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Thought it would be fun to have a little holiday get-together this year. For the sake of ease and because I like hosting parties , it will be at my house in northeast Sacramento (right off I80 and Elkhorn/Greenback). * Warning: We do have four-legged children (2 dogs) that are very friendly and somewhat well-behaved...

I'll have a couple main dishes, some appetizers, probably a few desserts and a selection of (diet) sodas. If you would like to bring something, you are welcome to - but it is not required. Please DO bring your choice of beverage though... thanks!

Also, we will have an ornament exchange, which is completely optional. If you would like to participate, bring a wrapped ornament ($10 or less) and we will do the exchange where you get a number and when it's your turn, pick whether you open one or steal one that has already been opened.

If you have attended at least one meeting, please join us!! Spouses and significant others are welcome - please be sure to include them in your RSVP so that I can plan appropriately. I will email my address to those attending a few days before the party.

Happy Holidays!!

We will be discussing The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. Please arrive between 6:30 and 7 so that you can browse and shop in the store - Time Tested has a lot of great new and used books! - and get situated. The meeting discussion will begin at 7.

Reminder: Time Tested is happy to order a book for you if they don't have it on the shelves - and it's easy! Just call or stop by... they put in orders on Tuesdays and it is often available that Thursday. Be sure to let them know you are with the Sacramento Women's Book Club.

Book synopsis:
Meet Taylor Greer. Clear-eyed and spirited, she grew up poor in rural Kentucky with two goals: to avoid pregnancy and to get away. She succeeds on both counts when she buys a '55 Volkswagen and heads west. But by the time she pulls up on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, at an auto repair shop called Jesus Is Lord Used Tires, she has reluctantly acquired a three-year-old companion named Turtle. What follows -- as Taylor meets the human condition head-on -- is at the heart of this memorable novel about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.

Please bring a dish to share with the group (whatever you like!) or let us know in your RSVP if you want to provide drinks. Thanks!

We will be discussing Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Please arrive between 6:30 and 7 so that you can browse and shop in the store - Time Tested has a lot of great new and used books! - and get situated. The meeting discussion will begin at 7.

Reminder: Time Tested is happy to order a book for you if they don't have it on the shelves - and it's easy! Just call or stop by... they put in orders on Tuesdays and it is often available that Thursday. Be sure to let them know you are with the Sacramento Women's Book Club.

Book synopsis:
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day comes a devastating new novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss. As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.

Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special–and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is another classic by the author of The Remains of the Day.

Please bring a dish to share with the group (whatever you like!) or let us know in your RSVP if you want to provide drinks. Thanks!

We are coordinating with Sacramento Library's One Book Sacramento event in September. We will read Three Cups of Tea and meet to discuss it on September 3rd, so that we can attend a special event to meet the author on the 9th.

From the Sacramento Library website:
Join us on Tuesday, September 9 to meet author Greg Mortenson, in a special program at the Sacramento Community Center Theater, 7 p.m. (Doors open at 6 p.m.) Free general-seating tickets available beginning August 4 at the Community Center Box office, 1301 L Street. (Limit of two tickets per person). Addtional locations for ticket pick-up will be added soon.

For full details, go to http://www.saclibrary.org/programs/oneBook/index.html.

Since there is a 2 ticket limit per person, everyone who is interested in attending will be responsible for getting their own or coordinating with someone else. However, please RSVP to let us know if you're attending and we will keep our eyes out for each other so that we can try to sit together.

Synopsis from Publishers Weekly:
A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far. A gifted journalist as well as the author of seven novels, she brings to her story a keen understanding of the intricacies of marital and parental relationships as well as a narrative pace that is both compelling and thoughtful. Eva Khatchadourian is a smart, skeptical New Yorker whose impulsive marriage to Franklin, a much more conventional person, bears fruit, to her surprise and confessed disquiet, in baby Kevin. From the start Eva is ambivalent about him, never sure if she really wanted a child, and he is balefully hostile toward her; only good-old-boy Franklin, hoping for the best, manages to overlook his son's faults as he grows older, a largely silent, cynical, often malevolent child. The later birth of a sister who is his opposite in every way, deeply affectionate and fragile, does nothing to help, and Eva always suspects his role in an accident that befalls little Celia. The narrative, which leads with quickening and horrifying inevitability to the moment when Kevin massacres seven of his schoolmates and a teacher at his upstate New York high school, is told as a series of letters from Eva to an apparently estranged Franklin, after Kevin has been put in a prison for juvenile offenders. This seems a gimmicky way to tell the story, but is in fact surprisingly effective in its picture of an affectionate couple who are poles apart, and enables Shriver to pull off a huge and crushing shock far into her tale. It's a harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise.

If you would like to order a copy through Time Tested, please call them at 447-5696. Orders are placed on Tuesday and generally arrive within 2 days.

Please state in your RSVP what you will be bringing so that we can try to balance the dishes. Also, please indicate if you would like to provide the drinks.