20 September: The Book Club Gets Curious

Today we discussed a fascinating book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, which was recommended by Debbie, our resident literati. It’s the first-person narrative of a 15-year-old boy with a serious form of autism, who discovers his neighbor’s dog impaled with a garden pitchfork and sets out to find the murderer. I enjoyed the book more than I expected, and we had a very good time discussing it, interrupted only occasionally by Cody shoving his toy duck into people’s laps. I made my grandma's fresh apple cake, a delicious moist cake topped with sticky-sweet icing, which seemed to go over well with everyone. It was Debbie's 60th birthday last week so she brought a bottle of Sekt to celebrate with us.

Brenda picked our next book, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, which should be quite different from our previous reads, as it is a sci-fi novel set in space, eighty years after a massive alien attack on planet Earth. It came out in 1985 and won a number of awards, and is supposed to be made into a movie next year. I realize this is not a normal pick for a women’s book club, but we are not a normal group of women! And Brenda was really anxious for us to read some sci-fi. The next meeting will be in November and will be the last book club I will host at my house, so we’ll have to do something special to celebrate.