Turkey Tracks: Book Club, Dewey

May 17, 2010

Book Club:  Dewey, the Library Cat

I love my book club.  We are six members, and each year, we each propose a list of 5 books.  The members choose two books from each members’ list, for a total of 12 books.  So, that’s our year of reading.  What I love, in addition to the members themselves, is that I frequently read books I would not have chosen for myself.  My life has been richer for those experiences, even when I don’t like a chosen book, it is interesting to hear if others did and why. 

I hosted in May.  It was a beautiful spring day.  I pulled out my yellow tablecloth, the matching tulip and bird napkins, and got out the Royal Tara shamrock tea set AND TEAPOT that John’s mother, Norah, gave me.  I made one of Julia Child’s lovely cakes–the chocolate and almond Queen of Sheba cake.  I put a chocolate ganache icing on it, then drizzled a dark chocolate butter cream over that.  Yummo!

I was able to pick some flowers from the garden.  It’s the first bouquet I’ve been able to organize from our spring garden.  I did pick some of the daffodils in the meadow for a friend’s birthday, but they are naturalizing so well that I just leave them alone.  It is enough to see their jaunty heads bouncing on the wind or turned up to the sun.  I was able to cage a few daffs from the upper gardens. 

The viburnum will only last one day as their woody stems won’t take in water.  But, they brought in the most heavenly sweetness with them.  The blue blossoms are from a pulmonaria (lungwort), and it is doing very well in the yard.  If you don’t know, the tiny blue blossoms turn pink with age.

As you might have noticed from the picture, our book this month was Dewey–a tale of a library cat.  I even heard the author interviewed on Diane Rehm a few years back.  None of us liked this book.  We thought it confused between the narrative of Dewey (a short narrative) and the narrative of the author’s own life.  Some of us wanted more on one or the other, which was interesting.  I was unable to finish it.  I ran out of time because I just couldn’t get into it.    

So, on to the next:  Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna.