holiday meeting

Not sure if anyone's checking this, but I thought I'd help Karen out. The next meeting will be Sunday, December 14. Not sure about the time. I'll say 6pm. Her comments below...

(1) THE BOOK
To celebrate the holiday season, we are all encouraged to read the first 599 pages of the 600 page book THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK.

(2) THE FESTIVITIES
I’ll whipping fresh batches of cookies for us to each decorate. Ready to call on your Monet talents? Prepared to recreate an Angelic Mona Lisa? Or perhaps you can channel VanGough (any broken-eared cookies)? I’ll have plenty of appealing selections of sprinkles, frostings, and other cookie enhancements to meet your strict artistic and most demanding of creative needs!

(3) WRAP A BOOK
In the tradition of last year, everyone please bring one of your “pre-read books” that you’d like to share with a fellow book club member. Wrap it up and we’ll play a game of random assigned numbers to each book and we’ll see who gets which one — and who is willing to trade! (Thank you again, Debbie Lee, for that idea last year).

(4) IF YOU WISH TO BRING SOMETHING...
Any appetizers, drinks, would be warmly welcomed. Please just let me know what you are thinking so I don’t duplicate. My thanks!

(5) LOCATION
1237 SO. Crescent Heights Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035

One block north of Pico on the west side of the street. 2-story gray house with a turret (caution: it is difficult to read house number in a drive-by). Plenty of street parking.

(6) RSVP

December?

Not sure when and if we'll be having a meeting in December, but the next book is The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter. Hope to see you soon.

November Meeting and Book

The next book club meeting will be hosted by Karina, Meredith and me on November 9 at 6:30 PM. Karen has enthusiastically offered to host December or Holiday book club meeting. Bring your sugar tooth to that one! We have decided to skip October to leave room to celebrate two of our members' monumental birthdays.

The book that we will be reading for November's meeting is:

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex by Olivia Judson.

Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Dr-Tatianas-Sex-Advice-Creation/dp/0805063323/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223315689&sr=1-1

It's an entertaining book on the creation rites of all creatures big and small. Who knows, we might be able to get some tips from fruit flies. See you in November!

Our address:
1230 Stearns Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90035

Karina and VanAn: 323-935-8252
Meredith: 323-857-1404

September Meeting

How does September 21 sound? I live in West LA, near the 405 and Olympic. I can send exact details as the date approaches. 

Thanks,

Liz

september book

Thanks for checking in, Liz, and offering to host the next meeting! Sorry, you weren't able to make it to the last one. It was a small group—just me, Debbie W., and Karen at Junko's house. I thought Junko might have posted since she took some photos of us and her adorable kids. Since it was so small, we spent more time chatting and watching the Olympics then discussing the book. Perhaps, Junko would like to fill in with more details, but we decided to read Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Let us know when the meeting will be.

Hope everyone is well, and that we'll be seeing you at the next one.

Debbie

Next meeting?

Hi Everyone!

Sorry I missed the last meeting - did you guys determine the next book?

Also, I can host the next meeting if you need someone to host.

I heard some of you guys went surfing with my friend, Roger, this past weekend. Small world!

Liz

Sunday, August 10, 6PM

Hi everyone!
It's the delinquent host here. Apologies for forgetting to post all the details - talk about having a party and no-one showing up...and that would be my own fault!

So with all the wonderful emails to remind the host here it is officially on our site:
The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield

Location:
View Larger Map
Junko Kobayashi house
2506 Berkeley Avenue
Los Angeles CA 90026
Cell: 818-807-8557
Hm: 213-413-5115
email: jjkdudette@gmail.com

Looking forward to seeing all of you and hope you will have time to read the book. It's actually quite good, mysterious, twisty turny and a pretty good summer read - if you can believe it, this is the first book written the author has written!

Cheers! Junko

selection

I would like to read a fiction book this time, since the last two were non-fiction. Any of the ones suggested are fine with me.

I think the whole voting thing after the meeting is not working. We used to do it via email, and we found that it was more effective to choose the next book at the meeting since figuring it out later proved to be a time-consuming and drawn-out process. It seems more prudent to be prepared at the meeting for suggestions and vote on it in person. If that doesn't happen, the person who is hosting the meeting next (or designated for choosing the book since Debbie W. volunteered to host a few meetings in a row) should simply make the decision. Part of the purpose of the blog is to have an ongoing list of suggested books to read. You can either choose from the most recently suggested or go back and review previous ones. You can take votes into consideration, but if none or little come in, just select one. For those who choose not to participate, then they'll just have to deal with it. We should have a deadline for the decision, maybe one week after the last meeting.

That's my two cents (perhaps I, along with others, appreciated the month break, but I wouldn't mind getting back into it again).

Truth & Beauty

Hi guys,

A friend recommended this book, in case we want to continue with Lucy Grealy's story. It's by one of her best friends, Ann Patchett, who wrote one of my all-time favorites, Bel Canto.

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, by Ann Patchett.

This memoir of Patchett's friendship with Autobiography of a Face author Lucy Grealy shares many insights into the nature of devotion. One of the best instances of this concerns a fable of ants and grasshoppers. When winter came, the hard-working ant took the fun-loving grasshopper in, each understanding their roles were immutable. It was a symbiotic relationship. Like the grasshopper, Grealy, who died of cancer at age 39 in 2002, was an untethered creature, who liked nothing more than to dance, drink and fling herself into Patchett's arms like a kitten. Patchett (The Patron Saint of Liars; Bel Canto) tells this story chronologically, in bursts of dialogue, memory and snippets of Grealy's letters, moving from the unfolding of their deep connection in graduate school and into the more turbulent waters beyond. Patchett describes her attempts to be a writer, while Grealy endured a continuous round of operations as a result of her cancer. Later, when adulthood brought success, but also heartbreak and drug addiction, the duo continued to be intertwined, even though their link sometimes seemed to fray. This gorgeously written chronicle unfolds as an example of how friendships can contain more passion and affection than any in the romantic realm. And although Patchett unflinchingly describes the difficulties she and Grealy faced in the years after grad school, she never loses the feeling she had the first time Grealy sprang into her arms: "[She] came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first."

-K

Ghost stories!!? I've got a good book!

Hi girls!
I'm sorry I missed the last book club, but, I was able to get some of the play-by-play from Cheryl, thank you. I'm a person with the crazy, impressionable imagination that can't handle horror flicks or scary books. I get nightmares from them and then feel those prickly things when I'm alone, even in my own house. Nevertheless, I still want to see the horror flicks and read the scary books, so go figure. Maybe this book might be fun, it's a mystery, with twists, interesting characters and some going back into time in England. ... Junko

My recommendation is The Thirteenth Tale - by Diane Setterfield

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com (I hope the link works below:) http://www.amazon.com/Thirteenth-Tale-Novel-Diane-Setterfield/dp/0743298039/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208468679&sr=1-1

Settle down to enjoy a rousing good ghost story with Diane Setterfield's debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale. Setterfield has rejuvenated the genre with this closely plotted, clever foray into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths. She never cheats by pulling a rabbit out of a hat; this atmospheric story hangs together perfectly.

There are two heroines here: Vida Winter, a famous author, whose life story is coming to an end, and Margaret Lea, a young, unworldly, bookish girl who is a bookseller in her father's shop. Vida has been confounding her biographers and fans for years by giving everybody a different version of her life, each time swearing it's the truth. Because of a biography that Margaret has written about brothers, Vida chooses Margaret to tell her story, all of it, for the first time. At their initial meeting, the conversation begins:

"You have given nineteen different versions of your life story to journalists in the last two years alone."

She [Vida] shrugged. "It's my profession. I'm a storyteller."

"I am a biographer, I work with facts."

The game is afoot and Margaret must spend some time sorting out whether or not Vida is actually ready to tell the whole truth. There is more here of Margaret discovering than of Vida cooperating wholeheartedly, but that is part of Vida's plan. The transformative power of truth informs the lives of both women by story's end, and The Thirteenth Tale is finally and convincingly told. --Valerie Ryan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Photos from 4-13-08

Enjoying a lovely meal before the discussion.

Happy Birthday Karen!

Check out all of that smoke! How many candles were on that thing?!

S'mores and ghost stories...

VanAn's suggestions

Thanks, Debbie, for hosting us in your fabulous backyard. I'm looking forward to the summer gatherings.

Since I finally read a book the entire way through, I now feel less guilty about choosing titles. I'd love to delve into some of the "iconic" authors just so I can sound incredibly well-read. I have two selections from W. Somerset Maughm:

The Moon and Sixpence
A short fictionalized account of the painter, Paul Gauguin's life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_and_Sixpence

OR

The Razor's Edge
Classic ex-soldier, ex-pat tale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Razor%27s_Edge

our history: 2002(?) - 2007

Believe it or not, I think the book club was started over five years ago. The founding members include myself, Karina and Meredith. We may have a couple members still with us from the initial meeting, but over the years we've seen people come and go. We didn't keep any official kind of records, but from what I can dig up from my cobwebbed memory, here are the books we've read (from most recent to our first book and approximated in between).

Infidel by Hirsi Ali
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Stealing Buddha's Dinner: A Memoir by Bich Minh Nguyen
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
English Passengers by Matthew Kneale
Black Betty by Walter Mosley
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen
Three Junes by Julia Glass
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
A Palestine Affair by Jonathan Wilson
The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru

A somewhat impressive list...although I may have missed or added a couple by mistake. Feel free to offer corrections if you happen to remember.

I'm up for reading Autobiography of a Face

sounds good to me! 

Pia's Suggestion with Better Description

I really, really hope we can read "Autobiography of a Face". This description does a way better job at describing the book. I want to read it all the way through *and* see everyone's reaction to it. Since I didn't get to suggest a book to read after hosting at my house, maybe you'll indulge me.

http://www.curledup.com/autoface.htm

:)

Pia

From Publishers Weekly
Diagnosed at age nine with Ewing's sarcoma, a cancer that severely disfigured her face, Grealy lost half her jaw, recovered after two and half years of chemotherapy and radiation, then underwent plastic surgery over the next 20 years to reconstruct her jaw. This harrowing, lyrical autobiographical memoir, which grew out of an award-winning article published in Harper's in 1993, is a striking meditation on the distorting effects of our culture's preoccupation with physical beauty. Extremely self-conscious and shy, Grealy endured insults and ostracism as a teenager in Spring Valley, N.Y. At Sarah Lawrence College in the mid-1980s, she discovered poetry as a vehicle for her pent-up emotions. During graduate school at the University of Iowa, she had a series of unsatisfying sexual affairs, hoping to prove she was lovable. No longer eligible for medical coverage, she moved to London to take advantage of Britain's socialized medicine, and underwent a 13-hour operation in Scotland. Her discovery that true beauty lies within makes this a wise and healing book.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

another book nominee

hi guys,

this book looks good to me, so i'll throw it in the mix.

Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
In the same way that the plains define the American landscape, small-town life in the heartlands is a quintessentially American experience. Holt, Colo., a tiny prairie community near Denver, is both the setting for and the psychological matrix of Haruf's beautifully executed new novel. Alternating chapters focus on eight compassionately imagined characters whose lives undergo radical change during the course of one year... Walking a tightrope of restrained design, Haruf steers clear of sentimentality and melodrama while constructing a taut narrative in which revelations of character and rising emotional tensions are held in perfect balance. This is a compelling story of grief, bereavement, loneliness and anger, but also of kindness, benevolence, love and the making of a strange new family. In depicting the stalwart courage of decent, troubled people going on with their lives, Haruf's quietly eloquent account illumines the possibilities of grace.

-K

book suggestion

I wanting to suggest the following books as possibilities for the next meeting.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Stiff/Oscar night

So, we didn't do too well this month. I was the only person in attendance that read the entire book, aside from Debbie W. who had suggested and previously read it. I think the gory parts along with the general subject matter were disturbing and off-putting to some. I agree that it was gross to read about and contemplate what happens to our bodies after we've left them. However, I found it somewhat fascinating to learn, for example, what happens after you donate your body to science or for "organ recovery," as well as learning green methods of dealing with and burial of remains (since cremation is not very environmentally-friendly).

The majority of the evening was spent watching the Oscars and discussing what movies, actors and outfits we did or did not like. We each filled out a ballot and Debbie W. won the prize for the most correct answers.

The others in attendance (besides the Debbies): Liz, Meredith, Pia, VanAn and Karina. The next book has not been chosen yet. If you want to share a comment about the last book or a suggestion for the next one, please post before Wednesday. Debbie W. will be hosting the next meeting and will also make the final decision on what book we'll be reading.

Hope to see you soon.

January 2008 meeting

For the record, Sarah hosted the January meeting and we discussed Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. In attendance were myself (Debbie L.), Sarah (of course), Karina, Liz, Debbie W., Pia, Junko, Cheryl and a warm welcome to our newest member, Eileen. We were about on target with 50% of the group in attendance finishing it—and overall, I think those who did finish the book enjoyed it. And thanks to Karina for sharing her lovely ceramics.

February 2008 meeting

We're reading Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. It should take you to Amazon if you click on the link. I'm also providing a link to the Los Angeles library, if you want to place it on hold (like I do each month—very convenient and cheap!). The meeting will be at my place in Glassell Park on Sunday, February 24. I'll send a reminder when it gets closer.

welcome

Welcome one and all to the 50% Club blog for Los Angeles readers! As you may or may not know, the 50% refers to the estimated number of members who have finished the book at the time of our monthly meetings—including those in attendance and not. It is also the approximate amount of time that meetings are given to the actual book discussion. The rest of it is spent catching up, noshing, drinking and sometimes, exchanging castoffs. Even though the numbers hover around 50%, it doesn't mean that we can't aspire to a higher percentage. And we definitely try to spend close to 100% of the time enjoying ourselves!

This blog will be a place to keep in touch, to check out what book we're reading, the next meeting location and time for those who weren't able to make it to the last one, as well as former members interested in keeping up. Hopefully, we can connect, encourage and support each other in our reading and in life.