The Best Book Club in the World

So this past year I joined the most amazing book club that has ever existed! We read such awesome books that cover such a wide range of topics, genres and reading levels I love the variety that we have in our books from month to month! I also love all the people that are part of this club, I look forward to book club all month long because of how fun everyone makes it and it is such a big club that I always manage to meet someone new each month, which is awesome I love meeting new people. Another huge benefit of being a part of this particular book club is the food, we have a delicious FEAST every month! We have a lot of talented cooks in our club so we have a wonderful gourmet spread every time! I must give props to my dear friend Kelly Dearth for making it all happen! This is her lovely book club that has grown and developed over the past 5 years. She hosts it every month and puts so much work into making it the delightful thing that it is, thanks a million Kelly!


This year's books were:

January-Like Water For Chocolate - Our rating, 3.5 Stars
February - A Great and Terrible Beauty- 3.5 Stars
March - Team of Rivals - 4 Stars
April - Spring Break and time to recover from Team of Rivals
May - The Robe - 4.5 Stars (I LOVED this book)
June - The Goose Girl - 3 Stars
July Couples Book Club - Ender's Game - 4 Stars
August - The Help - 4.5 Stars
September - Mocking Jay - 4.2 Stars
October - Interview With The Vampire - 2.5 Stars
November - Sarah - 4.6 Stars
December - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - 5 Stars (My favorite!)

This book was interesting, while reading it I wasn't sure how I felt about it but after our book club meeting and Libby explained all of the complex symbolism that is all over this book I appreciated it so much more. It has a cool format in that the chapters were the months of the year and every chapter had a recipe that corresponded with that month, Bethy made one of the recipes for stuffed peppers and brought it to our meeting!

Bethy and I had experimented with making boca filters for her camera and made cute valentines for everyone!



I thought this book was a fun read, I like how we read a light teen read every once in a while they are just so relaxing to read. This was the first book in a series and I would like to read the other books.





The Robe has become a very special book in my life, I just found it so amazing and recommend it to everyone. It is hard to find words that really describe my feelings for this book, it is very thought provoking and it is something that I will always cherish.





This book was intense in the fact that it was like a million pages long and it wasn't a light fluffy million pages either. I am so glad that our book club read this though, it really made me develop a love and reverence for Abraham Lincoln and the man that he was and the acts that he did. The book club meeting was fun to we all dressed in red, white and blue and had a wonderful meal of soup in bread bowls, I brought my vegetable chowder and it was a total hit!





















Couples book club was really fun even if I didn't have a man to bring with me. We switched it up a bit and had a summer meeting in Beth and Reece's backyard since they were the ones moderating it. It was fun to see how the men got into the discussion and what their thoughts and feelings were about the book Ender's game. Beth and Reece made it fun by turning it into a Jeopardy game complete with daily doubles and everything!



















Oh my goodness none of us could wait for the final book of the Hunger Games trilogy to come out so we were all dying to talk about it!! Kelly moderated this one and did such an amazing job! We began with a trivia game and we were divided into team Peeta and team Gale haha such a girl thing, I loved it. She gave every member of the winning team a cd she had made of songs that had something to do with some aspect of the book or the characters, it was a really cool cd! She also found international book covers for this book which I thought was cool









She gave everyone a white rose with a quote from the book on it because of the way the evil President Cornelious Snow always surrounded himself with white roses, the details of every meeting are amazing! The real or not real quote is my favorite, I thought that was such a tender aspect of Peeta and Katnisses relationship.





The Help was suuuuch a good book, I loved reading it even though it did get pretty sad in the end. The meeting was so fun! Jillian brought candy cigarettes for everyone and we enjoyed bottled coke, both luxuries that were mentioned numerous times in the book.



I won the quiz that was about all the cleaning tips from Aibileen that are mentioned in the book!





December's book club meeting is no ordinary meeting. First of all every year they have chocolate and cheese fondue to set the mood for a classy evening. Then we have a book club boutique where members can bring their products to sell. I went crazy and bought two bags of crio bru, some delicious salt scrub and hang oil and some pepper jelly! Then we had our book discussion on Sarah which was excellent, that book is so great! THEN we have a white elephant gift exchange! The theme this year was my favorite things so you brought one of your favorite things to exchange, then when your gift is opened you tell everyone why it is one of your favorite things! It was a great way to do white elephant cause everyone left with something nice and you learned a little something about everyone!













Joining this book club has been such an enriching experience! I can't wait for next year!