Book Club

Monday night was book club. Book club was started a couple of years ago by my friend Tina. Tina is an incredibly social person who I would like to emulate but I'm way too shy. She is definitely the social director of the group. I like her friends really well and they have become my friends by osmosis. I don't call them to go hang out or anything but then they don't call me either. But I always enjoy their company and I was really grateful for their love and support on Supermodels. It's funny how friends of friends become friends and I have been to their homes and they have been to mine, etc. They are so cool.

Tina started book club to A) read and B) get a chance to get caught up with people socially. We are supposed to talk abut the book for at least fifteen minutes. Most of the time, one or more people doesn't even finish the book. We read three or four books, then Tina had her son Avi and we just sort of lapsed. (See, I told you Tina was the social director of the crew.) Usually after reading the book we meet at some one's house for dinner and discussion. We had a 'cocktail party' and movie viewing after we read "Valley of the Dolls". (It was my pick and we had just done "Assassination Vacation" and I wanted to read something trashy after that.) We did "The Historian" in late September and I did a fall dinner with curried pumpkin soup, mushroom duxelles crepes and baby caramel apples with winter fruit sangria (Hey, it was a book about vampires, you gotta have dark red wine, right?) After that Avi was born and no more book club.



I was surprised about six weeks ago to find a package from Tina in the mail. It was a book with a note that said we were re-starting book club and this was the first book. It was "The Wonder Spot" by Melissa Bank (who wrote "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing") and Tina chose it because it was the only five dollar sale book on Amazon that had ten copies. She sent one to each of us with a note to "try to read". Via email later we set the date. Okay, honesty time. I meant to read the book right away but it came when The Graminator was in the hospital and it got pushed aside, then under a pile of other stuff. I might not have read it at all except that on Sunday Val and I were talking and she mentioned that she was reading "Valley of the Dolls" because it was on the Real Simple online book club list. I told her that we had read it for our book club (I'm as hip as the editors at Real Simple, apparently) which triggered in my pea brain that I had book club the next night and I hadn't read the book yet. I dug around my room until I found it and read it. Fortunately it was an easy read and only about three hundred and twenty pages. I finished it around five on Monday, two hours before the book club meeting. I'm glad I did because this was the first time we had all read the book!

We met for dinner at Marche Bacchus, a wine store and restaurant on the lake at Desert Shores. (For those not from Las Vegas, we have no real lakes, only man-made ones. The most famous, of course, is Lake Mead, made when they built the Boulder (Hoover) Dam, and it's the largest man-made lake in the United States. But we have several smaller ones they created so rich people could have waterfront property in the middle of the desert. The biggest and most expensive, Lake Las Vegas (which isn't in Las Vegas) is actually kind of gross, it smells really bad sometimes. Anyway, the restaurant was on the water at Desert Shore and we sat outside. It was a little warm (about ninety degrees at seven p.m., that's what fall is like in Vegas. It's supposed to get down to eighty-five by Saturday, then go back into the nineties. Ugh. What I would give for crisp fall weather!) The restaurant was nice but pretty pricey. You know it's expensive when the wine is the cheapest thing you order. It was good food and I enjoyed it, just overpriced. Tina had halibut with mashed potatoes and it was thirty-two dollars. Hello, do you know how much fish and mashed potatoes I can make for thirty bucks? I probably wouldn't have minded spending sixty-five dollars on dinner if I wasn't an unemployed writer. Oh well, the company was awesome and we actually found a nice red wine that I liked and it was only eighteen dollars a bottle, plus ten percent off of that on Mondays. It was called "Row Eleven" and it was a lovely California Pinot Noir and I highly recommend it.

The book was okay, not my favorite and I wasn't a fan of the disjointed chapter style. As Tina put it, "I liked it but would have a hard time recommending it to someone." it was about the life of a Jewish woman named Sophie Applebaum and her commitment phobic dysfunctional life (love and family) from age twelve to about thirty-five. Our next book is "Lunar Park' by Brett Easton Ellis and I ordered it from the library (unemployed writer who blew all of her spending money on the book club dinner.) I'm glad book club is back, it gives me a chance to get out socially a little at a time when I do so very little socializing. I had a great time talking books and food, my two most favorite subjects!