Book club location!

Ladies!

Book club is tomorrow night at 6:30, and a location has been picked. We will meet at the Panera Cafe in Eden Prairie. (It is conveniently located at Eden Prairie Center - 8251 Flying Cloud Drive, Eden Prairie, MN 55344)

Looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow night!! Please let me know if you cannot attend.

-SKH

How is it possible...

...that we have THREE women named Lisa in our group of 15 women? That's literally 20% of our entire group.

We also have two Suzann(e)s, which is a bit of an uncommon name.

Small world, people. Small world.

Who's excited for next Tuesday? (I am! I am!)

-SKH

Our next meeting date - Tuesday, July 15th!

The date has finally been selected! I’m really sorry if it is a day you cannot attend, it was tough to come up with a common date. This was the one that the most people could attend. Let me know if you have a suggestion on a café in Eden Prairie or Edina where we should meet.

As a reminder, we are reading My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands by Chelsea Handler. We have a list of books we'd like to read for upcoming meetings started on the group's blog, so check that out and pick the ones you'd like to vote for our next book as well.

Please let me know that you got this invite…I'm not sure if Outlook invites work on non-Outlook email addresses.

Looking forward to it!!!

-Samantha

New alternate dates for book club

Ladies,

I sent out an email this week, checking in on alternate dates. Please take a minute to let me know which of those new dates work for you, and I will finalize the date.

Tuesday, July 8
Wednesday, July 9
Thursday, July 10
Tuesday, July 15
Wednesday, July 16
Thursday, July 17

Happy reading!

-SKH

Grab Bag Book Club - the Blog

Hi all,

Most of you don't know me, but I'm Samantha Hensch's sister, and I'm a member of the Grab Bag Book Club. To better facilitate our scheduling and book choosing needs, I thought it might be a good idea to start a blog, as it works well for my friends in another book club. I've invited each member to become an author, and I hope you will accept the invitation. Authorship allows each person to post entries containing ideas, thoughts, opinions, etc. My friends also designate a "host" each month, and that person is in charge of posting details about the book choice, date, time, and location. These are just some ideas - we can make this whatever we want.

To start, I reposted Samantha's personal blog entry about the next meeting. I don't think we have a date set yet, so let's try to get that nailed down (I believe Samantha offered three choices). If you haven't responded to Samantha yet, please feel free to respond to either the first entry or this entry via the post a comment feature. I think that makes more sense than actually posting a new entry each time. If there is already a set date, and I missed it, I apologize! The date, time, and location will all be posted once we figure that out, so stay tuned.

Hope this works well for everyone!

Lisa

PS: I'm working on the book for the upcoming meeting, and I definitely have some thoughts to share... ;)

Repost from Samantha's Blog

The Grab Bag Book Club met for the first time last week, and we discussed a book by a local author (Patty Jane's House of Curl by Lorna Landvik). We had a great time discussing the book, and picking out some of our upcoming books. I think we have determined that we all have different tastes in books, but we do all agree that we are looking for more fun reads, not ones that are super in-depth or serious. To that aim, we came up with a bunch of books that look good!

I found a great site called Reading Group Guides that has tons of great resources for a book club leader - ideas for books, themes, questions to guide discussions, meeting location ideas and more. Check it out. :) We found some of our "to read" books from that site.

The book we are reading for our next meeting is not on that site, but it does promise to be hilarious: My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands by Chelsea Handler. Erin Jane thought her books would be very funny.

Here is a list of some of the other books that the attendees last week agreed on:

1. Mrs. Perfect by Jane Porter
2. Searching for Paradise in Parker, PA by Kris Radish
3. No Good Girls by Jean Marie Pierson
4. Names My Sisters Call Me by Megan Crane
5. Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen (my mom and I have read this and it is phenomenal...she has a new book out now called The Sugar Queen that we could read, but it is only in hardcover, so that could make it a bit tougher. However, I think it would be worth it. FYI, it's also available on the Kindle.)
6. Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch
7. My Best Friend's Girl by Dorothy Koomson

We also had a couple of maybes, looking for approval or not from the folks who couldn't make our first meeting on these ones:

1. Things I Want My Daughters to Know by Elizabeth Noble
2. The Next Thing on My List by Jill Smolinski

Our next book club meeting is going to be at the end of June (I'm thinking either Thursday the 26th or Monday the 30th, or even Tuesday, July 1st), where we'll be discussing the Chelsea Handler book. If you have any suggestions for a meeting location, or for another good book to read (either from the lists above or anywhere else!), please send them to me. It's always best to have a lot of options on our "to-read" list, plus you may find that one of these interests you and you want to read it now!

Please let me know which date works best for you, or if a date doesn't work for you.

• Thursday, June 26th
• Monday, June 30th
• Tuesday, July 1st

Happy reading (try not to shoot Diet Coke out of your nose when you realize how hilarious Chelsea Handler is...)

-SKH