5/8/10 - May Meeting: The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno

Assuming this date works for everybody, here are details for May's meeting:

Time: 1pm - whenever
Place: 3310 E. Mulberry Street

BYOB, a lawn chair if you have one & anything particular you'd like to grill. I'll be doing burgers/dogs & will have a few sides.

After we have book club, feel free to hang out. We have cornhole/bocce ball & likely do a campfire around dark.

If I feel squirrelly I may get a keg.

4/3/10 - April Meeting

Awesome meeting today @ the Pub, AKA the restaurant with the world's scariest bathroom.

The good news is our agenda has basically turned into 3 items: discussion, nomination & angry fistfights.

Notes from todays' discussion about 100 Years of Solitude by Gabrial Garcia Marquez:

General discussion:
confusion of aurelianos & arcadios – at once makes for difficult reading but is intentional to reflect the cyclic aspect of human nature.

Supernatural reality – the mundane as fantastic and the fantastic is mundane.

Fatalism, pessimistic view of human nature. Non-family members living in the house without exception submit & are overwhelmed by the will of the Buendia.

City planning at first is very simple & easy. As more of modern civilization is introduced to the town, the worse conditions get. This is corollated more strongly when introduced by a Buendia family member. Religion, technology, politics, war.

Narration of the banana workers' massacre recited as an excellent example of the narrative poetry of the novel as a whole.

I'll make a new post when I find a location for our next meeting. Our book for next month is "The Boy Detective Fails" by Joe Meno.

Any objections to making it a May Day cookout/drunk fest @ my place? I have a frisbee, cornhole, & will have a fucking bitching kite by then. Plus grillin' drinkin' philosophizin' etc. etc.

March Meeting transforms! March Meeting is now known as April Meeting

As per my fb message to y'all (let me know if you're not in that message feed & I'll add you), we're pushing March's meeting back 2 (two) (II) weeks to April 3. 1 PM @ The Pub.

Be there or be Charles Grodin

March Meeting - The Pub, March 20, 2010 1-3 PM

Hi guys,

The formality of getting a room @ Central library kind of scared me. No fee but I have to sign an agreement & apparently they can shoot us if we get caught with booze.

But the Pub has a nice private room so we'll do that instead.

2/20/10 - Book list brainstorming session

Here's a list of books to consider as we come up with new nominations each month:
Michael Chabon
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
The Final Solution
Herman Hesse
Steppenwolfe
Siddhartha
Isabel Allende
The House of Spirits
J.T. LeRoy
The Heart is Deceitful Above all Things
Joe Meno
Hairstyles of the Damned
The Boy Detective Fails
Donna Tarte
The Secret History
Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
Thomas Pynchon
Gravity's Rainbow
Haruki Murakami
Wind-up Bird Chronicle
Hardboiled Wonderland & the End of the World
After Dark
Kafka on the Shore
Dennis Lehane
Shutter Island
Books in his first series
Mark Danielewski
House of Leaves
Bret Easton Ellis
Lunar Park
The Rules of Attraction
American Psycho
Chuck Palahniuk
Choke
Arturo Perez-Riverte
Club Dumonde
Kurt Vonnegut
Every goddamn thing he ever wrote
J.D. Salinger
Ditto
Truman Capote
In Cold Blood
William Faulkner
Ummmmm
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita
James Joyce
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Ulysses
John Steinbeck
Grapes of Wrath
Umberto Eco
lol jk

2/20/10 - 100 Years of Solitude

Howdy fellas,

Welcome to this blog, which we will use from this point forward to communicate about our book club, so that we don't spam the crap out of facebook friends.

Here are notes from today's meeting:

Present: Mike Balich, Rebecca Balich, Glen Seay, Ryan Grisham, Sabyn Braun, Andy Keeping, Colleen McGovern

1. Group Name
Nobody had strong opinions so I went with "In the memo line" both because it's topical and less potentially offensive to new members than say... "Why am I on cops?" Also it makes for a clean blogspot address. Fuckittearouthisvocalchords.blogspot.com is kind of hard to yell @ somebody in a bar.


2. Website
http://inthememoline.blogspot.com

3. Book discussion: The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

Reaction & discussion was varied. Some revulsion to the theme – it's just not a pleasant story for most of the book. Agreement that the sister's character is an interesting & ultimately uplifting. Some of the passages where Susie interacted with the real world were confusing. Some discussion about the contrast between Ray & Susie's mothers. Mike was interested in the presence of several short passages, which seemed offset from the main text & serve as poetic pauses. Agreement that this setting & characters tend to evoke real people from our lives. My final thought is that we mostly "hate this book," not because it's poorly written, but because it's an incredibly uncomfortable theme & mostly a very sad story. 

4. Book for March

After a brainstorming session, we settled on 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.