Skip to content

Finer Things

The Finer Things Club Page

A book club for people like me: At the awkward age between old and young

who want to read a bit of both.

~

 

For those who aren’t familiar with the history of The Finer Things Club, I’ll elaborate.

The Finer Things Club began with me mentioning, innocent and totally clueless about where this would lead, that I would love to be in a book club, but that I hadn’t found many for folks my age, and that, honestly, I wanted a say in the book-choosing. My ever-ambitious mom immediately came up with an easy fix to my dilemma: Let’s start a book club.

The name “The Finer Things Club” was inspired by an episode of “The Office” – which is slightly embarrassing to admit. Pam, Oscar, and Toby had a refined and proper club named The Finer Things Club, where they discussed art, literature, etc.

A few months after my mom decided to host a book club, on March 12th, 2008, the first meeting of The Finer Things Club was held in our bonus room. Accompanying the 15+ girls (there are fewer now, but we still have many members) – all between the ages of 10 and 16. I was 12 at the time – was a whole lot of yummy food (e.g. fondue, chocolate covered raisins, Italian sodas -which by now have been substituted by juice-, cheese ball, crackers, etc. The menu’s been adjusted a bit as time’s gone on).

FT meets once a month. Previously, it’s been the second Friday of every month at 7:30, but we’re switching the times around to accommodate as many people’s schedules as possible. (Book club girls: We’re contemplating moving over to the first Friday.) We read one book each month that my mom and I have picked beforehand. Last month (on March 5th), we held our two year anniversary and celebrated by going out to see “Alice in Wonderland” (which we had just read and discussed).

FT has a not-so-strict schedule that my mom organized before we began…

I hors d’oevres – We line up around the ping-pong table/dinner table and serve ourselves (we sign in as we do this).

II dignity and order – My mom calms the incessant chatter of teenage girls (and, of course, it never quite goes away. We digress a lot).

III brief infatuations – We discuss other books we’d read and loved that month.

IV making headlines – People who have book-related headlines to announce do so.

V digestion and satisfaction – We discuss the book club book of that month.

VI footnotes – We address questions about the book.

VII welcome the debutant – We introduce the new book. Someone reads about 5 minutes worth of it, and we pass around slip sheets (slip sheets are bookmarks to most of us, but are also intended to have notes written on them. Also printed on the slip sheets are the date of the next meeting, the book title, and the author).

VIII au revoir – We say goodbye. It’s usually around 9:30 by this time.

Occasionally, we’ll do something special, such as watching a movie (we have a nine-foot wide screen and a projector in that room. It’s fun), going to a movie, etc. This summer, we plan to stay at a beach house my family likes and have book club there.

So that’s a bit on The Finer Things Club. The remainder of this page shall be used for frequently-updated information for the actual book club members. Below that you can find a list of the books we’ve read so far.

FT This Month

The Book: Paranormalcy by Kiersten White

Synopsis from the jacket:

Weird as it is working for the International Paranormal Containment Agency, Evie’s always thought of herself as normal. Sure, her best friend is a mermaid, her ex-boyfriend is a faerie, she’s falling for a shape-shifter, and she’s the only person who can see through paranormals’ glamours, but still. Normal.

Only now paranormals are dying, and Evie’s dreams are filled with haunting voices and mysterious prophecies. She soon realizes that there may be a link between her abilities and the sudden rash of deaths. Not only that, but she may very well be at the center of a dark faerie prophecy promising destruction to all paranormal creatures.

So much for normal.

You can read my review here: Paranormalcy by Kiersten White; Review

The book has been doing well since it came out at the end of August, which means that there are probably a lot of them at Borders. However, there could also be very few because, as I said, it’s been doing well. You’ll have to check.

I own a copy, and my mom and I have checked one out at the library. We’re willing to lend both. There are more copies at the library as well.

The Date:

Book club will be at my house, per usual, on Saturday, November 20th (?) at seven.

Updates:

None.

 

And, of course, if any of you or your parents have questions/comments, please email my mom.

FT Books Read:

1. The Giver by Lois Lowry

2. An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott

3. Shackleton’s Stowaway by Victoria McKernan

To Be Continued… (I can’t remember all of them.)

Advertisements
No comments yet

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://madeleinerex.wordpress.com/finer-things/?shared=email&msg=fail
madeleinerex.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-30
95889
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5TMP3ZBBRQYA6BD65HO3256E2UIPWXRC
<urn:uuid:151f0a4b-e941-4f27-9d15-25244d6471c1>
2019-07-23T11:11:07Z
192.0.78.13
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:Q223A25XVCHNKNODDFJA2J7QYMOGCAOR
<urn:uuid:92859f6a-ed4c-405a-b046-b1c42af50b66>
https://madeleinerex.wordpress.com/finer-things/?shared=email&msg=fail
response
<urn:uuid:2a399ce8-03cc-4601-8cac-b186b551afdd>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-30
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-95-236-185.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/