Not Your Grandma's Sunday Afternoon Book Club

Question: What do you do when your book club chooses a book that everyone agrees will elicit about 15 minutes worth of discussion?

Answer: Host a fantastic dinner party wherein all participants are required to wear a wig and bring a delicious dish. Thank you, Liza! It was a beautiful night; everyone participated in the merriment; and there was so much laughter - a great success!

For August, we read Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires, a memoir chronicling her six years spent as The New York Times' food critic. During her tenure, she found it necessary to dress in disguises to hide her identity and gain a realistic dining experience at the restaurants she reviewed. Hence, our themed evening.
It was an okay book. The author began to take on the persona of the different women she embodied - talking like them, acting like them, empathizing with their plights, which was sort of interesting. She included an assortment of recipes, none of which anyone brought to the party, which Caroline astutely pointed out as being curious. She also reprinted her published reviews from the Times, which after reading the accounts of her various experiences in prose, was simply overkill. It was certainly not a meaty enough idea to fill all 328 pages of book.

On the plus side, we had a marvelous time at the party and selected our books for the next few months:

September - To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
October - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
November-ish - The Ha-Ha, Dave King
December-ish - The Secret History, Donna Tartt
January - The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald
February - Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain
March - The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
April - Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen

Additionally, Liza and I had a very interesting day wig shopping Saturday. I won't go into great detail, but let's just say when a wig store owner tells you there is a five-wig-try-on-limit, that is precisely what she means. And don't try to go down the street to another wig store. She will alert the next merchants of your behavior and the next merchants will monitor you with in-store cameras. Five wigs, dammit. That's it.

Easy Rider

I have ridden my bike to and from work for the past two months, except for one day last week when it was raining and Bonnie gave me a ride. I'm convinced one of my peers put a hex on me by asking if I'd had any trouble with poor weather conditions. "Not so far," I replied cheerily. And of course, downpour the next morning.

I like riding. It's good to get the skunk out of the boat in the morning and, in the evening, it's a nice way to blow off steam. Yesterday I cursed under my breath the whole ride home. It was glorious. And by the time I walked in the front door I was totally over whatever it was.

Thursday is my least favorite day to commute. It's trash day and the whole ride smells like garbage. But nine out of ten normal-smelling commutes is a pretty good record.