Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth at Winter Institute, and to everyone who came out for the book lovers extravaganza event we hosted at Milkweed Books! If you couldn’t attend the event, you can still read below to find out about these wonderful books and authors!
Little Free Library, a wonderful organization that RGC has partnered with in the past, has just launched a new initiative. Action Book Club (ABC) pairs a love of reading with community service in an effort to strengthen both minds and communities. Any pre-existing book club (or new club!) can sign-up to get involved. Many of the books we recommend here at RGC are also recommendations of ABC so it’s easy to integrate your own group’s reading with an ABC service project. Margret Aldrich of Little Free Library took a few minutes to answer some of our questions about this exciting initiative and provide details about how to sign up.
The February Spotlight Group is The Desert Sleuths Book Club!
The Desert Sleuths started a mystery book club three years ago to accommodate the gals who come to Palm Springs, CA for delightful winter weather.
We are from all over the country and Canada, and enjoy reading, discussing and laughing away an afternoon every month. We have read Defending Jacob, Room, The Husband’s Secret and Bruno, Chief of Police.
Think of great pairings in the world, such as red wine with steak, hot chocolate with snowstorms, Simon with Garfunkel. Each one alone is fine, but the combination creates something new and different.
The same is true for reading groups. We often limit our book choices to one genre or the other, fiction or nonfiction. But one way to enrich your group’s discussion is to read a novel alongside a work of nonfiction, whether a biography, cultural study, or even the author’s own memoir or journals.
Given the lyric prose in the first novel by Eimear McBride, we enjoyed discussion the style as much as the story itself. The book brought up many important and timely issues to discuss: gender, power, trauma, individuality and perception, and caused us to consider how the meaning of of these words/themes change when they are specifically tied to a woman’s story. We were lucky enough to have Eimear answer a few questions for us!
RGC Group: When you began writing the book or had the idea for the book,
Add some extra fun to your book club discussions this year by introducing creative and playful spins to your book club approach.
Dress up as your favorite characters! You can keep it simple by limiting costumes to just one item—a mask for The Queen of The Night or Old West hats for Lady Cop Makes Trouble. You might also want to open the evening with an impersonation game to see what book club member best embodies the book’s protagonist.
