It has been a long day for me. I left the house this morning before 7 am (like I always do for work) and then I had book club this evening at 7 pm, and I don't come home after work if I have extracurricular activities, even when those activities don't start for a couple/few hours after I get off work. That is doubly true of this book club, because it meets about two blocks from where I work. Like I don't even fasten my seatbelt to drive there half the time, and my car doesn't even yell at me about it. In an interesting twist of fate, that meeting was for THIS book club. So even though I had this review pre-written, what ends up published will probably only vaguely resemble what I already wrote.
On that note, let's go.
This group is an off-shoot of the big Colorado Springs Book Club and it goes by lots of names, none of them actually official. I refer to it as Books and Booze book club because we pretty much always meet at a brewery, and it's usually Storybook Brewery. Most of the members just call it Mid-Month book club, because we meet around the middle of the month. And Gregory calls it Tam's Sci-Fi Adventures, because this group has really allowed her to embrace her love of science fiction.
This group is managed on StoryGraph, which I know but consistently forget, and it kind of causes problems for me. With 18 in person book clubs, I really need the event reminders in Facebook to tell me what book I need to read next, and when I need to have it read by. I'm not sure I even know how to read a book without a deadline induced panic anymore. We select books by rotating through the usual attendees (and this group has the most consistent core group of all my book clubs. It also has more gender balance in attendees than most of my book clubs). At this point, we have books selected several months out, which is where knowing that information is listed on StoryGraph is important. We do a pretty good job of talking about the chosen book for about an hour before the conversation devolves into Anna just yelling about the state of the world (there was so much yelling tonight about Demon Copperhead and how relevant it is. But we also stayed more on topic than normal, which was weird). And sometimes we have barely related PowerPoint Presentations about things like the new Jurassic Park movie (Scarlet Johansen is hot) and lizard people (I'm not a lizard person).
Some of my favorite books read in this group were Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus, and Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane. This was a difficult list to come up with, because I haven't loved most of the books we've read in this group (and that includes the ones I've picked).
I said The Next Chapter isn't just a book club, we're friends. I'm going to go a step further here. Books and Booze feels more like family, a dysfunctional family, but family nonetheless.
Is this a group you'd want to be adopted into? - Katie
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