I'd like to start by thanking the wonderful ladies who ventured out to
Columbia Cafe last night for our July meeting! I think we all had a wonderful time and as always, enjoyed an exciting meal. The Southern Belle Peach Salad was to die for!
We began the meeting with handouts...how could we not? Ha! I created card stock book marks to share with everyone as well as a slip of information about August's book selection
Zeitoun by Dave Eggars. If you weren't able to attend the meeting, on the top left corner of this page, you can click to print your own book marks as needed as a pdf file! Feel free to share them with your friends!
This month new member Wanda joined us. She is a friend of Suzie's and, as it turns out, she was once in a quilting club with Leslie! Welcome to the club Wanda (her birthday is the day of the next meeting, wink wink)!
Before we began talking about the July book selection, I talked a good bit about an article I read in the current issue of
Louisiana Cultural Vistas magazine (you can pick one up at Barnes & Noble or you can click
here to read the online version). The article is titled
Grace King, Le Petit Salon by Mary Ann Wilson. It talks about a popular literary club that began in New Orleans in 1924 with members such as Kate Chopin, Sherwood Anderson, George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Dorothy Dix, Tennessee Williams, and even Eleanor Roosevelt. In the 1800s, early 1900s, clubs of this description were not called "book clubs", but literary "SALONS". The salon in New Orleans eventually bought a cute little house that became the home base for the salon. Ladies wore their finest, furs, chiffons, crepes, gloves, etc. At the meeting, we longingly talked about what kind of "home base" we would aspire to have for ourselves and that when winter time comes, we would like to dress in our finest (furs, pearls, etc.) for a lady-like tea or something of that description.
We also discussed Girlfriend Weekend 2011. The theme is "it's all about the book" and each chapter is encouraged to come dressed as characters from a book of their choosing. We have started a list and will be open to suggestions for the following months so as to narrow down and make a choice closer to GF Weekend.
As for the book
The Recipe Club: A Tale of Food and Friendship, we all seemed to agree that the characters were petty and juvenile. None of us enjoyed reading a book of argumentative letters that seemed to drudge up our own past skeletons in our closets. On
August 31, same place, same time, we will discuss the book
Zeitoun by Dave Eggars (now in paperback) as well as
The Year Before the Flood by Ned Sublette, and
Yazoo Blues by Shreveport favorite John Pritchard. The staff at Columbia Cafe has offered to make us all Hurricanes to sip on during our meeting! So don't miss it!
P.S. All members will have the opportunity to share any book-related news, read anything they have written lately (even if it is a newsletter or journal entry), so if it's important to YOU, then it is important to our "Salon".
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It is old news that I am an Allen Whitley "groupie". I have joked recently that I even follow him across the South for signings. (although I actually showed up in Alabama first) Olivia Wright, the Head Pulpwood Queen of the Heart of Dixie chapter was able to get Allen set up several different signings in Alabama and Mississippi this week to promote his new book Where Southern Cross The Dog. She and I drove into Tuscumbia, Alabama...hometown of Hellen Keller and blues musician W.C. Handy, for Allen's first official book signing at Cold Water Books (a building dating back to the 1800s). 
