@jinglepostman @KarenStrickholm Thank you both for the wonderful list of book recommendations.
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Karen Strickholmreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
When I lived in LA and before I got super sick, I belonged to the most fun book club ever. We would meet once a month, rotating homes, potluck dinner with wine. We would yak it up over dinner anout all tooics. Then at dessert, each of us placed a gift wrappef book we had brought in a pile in the center. The books could be anything - something we had read, heard about, stumbled across. Any genre, any format (fiction, poetry etc). We would each draw a number, and then...
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Karen Strickholmreplied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@wdlindsy @jinglepostman ...pick the book at top of pile in order. If the book had already been read by the picker, it went back in the stack for another reader to pick.
It was the most fun ever! No pressure, no reporting, no "homework." I'd love to do that again sometime.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @jinglepostman That sounds like a marvelous idea for a book club. I'll suggest it to several friends who belong to book clubs. My spouse and I keep a little free library in front of our house, and people who take books often put books they've read in the library. I also love seeing some new title there that I would never have thought to read β but now want to explore.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @jinglepostman Again, so grateful for this growing list of new reads I will add to my to-read list!
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Karen Strickholmreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @jinglepostman So cool! Did you ever hear of Book Crossing? It tracks where books travel.
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Elizabeth S.replied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @KarenStrickholm For a short time I was in a book club where we didn't all read the same book, we just brought whatever we'd been reading and talked about it, and if ready to part with the book, offer it to anyone who was interested. I still laugh remembering the poet who had been reading a pamphlet!
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Elizabeth S. last edited by
@jinglepostman @KarenStrickholm Interesting approach to a book club. Like a potluck meal where no one stipulates who's to bring what kind of dish. I like that idea.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @jinglepostman I had not heard of that. Fascinating. How books move around is inherently fascinating. In high school, my Latin teacher in 4th year gave each of us in the class a Latin book to read and report on. When I opened mine, I saw that my great-aunt, who was a Latin teacher, had written her name in the book. It was her book. My Latin teacher did not know, of course, when she gave me the book that it had belonged to my great-aunt β who lived in a different place altogether
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Aloniaxxreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy Ohh, I went into a second-hand bookshop in the city where I'd gone to Grammar School some 30yrs before to look for a copy of Cyrano de Bergerac in French that we'd done at 'O'Level...and the copy I found had a little love note on the inside from our French teacher to the English teacher. They were both women and my school was all girls. It was very romantic and I wanted to talk to my classmates about it!
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Aloniaxx last edited by
@Judeet99 Amazing. That's a novelistic story that could actually be worked into a novel!
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Leslie πΊπΈπ»π πreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @KarenStrickholm @jinglepostman I admit I had my mom's complete works of Shakespeare and stole the notes from the margins for my college Shakespeare class. The professor liked "my" observations. βοΈ
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Leslie πΊπΈπ»π π last edited by
@Lesliesez @KarenStrickholm @jinglepostman What a wonderful resource to crib from!
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Karen Strickholmreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @jinglepostman Exactly. And you always leave with a present!
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Karen Strickholmreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @jinglepostman That is wild! Do you still have it? What was the book about?
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Leslie πΊπΈπ»π πreplied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@wdlindsy @KarenStrickholm @jinglepostman what an amazing story about getting your great aunt's book as well!
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @jinglepostman A cousin of mine gave a nice luncheon yesterday for a group of friends (and me as family), and she happened to mention her book club to me. That gave me an opportunity to tell her about this discussion of book clubs and some of the wonderful ideas I'm hearing about them here. She was very interested!
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Karen Strickholm last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @jinglepostman I do still have it. Haven't looked at it in years, and honestly can't quite remember what it's about. My recollection is that it tells some boring story that would otherwise have been told in English, but was translated into Latin. I remember how surprised I was when my teacher handed me the book. Even before I saw the signature of my great-aunt, Frances Tucker (she married my grandfather's brother), I recognized her handwriting.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @jinglepostman I knew the handwriting because, after Frances died young of t.b., her widowed husband John came to live with my grandmother, his sister, and after his death, John's trunk remained in my grandmother's attic. We grandchildren used to play in the attic and open the old trunks, and in John's trunk was a diary Frances had kept while at university and then in a treatment home for t.b. patients.
I have now given that diary to a a local archive.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to William Lindsey :toad: last edited by
@KarenStrickholm @jinglepostman I also knew Frances' handwriting because a little picture that had belonged to her, Guido Reni's "Aurora," hung in my grandmother's bedroom, and I would sometimes take it down to look at and look at the back, where she had written that the painting in the picture was Guido Areni's "Aurora." I now have that little picture and treasure it, because it has so many good childhood memories attached to it. It occurs to me to attach a photo of Frances on her wedding day.
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William Lindsey :toad:replied to Leslie πΊπΈπ»π π last edited by
@Lesliesez @KarenStrickholm @jinglepostman It was quite a surprise, since my great-aunt didn't even live in the town in which I went to high school, and my Latin teacher had never known her. She thought she had bought that book at a used bookstore.