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2010!

A few things we learned at the last book club:

1. People like asparagus a lot more when it's on a pizza
2. We WILL have to cut off no later than midnight in the future
3. Everything is more fun with wine
4. We're a liberal bunch
5. Mashed potatoes make great muffins
6. You can Google a LOT of information from your cell phone
7. We always enjoy ourselves!

Book Club Business for 2010:

A. I want you to show up. I really do. But I'm leaving it up to you to tell me when it works best, or what would make it easier for you to be there. I love having people over, and I really want you to come. Don't feel weird if you didn't get all the way through the book, or didn't even crack it open. Yes, we do love to read, but it's really just an excuse for us to get together and socialize. Really.

B. We are going to have some extra book club events in between clubs. For example, Feb 15th we'll be going to Flying Saucer for Pint Night to celebrate Jake's birthday. No book talk, just beer talk. Suggestions for other get-together's in the months that follow are welcome.

C. If you have something you'd like to share about the book club book, present or past, or if you'd like to share something about another book you're reading, or anything to do with literature in general, I would LOVE to share it on our website. Don't be shy- write it, and I'll post it. If you don't want your name on it, I'll post it anonymously.

D. In 2010, we're getting away from the "I liked it, I didn't like it" mentality. I have some interesting books up my sleeve and I am more focused on all of us getting our hands dirty. This year we'll be reading things we probably wouldn't have picked up off the shelf for ourselves.

E. Aside from our Pint Night, next book club will be scheduled for March 2nd. PLEASE, if this date looks bad for you, and I hear from the majority, then we can move it to another day in the week. But I can't help you make it if you don't tell me! And there's nothing I want more than for YOU to come to book club. So let me know.

Lastly, our current selection is The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. He also authored Election, and Little Children. The best price I've found is on Amazon, but it is in store at Barnes and Noble and Borders.

Happy Reading, and I hope to hear from each and every one of you soon!

Illuminating Everything

Please mark your calendar for next week's Geek Chic Book Meetup. It will be at our pad, on January 19th, from 7-10 pm. We ask that you please bring yourself, the book ( Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud), maybe a reading friend, and a drink or finger food. We always have a good time. I've got some great discussion questions up my sleeve, so come ready!

Also, I am still taking suggestions for our next book. But I really want you to stretch yourself before making your recommendation. Think about climbing another one or two flights of stairs up in your regular book reading, then look on those shelves and tell me what you find. 2010 is going to be a stellar year for our club, I'm looking forward to the challenge, and I hope you are too.

Please RSVP so I know you are attending.

If live gives you lemons... keep them, cuz hey, free lemons!

Hi everyone! I think we'd all have to agree that the Christmas Book Exchange was a huge success. Although the really cool game Jake made up for the exchange was too much for all of our wine-softened brains to handle! It was a cool game, though. We had a dozen people and a lot of food and great conversation. I'm glad that we were able to talk about The Raw Shark Texts, our prior book. So many different opinions and theories! Great discussion.  We had a couple of newbies join us as well, which made me very happy. Hopefully they were just as happy as I was!

Our new book was revealed, and  I have to admit I'm seriously stoked about this one. My process for choosing books has been pretty organic lately. It's pretty much been me, wandering around the bookstore until I find the one book I believe is the book I want to read right this instant, above all others. To be fair, be fore I head out, I naturally do a little online research and almost always know quite a bit about the authors on my short-list. It worked out pretty well the last two times, and well, here we go again. This author has written two other books that I am crazy adamant about reading. The first was Everything Is Illuminated. I'm often told I need to read this book, and I often want to watch the movie, but I still haven't because I'm so opposed to the watching of the movie first. The second book is getting a ton of press coverage right now, it's called Eating Animals. And, being vegan, you would think I'd be ready to shove this one down everyone's throat, naturally. BUT, that's not my style :). SO, we go with his middle work, which has garnered so much praise that I am almost a little scared to read it in case it lets me down. I think I'll take the risk.

Without further adieu, our new selection isExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close. By Jonathan Safran Foer. I have often read it said that this is a person's "Favorite adult book of all time". Many many blogs later, this is our choice. I'm very excited about it, and I hope you will find yourself excited as well. It's linked above for purchase on Amazon, so throw it in your Holiday shopping cart, and stuff it in your stocking as a little treat from yourself to yourself. You deserve it! I picked up my copy at Borders, and I have seen it gracing the shelves of Half Price Books as well.  Our next meeting is January 19th, so you have some time to enjoy it over your holiday break, or come home from your fantastic holiday break and still have plenty of time to read it.

I hope everyone has a wonderful season this December, no matter what you celebrate, or even if you celebrate at all. Make one of your resolutions to start reading more! And choose us to read with. We'd love to have you.

Here's my special gift to you. Cheers:

Next Meetup- November 17th

Hi to all of my book-loving family! I hope you are enjoying this new read The Raw Shark Texts as much as I am. It has definitely been a ride. I wish I could come up with something more witty today, but alas, I have complete and utter work induced brain-fry. But please mark your calendars for November 17th, from 7-9:30. Club will be at Natasha's from 7-9:30, off of Vance Jackson. More details to come soon. Love to you all, and happy reading!

The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall

What a great meetup we enjoyed last night. Food= fabulous. Wine= demolished. Friendships= growing. Although we have quite a large group now of people reading with us (about 40), the core group of peeps showing up to club is about 10, give or take. The rain actually brought more folks than usual, due to cancellations. But it felt intimate, and comfortable, and special. I don't think going in to creating a book club did I think we would get to broach topics such as what our dreams are, but we do, and it's great and it's light, fun, and a damn great way to spend your Tuesday evening every six weeks or so. Last night I had a handful of texts from some really great peeps that didn't get around to reading the book, and therefore felt strange showing up. I know this will be an ongoing perception, but please let me help you out with that right now: COME. If you didn't get around to the book, TRUST ME when I say you will still have a blast, and you'll get some good information about the next book. And there's no commitment so if you want to come once and don't like it, there's no pressure! Promise! But I think I can say a good time was had by all parties. Of course we never push anyone out the door, so we ended up talking and listening to records until about 11:30 when we all finally cashed in. It was a lovely time, and thank you to new and old friends alike. Can't wait for the next one- which will probably be early November, at Natasha's place. So plenty of time to get this new book, which I PROMISE YOU --> You do NOT want to miss out on.

It's the Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall. This is the perfect book for Autumn, for blankets and coffee and snuggling up on your couch, getting pulled in and not being able to put it down. There's a pretty fantastic review of the book at Amazon, which I'll re-publish below. I found it Borders for $14, but you may even check Half Price Books as well. I always say, support your local bookstore first, and if they don't have it, then hit up Borders/ B&N or Amazon. But it's every where. And every author is applauding this novel as well. I cannot wait to "sink my teeth" into it. I hope you will too. Here's the review straight from Amazon, to you:

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, March 2007: Not since Fight Club have a I read a book that sizzled with such fierce originality and searing vision as Steven Hall's electrifying debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts. It's a twisting, trippy thriller that tears through the landscape of language, revealing the lurking terrors uncovered in every letter of the written word. Steven Hall swims in the same surreal waters as pop-culture pioneers David Lynch and Michel Gondry, and The Raw Shark Texts deserves to be shelved somewhere between Trainspotting and Life of Pi. It pulls you under like a riptide, leaving you exhausted, exhilarated, and gasping for air.
But don't just take our word for it. We asked Audrey Niffenegger, one of the most creative contemporary writers working today, to share with readers her take on Steven Hall's debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts. Check out her exclusive Amazon guest review below. --Brad Thomas Parsons


Guest Reviewer: Audrey Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger is a professor in the Interdisciplinary Books Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. A visual artist, she shows her artwork at Printworks Gallery in Chicago. The Time Traveler's Wife, her first novel, was an international bestseller and was one of Amazon.com's Best Books of 2003. It won several awards and is being made into a major motion picture. Her visual novels, The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress, were recently published by Harry N. Abrams. Miss Niffenegger is currently hard at work on her second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, a ghost story set in London's Highgate Cemetery.
Eric Sanderson has lost his memory, his girl, his life as he once knew it. His pre-amnesiac self is sending him letters, a sort of correspondence course on how to be Eric Sanderson. Unfortunately, this previous self didn't really have it all together either. This is too bad, because the source of all the trouble is a conceptual shark, a Ludovician shark, no less. Soon Eric is on the run, trying to piece it all together and find true love before his mind gets wiped by the shark for the twelfth and probably final time.
Steven Hall is an inventive, funny and extremely smart writer. I am a letterpress printer and a typophile, and I was drawn to his book because of the typography: The Raw Shark Texts is riddled with typographic games, codes, a flip book, and a boatload of very elegant plot devices that hinge on collisions between the Information Age and the imagination. At one point Eric and Scout, his guide/love interest, are speeding away from the conceptual shark on a motorbike. Scout eludes the shark by exploding a letter bomb, a bomb made out of old metal type; the type diverts the shark into a stream of random letterforms. At this I practically fell off the couch with admiration.
There's plenty to groove on in The Raw Sharks Texts even if you're not a type maven. There's echoes of Cyberpunk, Borges, Auster; there is adventure on the high seas, lost love, an exploration of what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines. The Raw Sharks Texts is huge fun, and I gleefully recommend it. --Audrey Niffenegger

---

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Hall's debut, the darling of last year's London Book Fair, is a cerebral page-turner that pits corporeal man against metaphysical sharks that devour memory and essence, not flesh and blood. When Eric Sanderson wakes from a lengthy unconsciousness, he has no memory. A letter from "The First Eric Sanderson" directs him to psychologist Dr. Randle, who tells Eric he is afflicted with a "dissociative condition." Eric learns about his former life—specifically a glorious romance with girlfriend Clio Aames, who drowned three years earlier—and is soon on the run from the Ludovician, a "species of purely conceptual fish" that "feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self." Once he hooks up with Scout, a young woman on the run from her own metaphysical predator, the two trek through a subterranean labyrinth made of telephone directories (masses of words offer protection, as do Dictaphone recordings), decode encrypted communications and encounter a series of strange characters on the way to the big-bang showdown with the beast. Though Hall's prose is flabby and the plethora of text-based sight gags don't always work (a 50-page flipbook of a swimming shark, for instance), the end result is a fast-moving cyberpunk mashup of Jaws, Memento and sappy romance that's destined for the big screen.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Meetup Tomorrow- Then We Came to the End

Good Afternoon!

Hope you all can make it to tomorrow night's book club meeting. It will be at my pad in North Central San Antonio at 7pm. Please email me for more specific directions.

You may bring a finger food or a bottle of whatever if you so choose, and a friend if you'd like! Just let me know so we can plan to accommodate everyone.

This book was a super-cool read, and the next one will have a completely different tone but won't lack in greatness. I hope you can come to our little hacienda, relax and enjoy some quality time among friends, old and new! Can't wait to see you there.

-S