Since TT is unavailable, we will be meeting at Helen's house in Midtown Sac. She will email her address to "yes" rsvp's at the beginning of the week.

For November we will be reading "A Year Without 'Made in China': One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy" by Sara Bongiorni. As always, feel free to bring a dish or treat to share with the group.

Review From Publishers Weekly
Journalist Bongiorni, on a post-Christmas day mired deep in plastic toys and electronics equipment, makes up her mind to live for a year without buying any products made in China, a decision spurred less by notions of idealism or fair trade-though she does note troubling statistics on job loss and trade deficits-than simply "to see if it can be done." In this more personal vein, Bongiorni tells often funny, occasionally humiliating stories centering around her difficulty procuring sneakers, sunglasses, DVD players and toys for two young children and a skeptical husband. With little insight into global economics or China's manufacturing practices, readers may question the point of singling out China when cheap, sweatshop-produced products from other countries are fair game (though Bongiorni cheerfully admits the flaws in her project, she doesn't consider fixing them). Still, Bongiorni is a graceful, self-deprecating writer, and her comic adventures in self-imposed inconvenience cast an interesting sideways glance at the personal effects of globalism, even if it doesn't easily connect to the bigger picture.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

It's been one year since our book club began. Let's celebrate with drinks and hors d'ouevres. If you've attended our regular monthly book club meetups, please join us. Your significant others are invited as well.

Since we're getting together, I thought we could do some good as well. I will be collecting canned food items to donate to River City Community Services, a local food closet.

I'll email the location to yes rsvp's at the beginning of the week of the party. It'll be at my house; I live in midtown Sac.

I've closed rsvp's; if you'd like to attend, please contact me.

We will be discussing A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Please bring a small dish to share to the meetup. If you'd like to bring the drinks for 15 people, please state so in your rsvp.

In Nov, we will be reading Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky; and in Dec, Snow by Orhan Pamuk.

For September we will be reading "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen. Please bring a small dish to share with the group. If you'd like to bring the drinks for 15 people, please state so in your RSVP. Looking forward to this book!

Editorial Review:
Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and... he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August's wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there's trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the "revenooers" or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena's and Rosie's pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it--and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely. --Valerie Ryan