Finally....Book Club

Ever since my friend Anna brought me with her to her book club I've always wanted to join one. I had so much fun with her when I went, I can remember the book, The Time Traveler's Wife, and we went out to this great Mexican restaurant, it was so much fun, but it was just too far away for me to go with her on a regular basis coming from Jersey after we moved. With grad school, the wedding and Rocky, I never had time to even look for a local book club to join, and unfortunately with working from home and not knowing many people in the area it was going to be almost impossible to stumble across one locally from the few people I do know.

So I did the next best thing, I looked online at places like meetup.com which do have a ton of book clubs to join, but most were in the city which just isn't convenient. I finally found one I was thinking about joining, it was a good 40 minutes away from the house but a small price to pay. Ironically I even knew one of the members in the group, someone that used to work with us. The first book club event I was going to go to also turned out to be the night that Gabriella was born, so that never worked out and I never made it to one of their next events with the Holidays and all.

Which lead me to my next plan, starting my own book club. If I couldn't find a book club to join, I was determined to start my own group, of course I'd have to find people to join me, or else I was destined to be a book club of one. When I was getting married I had sometimes posted on one of The Knots local community boards for Northern NJ to ask a couple questions about vendors and other local things that I had no idea about, or anyone else to ask. I decided to go back there and ask if anyone else would be interested in joining a local book club, I figured other young engaged, newlywed women would be the perfect place to start, at least we'd have something in common. Turns out there was a lot of other women that were interested in joining a local book club. I wound up getting 10 women that expressed an interest.

And with that I had other people to meet up with me, so I planned our first book club event to meet up after the Holidays were over. I had no idea what book to pick, I eventually settled on a Jodi Picoult book, Sing You Home, since I knew there were at least discussion questions at the back of the book, and also it was likely most people had not read it since it wasn't as popular as a book like The Help. Unfortunately within 24 hours of our scheduled meet up, several people had to cancel last minute, I almost thought I was destined to be a book club of one. But two other girls came through and we had a book club of 3.

I had a great time meeting with the other girls, we stayed on topic and discussed the book for the majority of our dinner conversation. It was such an easy book to talk about. I also loved that they said they were glad I had picked the book, they had both never read any Jodi Picoult books, and said they never would have read this otherwise and they both ended up loving the book, I did too.

We already have our next two months of book club get togethers planned. Next month we're reading "When We Were Strangers," a book I had never heard of either. And the following month I suggested we read "The Hunger Games", even though I've already read it, I'd love to read it again because that month we'll do dinner and a movie and go see the new film that will be coming out, which I cannot wait for, because of course Mike would never go see that. So at least for now I have two more months of book club to look forward to and hopefully we can keep it going from there.