he tells his class about his family and ancestors hoping that they will get to know him.

I

n the One Thousand and One Nights, King Sghahryar finds out that his wife has been regularly unfaithful to him when he is away. He has her killed along with those she betrayed him with. Thereafter he hates all women and marries a new one and kills her each night until there are no prospects left except for the two daughters of one of his advisers. One of the daughters Scheherazade had devised a plan to save herself and any others that might follow and insists that she be next to marry the king. On the first night, she tells the King a story but leaves it at the cliff hanger. He is too curious about the story to kill her so lets her live another night and so on for 1,001 nights until he has eventually fallen in love with her and abandons his cruel plan. 

Standing in front of a classroom full of hostile students, Daniel, like Scheherazade, spins a tale to save his own life and to tell his own truth. This is a well told tale of resilience and truth telling. 

And, much like Trevor Noah's, Born a Crime, it is a tribute to his mother who never gave up on saving herself and her children so that she could live her truth. 

It also provides a compassionate look at what refugees across the world have always gone through and continue to the present. 

July 2022 Book Club

 

Denise hosted for us in July. 

July was a really big month! Laura welcomed her first grandson, Howard Ray Savage, on July 11 at 9:11 am. He weighed in at 8 lb. 8 oz. He is beautiful and the whole family is doing well. 

Carla G. retired on July 9 and celebrated with a party at their place near Riverwind. The Gods of weather were in her favor. This summer has been brutally hot but on Friday afternoon a big cloud rolled in and the temperature dropped dramatically. Their son, Garrett's band entertained us and it was a fun night, I know she and Randy are excited about the next chapter.

Denise provided us with delicious fried chicken and corn muffins with honey butter. The main course was complimented with Zucchini, deviled eggs, salsa, fruit and Laura's Pioneer Woman Grapefruit Pie. 

Our book, Guncle, was very well received and rated 4.4. 

This book also started out with loss and grieving but had a happy ending. Patrick is an aging, Gay actor who is hiding out in Palm Springs licking his wounds when his sister-in-law passes away from Cancer. Immediately following the funeral, his brother checks himself into rehab so that he can sober up and take care of his children. In the meantime, Patrick takes it on himself to care for his niece and nephew over the summer until dad is ready to take them on. 

What is ensues is a very funny, poignant and charming story as Patrick tries to rise to the occasion of providing stability for the kids, something he hasn't achieved in his own life.  Patrick soon realizes that he's in over his head and hasn't processed his own grief. The writing is breezy and fun and the children rescue Patrick as much as he rescues them. 

June 2022 Book Club

 

Laura hosted us in June and we got to spend some time on the patio with the fireflies. That was perfect for our book, The Music of Bees by Eilene Garvin. This book was one of three books for the Libraries Big Read series. 

For our meal Laura made, assemble your own fish tacos and that was supplemented by fruits, hummus, salsa and strawberry shortcake. In honor of our book about bees, Arnora brought American Honey Whiskey and Leslie made The Bees Knees cocktails. 

The Music of Bees was well liked by all and rated 4.0. The novel is a fictionalized memoir of the author who is a beekeeper. She has written one other non-fiction book so we'll consider this a debut novel. Lou really liked that it was a debut and that it made her think of Prodigal Summer. I think several felt similarly. 

The novel revolves around Alice Holzman a 44 year old woman in a dead-end job with the county. Her parents have passed, she was an only child and now she has suffered the loss of her beloved husband. Without going into too much detail she crosses paths with Jake, a recent high school graduate and musician who was paralyzed in a freak accident and Harry. Harry is a 24 year old with debilitating social anxiety looking for work and a fresh start. Alice hires them and gives them room and board in exchange for their help with her bees. 

At the same time, Alice is becoming embroiled in a situation that pits her against her company and a giant, corporate pesticide company. The three form an unlikely trio in their efforts to stage and protest and fight off the damage the pesticides are doing to the bees and in turn the orchards and farms in the Hood River Valley area just outside of Portland, Oregon.

The story was heartwarming and poignant and I thought the author did a great job of building suspense around the events of a small community fighting the big corporate pesticide company. 

I particularly liked the part where Jake, who plays the trumpet, became so in tune with the bees that he could tell the Queen from the Drones and even identified the Queen's vibration as a G-sharp. It is fascinating how the bees converse and transmit information about where the pollen is at several miles distance. I found several YouTube videos where people have rigged microphones to the hives and it literally sounds like they are having a very 'busy" conversation. The author uses the beehive as a metaphor for the unlike "colony" that Alice has formed with her two new friends. Their new friendship and their shared passion to save the bees saves them all from their loneliness and grief.

We also talked about nature, our summer plans, kids, grandchildren, various health issues and more. 

Diana and Carla A. had a separate conversation when Diana pointed out that we all struggle from time to time. Carla responded, "Absolutely, and thankfully, it helps to remember when I am scared it's okay to reach out to some wonderfully amazing, kind and loving women that came into my life for so many reasons." 

And, I would add, how lucky we are to have had our "hive" for so many seasons. 

We also continued to make plans for our September retreat to Tulsa. 

20th Anniversary Book Club Retreat May 20

It is hard to believe that we have reached our 20th year anniversary of the Same Time Next Month Literary Society Book Club! 

First, let me just give a standing ovation to Ms. Diana Beal for all her efforts to secure our retreat location at the cottages in Pawhuska. It was a perfect place for a group of rowdy gals to hang out, catch up, eat, drink and make S'mores! 

Our one big disappointment was that Carla Anderson had to miss out due to illness at the last moment and, of course, we missed our Terry. But, both were there in spirit. We kept Carla informed with our Facebook photo uploads and Diana managed to give her a pretty good play by play. We believe Terry made an appearance as a beautiful green Luna Moth. This moth appeared on one of the cottages and never left the entire weekend. It was much like the Lightening Bug that appeared on Barb's deck that greeted each one of us individually. We all witnessed it! 

I thought this would be a good time to review some of our stats since the book club was started in 2002:

16 Women

240 meetings

254 books (occasionally we have done "bonus" books over the years)

178 blog posts (I started the blog in 2007 when Darby decided she didn't have time to keep up a web page she had started)

9  Retreats:

        Saint Francis of the Woods

        The Montford Inn

        Madden Lake House

        Carolyn Branch's Lake House

        10th Anniversary Medicine Park

        Hugo - Endangered Ark

        Hugo  - Endangered Ark

        Pawhuska

        20th Anniversary Pawhuska

There were several other trips taken by some of the members

        Chicago for Harry Potter exhibit

        Chicago to visit Darby

        Florida to visit Lou

        Dallas to hear author of Memoirs of a Geisha

        Several pajama book club parties at Diana's, Christmas sleepovers at Laura's, and a couple of costumed themed parties at Terry's and Sherrie's. 

Darby compiled music playlists for both 10 and 20 year anniversaries. 

Not to mention the fun we have had going to movies, concerts, and dinners together.

We have had our fun and have held each other's hands through marriages, divorces, loss of parents and sometimes siblings. We watched our kids graduating, marrying and having kids of their own. We also watched many of them traveling the world and living in far off lands. 

We've often talked about the crazy way that we all came together. For me, it was just putting in my zip code to see if anyone was forming an Oprah book club in my area. One of the best decisions I have ever made! 

An interest in books brought us together but it was sharing our personal stories as we reviewed the books that bonded us so deeply so quickly. 

We did a lot of reminiscing in Pawhuska. We also did a lot of sightseeing, picture taking and hugging! 

It has been a wild and crazy ride for 20 years, not to mention having to meet for about a year over Zoom due to a world wide pandemic. That is something we never thought we'd see!

May 2022 Book Club

 

Arnora hosted or book club for May. She made the most delicious meatballs I have ever had. And, that is saying something as I generally don't like them. She used a recipe from the Pioneer Woman, who coincidentally, we will be visiting at the end of the month for our 20th Anniversary Retreat. 

This month's book was West With Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge. The premise of the story was based on true life events that took place in 1938 when the director of the San Diego Zoo paid for two giraffes and a rhino to be shipped from Africa to NY. Once they were in NY she had paid to have them transported over land to San Diego. The director, Belle Benchley, was the first woman director of a zoo in the world. Giraffes were not unknown in the U.S. the first ones were seen at Central Park in 1872. However, they were difficult to transport and the climate did not always agree with them. By 1925 there were only five in the country. 

The trip across the ocean did not go well. The ship encountered the deadliest hurricane to ever hit the East Coast. In fact, it remained so until 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit. The boat made it some of the passengers did not and the rhino was swept overboard. 

The book opens with our main character Woodrow "Woody" Wilson Nickel living in a nursing home at the end of his life. He is reliving the time in his life when he went to meet his cousin who was a passenger on the ship. He arrives to find his cousin was one of the storm's victims. But, he becomes entangled with the giraffes and the zoo employ who is to drive them to San Diego. Woody wants to tag along but is denied so he stows away and ends up driving the make shift crates and truck. They followed by a young redheaded woman in a green Packard who says she is a photo journalist trying to break into the biz. 

This story had everything and reminded me of how I felt reading The Elephant Whisperer. It was action packed from near the first page. It had adventure, romance, danger and the connection of man with animals. 

I won't recount the full story here but the book was so well loved that we decided we had to have 21 favorite books for our 20 year anniversary. The book rated a 4.9 

April 2022 Book Club

Pam hosted April's Book Club and we read Time after Time by Lisa Grunwald. On our arrival, we were greeted by music from the 1940's to set the mood.  Our main dishes were sandwiches and salads. Lis brought sandwiches from Jersye Mikes and Carla A brought, what I call "tailgate sandwiches." Don't ever eat one because they are addictive!  There was a lot of food including two delicious desserts.  I have included photos of the food and flowers. 

Time after Time is a combination time travel and ghost story set mostly in Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal. 

The author was inspired to write this book while doing research on another. She stumbled onto a book about Grand Central Station and in it was a story of a young man who stumbles upon a young woman who is lost and confused. The young man offers to walk her home but she disappears. He has her address but when he reaches her aunts house he is told the woman had died years ago but that she reappears every year on the same day. 

In the novel, Joe Reynolds is a hardworking railroad man from Queens who works in the terminal. One day he comes upon a mysterious young woman, Nora, who seems out of place and confused. She is dressed like a 1920's flapper but the current day is 1937.  Joe wants to help her out and tries to walk her home but she disappears.  Over time, Nora continues to appear and disappear in Joe's life and they eventually determine that Nora had been killed in a train accident in the terminal in the 1920's. But, she keeps appearing in the present time. Joe and Nora fall in love and with his help, they figure out why she disappears when she leaves the train station. She reappears every year on the day of "Manhattanhenge." A phenomenon of the equivalent of the equinox at Stonehenge. However, Nora's permanent existence is threatened when the new United Nations Building goes up and the sun is blocked from the station. 

I thought the author did a great job putting the reader in Grand Central Station. It was built by Commodore Vanderbilt and acted like a city within the terminal. There was a bar, a hotel, shops and restaurants. It would be easy enough for someone to live inside the terminal. 

The story starts in 1937 during the depression and continues through WWII. Everyone enjoyed the read and the book rated a 4. 

 

March 2022 Book Club

 

Lis hosted our March Book Club. We read Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid. 

This story takes place in Malibu, California and is about the family of a famous singer. The story is fiction, of course, but the group could see similarities with famous crooners like Frank Sinatra. The family comes together for an annual summer party hosted by the daughter, Nina and her three siblings. The full story takes place over the course of this one day event where the siblings confront their childhood growing up with a mostly absent famous father whose fame they are forced to reckon with. 

Several of us were a bit surprised as the book summary mentions Malibu fires but, they did not play a part in the story. 

The book rated a 3.5 for those who finished. it.