What We're Reading!

November 19: The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs. A group of women meeting in a yarn shop become more than a knitting club, they become a sisterhood. According to the blurbs I read we should be on the lookout for unexpected changes and the unthinkable happening in the women's lives. NOTE: this month we're meeting the third Thursday instead of the fourth because of Thanksgiving.
December 17: We'll be holding a Christmas book party. Bring a wrapped book to swap in the gift exchange, something edible, and something Christmassy to read to the others, like a poem or children's book or whathaveyou. NOTE: In December we are also meeting on the third Thursday instead of the fourth.

January 28: America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines by Gail Collins. From Amazon's review:

Well researched and well written, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines is a powerful and important book. Starting with Pocahontas and Eleanor Dare (the first female colonist), this lively and fascinating history records the changes in American women's lives and the transformations in American society from the 1580s through the 2000s.

A history of the oft-marginalized sex must often draw from diaries and journals, which were disproportionally written by whites; as a result, African-American and Native American women are not as well represented as white in the earlier chapters of America's Women. However, Gail Collins writes about women of many races and ethnicities, and in fact provides more information about Native Americans, African-Americans, and Chinese, Jewish, and Italian immigrants than some general U.S. history books. She writes about rich and poor, young and old, urban and rural, slave and slave-owner, athlete and aviatrix, president's wife and presidential candidate--and, of course, men and women. And some of these women--from the justly famous, like Clara Barton and Harriet Tubman, to the undeservedly obscure, like Elizabeth Eckford and Senator Margaret Chase Smith--will not only make any woman proud to be a woman, they will make any American proud to be American.

February 25: An as-yet-undetermined romance. Possibly one of the recent Jane Austen "sequels", but probably not Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

March 25: In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez. From Amazon: ". . . this tale of courage and sisterhood [is] set in the Dominican Republic during the rise of the Trujillo dictatorship. A skillful blend of fact and fiction, In the Time of the Butterflies is inspired by the true story of the three Mirabal sisters . . . Alvarez breathes life into these historical figures--known as "las mariposas," or "the butterflies," in the underground--as she imagines their teenage years, their gradual involvement with the revolution, and their terror as their dissentience is uncovered."