I've started reading The Handmaid's Tale. Very disturbing, but an excellent read so far! It's weird that I've never looked twice at this book before. I've noticed it, but something about the combination of the cover and title just never enticed me to pick it up.

Atwood is amazing. You should read anything she's ever written--seriously.

And has anyone read the Black Dagger Brotherhood books? I'm debating giving those a try, but I think I'm over my teen vampire story phase (thank goodness!)

TERRIBLY written. Fun if you can look beyond that. (I actually enjoyed the sheer ridiculousness of the the Mary Sues/Marty Stus and the amount of cliche, though. I'm perverse that way.)

I loved The Handmaid's Tale, Rayne. I read it in one day on jury duty, actually.

I definitely want to read the first two Hunger Games books before the third one comes out (but I'll probably wait until closer to the release date).

It comes out in August, just so you know.

Pix, I saw the latest E. George at B&N, but it's still hardcover! Off to the library with me.

Pix, I saw the latest E. George at B&N, but it's still hardcover!

Yep, I sprung for the $12.99 on the Kindle.

It comes out in August, just so you know.

But they do read quickly.

On the other hand, I'm still not making progress on Don Quixote. Of course, half the people in my book salon did not finish their quest book so we are going to continue the topic for another meeting.

(By the way, for anyone that hates the idea of a regular book club, our first meeting went very well. And the great thing about the salon concept was that we could discuss the topic without having finished.)

Mostly, I've been distracted by Wolf Hall, which I am loving. So much so that Hornet's Nest is just sitting there unread!

What do you mean by salon concept? My only book club attempt was kind of disastrous. We tried to do the Booker winners and we hated most of them.

Instead of everyone reading the same book, we pick a theme and people read any book that fits the theme. It is mostly people who are looking to read classics, so I came up with a few themes and suggested book lists that were mostly classics with a few contemporary classics.

Our first theme was quests. Here is the list I proposed:
Aeneid
Beowulf
Don Quixote
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Lord of the Rings
Moby-Dick
Le Morte d’Arthur
Odyssey
The Pilgrim's Progress
The Road
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Watership Down
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Stephen King's "The Body"

Here's what people read:
Dante's Inferno
Don Quixote
Moby-Dick
The Razor's Edge
The Road
Watership Down

Our next theme is eponymous heroines.

Cherchez la femme!

Classic Novels and Plays
Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
Emma (Jane Austen)
Hedda Gabler (Ibsen)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
Lysistrata (Aristophanes)
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Manon Lescaut (Prévost)
Medea (Euripides)
Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe)
Nana (Émile Zola)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)

Children’s Literature
Mary Poppins (P. L. Travers)
Coraline (Neil Gaiman)
Pippi Longstocking (Astrid Lindgren)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding)
Carrie (Stephen King)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles)
Lolita (Nabokov)
My Ántonia (Willa Cather)
Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark)
Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser)
Sophie’s Choice (William Styron)

Rebecca's cheating! She's not the heroine!

That's a great theme, though,

And man, $12.99 for a brand-new book is great incentive to think about a Kindle.

Mostly the themes revolve around the “should-read” books I decided I need to read this year (for example, Don Quixote and My Antonia for the above lists).

So we will do “Classic Boys Adventures” to force me to get through The Count of Monte Cristo and "Dystopian Novels" for The Handmaid’s Tale, and "Russian Roulette" for War and Peace. There's also “Water, Water, Everywhere" and then I'm going to propose "Classic Horror" in October.

I love that idea for a book club. It makes me want to start one up again.