Argonauta’s Picks for 2024-25

The Argonauta Book club met and chose the books we want to read.

Month                            Book                                        Author

September                Still Life                                    Louise Penny

October                    Rules to Live by                        Barbara Walters

November                People of the Book                    Geraldine Brooks

December                Remarkable Creatures                Sherry Van Pelt

January                    The Sunflower                            Simon Wiesenthal

February                   The Heaven & Earth Store        James McBride

March                        As Goes A River                       Sherry Read

April                        Demon Copperhead                    Barbara Kingslover

May                         Things I Wish I Told Mother      Patterson

June                          The Bee Sting                            Paul Murray

Titles and Author most likely are a bit askew.  I didn't check any of these.  This is off the top of my head.  I think you can figure them out.

We have been meeting for a long time.  Some of us think it might have been since the 1980's.  We've lost some people and we brought in some new, but a few years ago, we decided to not accept new people.  We're set.  Others wouldn't understand.

2022-23 Argonauta

 My Book Club, Argonauta, has released its reads for 2022-2023.

1. September 8, 2022

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

2. October 13, 2022

Apples Never Fall Far by Liane Moriarty

3. November 10, 2022

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines

4. December 15, 2022

Book to be decided; perhaps Celebrations: Rituals of Peace and Prayer by Maya Angelou

5. January 12, 2023

State of Terror by Hilary Clinton

6. February 9, 2023

The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margo by Marianne Cronin

7. March 8, 2023

Moloka’i by Alan Brennert

8. April 13, 2023

Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys

9. May 11, 2023

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

10. June 8, 2023

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Other Suggestions

Freedom – Jonathan Franzen

Crow Lake – Mary Lawson

Jill: A Biography of the First Lady – Julie Pace

Brothers and Wives – Christopher Anderson

The Palace Papers – Tina Brown

The Girl Who Came Home – Hazel Gaynor

The Tender Land – William Krueger

The Tobacco Wives – Adele Myers

The Girl with the Louding Voice – Abi Dare

Survival

Educated by Tara Westover is the next selection in the Argonauta Book Club.  It's an easy hard read.  I mean the narrative is understandable and coherent, but the subject is difficult.  This is Tara Westover's memoir.

Her childhood makes mine seem perfect.  Her father was a tyrant.  An older brother was physically abusing his siblings but their parents defend him.  This is not ancient history; everyone is still living.  Tara is still estranged from her parents.

Remember Ruby Ridge in 1992.  Tara's family is similar.  They're so anti-government they're paranoid.  And I don't think being Mormon has anything to do with it.  It just happens that the predominant religion in their area is Mormon and that's where they go to church. When Tara went to college at Brigham Young University, all the Mormons there thought she was crazy. 

It's her parents that are crazy.

2019-2020 Reading List

Argonauta has chosen its book selections for this year.

Argonauta Book Club    2019-20  

September 12          Where The crawdads Sing     Delia Owens  

                     

                            

October  10      Jerusalem Maid   Talia Carner

 

                          

 

November 14      Becoming   Michelle Obama    

      

 

December  12    Waiting On The Word     Malcolm  Guite

 

                             

 

January 9        A Gentleman In Moscow    Amor Towles 

 

                             

  

February 13      Educated   Tara Westover  

                                                                  

                          

      

March 12           Orhan's Inheritance   Aline Ohanesian

 

                           

                            

April 9                The Beantown Girls     Jane Healey

 

                            

May  21              Lost Girls Of Paris     Pam Jenoff          

 

                          

June   11               An exciting book we don't know about yet!!

Black and White

The book for May in my book club group, Argonauta, was The Tea Planter's Wife by Dinah Jefferies. At first, I didn't like it.  Probably, my fault.  I am used to reading non-fiction books and encyclicals and papal exhortations, so a story seemed silly.  The characters annoyed me.  Of course, I'm not used to reading about people!  The main character, the tea planter's wife, Gwendolyn, seemed to be always whining about one thing or another.  Her husband, Laurence wasn't communicative.  His sister was a kaleidoscope of emotions and actions. If it weren't assigned by Argonauta, I would have thrown the silly book across the room.  But that's the beauty of belonging to a book club.  You read books you would have never read on your own.  You learn and learn to appreciate books you would never have approached.  And this is what happened to me and The Tea Planter's Wife.

When Gwendolyn gave birth to one black twin and one white twin, I became involved with her.  I, as the author, Dinah Jefferies, intended, thought the father was Ravasinge.  Spoiler alert!  I learned (yes I did research) that it is biologically possible for two sperm from two different men to impregnate a woman.

The story took off from there.  Gwendolyn, Verity, Laurence, and Naveena are woven into a mesh of circumstances that tie their familial interests into an emotional mess.  The setting of Ceylon at the beginning of World War II and the political and economic stress add to the tension of the plot.

Yes, I learned to enjoy the book.  The ending is a page-turner.  The storyline is different.  I am recommending the book. The only question I have is why was Laurence's sister given the name Verity?  Verity is a derivative of "truth"
and I don't see what that has to do with her character.

Argonauta's Selections

This is how one of my book clubs (Argonauta) chooses its book selections.  No more Irish stories, memoirs, and mysteries.  Not because they're not good, au contraire; it's that we've read too many and are sick of them.  I predict we will add African stories to the list because there's two on this year's list.

We met in a restaurant for breakfast--a quiet, not rushed atmosphere, place.  Each of us ordered a huge breakfast.  After breakfast, the bidding discussion began.  Here are erthe resulting selections:

September:  Lilac Girl by Marsha Hall KellOctober:  Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
November:  Britt Marie Was Here by Felix Bachmann
December:  Bossy Pants by Tina Fey                                        
January: Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
February:  Eleanor Oliphant by Gail Honeyman
March:  The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper
April: Arthur Truluv by Elizabeth Burke
May:  The Tea Planter's Wife by Dinah Jefferies
June-August: To Be Decided

We leave the last months open because, during the year, one of us will read something so fantastic that they insist the book be read.  This always happens.  Also, during these free months, we come across books we want to recommend for Argonauta's list. This method works for us.

By the way, I know I misspelled authors and titles.  I also know you will correct me.  

Gamma

Gamma is the name my youngest grandchild calls me.  Makes sense; if your mother is Ma then it follows that Grandmother is Gamma.

Oh no, I'm sounding like the story I just finished, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, by Fredrik Backman. If you like fantasy, you'll enjoy this book.  I had trouble getting into it. Simultaneously, I'm reading: Mary, Queen of Heaven by Scott Hann, Chesterton's Everlasting Man (for the second time), Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching by Anthony Esolen, and The Many Sides of Peace by Brayton Shanley, among various others, which explains why reading a novel like My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry was hard to get used to.

Of course, I did -- get used to it.  How could one not?  This is the type of book that keeps a smile on your face throughout your entire reading.  The theme is the importance of grandmothers to their grandchildren.  Intergenerational differences are celebrated.  In fact, individual differences are celebrated per se.  The story line involves a little girl delivering letters (which isn't easy) to people the grandmother wants to apologize to.  This simple idea, however, is interwoven in the fantasy world the grandmother made up for children.  It works, trust me, it works ingeniously.

My favorite part of the book is when two grandparents visit their grandson in prison.  This direct quote will give you a taste of the author's writing:

And probably a lot of people think Maud and Lennart shouldn't do that, and that types like Sam shouldn't even be allowed to live, let alone eat cookies.  And those people are probably right.  And they're probably wrong too.  But Maud says she's firstly a grandmother and secondly a mother-in-law and thirdly a mother, and this is what grandmothers and mothers-in-law and mothers do.  They fight for the good.

See why I enjoyed the book?  By the way, this is a Christmas story because of the timing of the climax and ending.  So it was perfect for my book club, Argonauta, whose Christmas party is tonight.  I finished this book at breakfast--nine hours before the meeting.  I had to finish it.  I enjoyed it too much to miss out on the discussion.  I recommend it so you don't miss out on this unique story and delightful gamma.

Argonauta 2015

This is the day my book club, Argonauta, met to choose our book selections for the year.  It did not begin very well.  We planned to meet at a certain place for breakfast.  However, when we arrived we found out that the place was closed for the week.  It was their vacation.  So we made a few telephone calls and settled upon another place, in a different town, for lunch.

This place was wonderful.  We arrived at 11:00 AM and they opened at 11:00 AM.  That meant that we were the only people in the restaurant.  They'd be no chance of us being kicked out due to our rowdy behavior.

Two hours later, after much laughter, arguing over Atticus Finch, (Iconic character), and clapping, we came up with the following:

The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant

Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee

The Nightingale by Kristen Hanna

A Desperate Fortune by Susana Kearsley

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamand Ngozi Adichie

The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian

Me Before You by Jojo Moynes

Argonauta

The Argonauta met today to pick out next year's selection of books.  These are the book club's picks:

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James
Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight
Christmas at Eagle Pond by Donald Hall
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Natchez Burning by Greg Iles
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
A Star for Mrs. Blake by April Smith
50 Children by Steven Pressman

Typical Book Club Meeting

As of four hours ago, I had nothing to post.  I would have posted something, according to my personal philosophy.  But nothing inspired me, then.  I also knew something would happen at Book Club.  It usually does.

The book club has been going on for years and years.  It's beyond ten years.  The name is Argonauta, because the first book we ever read was Anne Murrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, and in it she talked about the seashells, Argonaut.  They travel the seas, and that, to us, conveys adventure.  Hence, we chose Argonauta as our Book Club's name.

Hors D'oeuvres

Tonight, we discussed The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh.  Keeping with the flower theme, our hostess had flowers around her living room and dining room.  Her dining table was beautifully set with hydrangeas.  We all love hydrangeas, but in The Language of Flowers, they meant dispassion.

For hors d'oeuvres we had shrimp with two kinds of dips, a couple of cheeses, chili, etc.  Of course, the wine was whatever your little heart desired: white, red, or rose.

Desserts

We discussed the book and relished the food and wine.  We all loved the book.  We also planned to go to Nantucket or Block Island to see the daffodil festivals; but of course, we won't.  The fun is the planning.  "Getting our act together" is difficult.

Boston Cream and Carrot Cake

After the book discussion, we adjourned to the dining room.  Here our hostess outdid herself.  A big bouquet of hydrangeas was the centerpiece, with candles.  At each table setting was a little gift, for each of us--a ladybug planter.  In the ladybug was a tea rose.  The beverage was decaffeinated tea or coffee.  The wine was still available.  We had cupcakes to accompany our drinks.  We had two kinds of cupcakes.  One choice was Boston cream cupcakes.  The other was carrot cake with cream cheese.  I had both.  Don't think I'm a pig; I cut each one in half.  So it was really only one cupcake.

Ladybug Planters

Something happened while we were departing that made tonight different from all other book club nights.  As I was leaving, I heard "help," "help."  I looked at the direction the cries were coming from.  I thought I saw an animal running up and down beside the driveway.  One of us ran over to the "animal" and was talking to it.  Then the scene became clearer.  It wasn't an animal running back and forth; it was a hand waving help.  Someone, somehow, had fallen in the snow, right beside the driveway.  Then the one who was helping, got pulled down into the snow, trying to pull the other one out.  Now there were two in the snow.

Others ran to help and pull them out.

Not me; I was taking pictures to post on Facebook.  I only had my phone.  It was dark and the driveway didn't have enough light.  So what you are seeing is the backside of the one, trying to pull up the other.  I wish the picture had come out better.  They will never live this down.

As I said before, Argonauta conveys adventure.

What you are looking at is Monique trying to pull Linda out of the snow.
Don't ask how she fell into the snow bank.
What happens to Argonauta, stays with Argonauta.

My turn to host, next month.

You're a Gossip, a Liar, and a Do Good Failure

The Argonauts were discussing The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye by Rachel Joyce.  One of the supporting impetuses of the pilgrimage was a story someone told Harold.  What’s interesting, we find out in the end, is that the story was made up.

This story reminded me of my own.  I had a friend, whom I wanted to encourage.  I made up a story of a friend in similar circumstances.  It had a happy ending.

Well, my friend whom I was trying to encouraged, backed away from me.  She scolded me for being a gossip.  She said that I shouldn't be talking about people behind their backs.  And if this is what I did to friends, then she didn't want to be considered a friend of mine.  Then she turned around and walked out of my life.   

Paralyzed in shock, I think would describe my reaction.  I didn't dare call her back to explain that I made the entire story up.  What would she have called me then?

Argonauta Picks

As usual, the Argonauta Book Club ate a gourmet brunch at Jayne's. Here are this year's picks:

The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman

The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Patzsch

Wench by Dolen by Perkins-Valdez

A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver

the Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Beyond the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

The Dovekeeper by Alice Hoffman

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

I know the spelling is bad but we'll still be able to access the books.  Can't wait to read them!

New Book

Wait till I tell the Argonauts (my book club) about The Father's Tale. I ordered this book by Michael O'Brien on a whim. I knew nothing about him, or his books. I happened to see a full page add of the book in Catholic Digest and ordered it. It's 1075 pages!

He's written quite a few novels, and I have read Father Elijah. I remember liking that novel and thinking that it was thought provoking. I can't wait to read The Father's Tale. I'll tell you about it, as I progress.

Pea Pods, Chipmunks, Hissing Cat, and the Argonauts

It's about an hour before the Argonauta Book Club and I'm pooped.  What a day!  I'm glad I only have to host the club once a year; it's a lot of work.

I've got two different kinds of cheeses and basil and tomato crackers.  I've got salsa and chips.  A big bowl of grapes is the centerpiece.  I've got honey roasted peanuts, chocolate almonds, and unsalted peanuts.  I've macaroons and hermits.  A mile high apple pie will be served last.

I'm also trying something I'm not sure about.  See the picture.  That's a picture of either snow peas or snap peas.    I read a recipe somewhere and thought it was simple enough not to copy it down.  I made an onion dip to stuff the peas.  But when I opened the peas there were seeds in them.  Do I leave them in?  They were soft and I ate some.  But I chose to take them out.  Get that--I bothered to take out these itsy bitsy peas, out of their pods.

So I hope Jayne is the first member to arrive.  She's a gourmet cook and will tell me.

As I looked over the snack food, I checked what I had to drink: coffee, tea, apple cider, and Chardonnay, Merlot, and Sangria.  Mmmmmmm.  Most of the ladies drink Pinot Grigio.  So I ran out to Liquor World.

While I was gone, all hell broke loose.  Out of the corner of my husband's eye, he saw a chipmunk run across the living room.  A CHIPMUNK!  


What if that happened during Book Club?

Luckily, the chipmunk ran out to our screened porch--where the cat was.  Hubby closed the sliders so the chipmunk couldn't get back in the house.  He then open the screen door, so the chipmunk would run out.  The cat caught him and dropped him at hubby's feet.  Hubby picked up the cat and opened the slider and threw the cat in the house.  (And she's been in a "piss ass" mood ever since.)  Anyway, back to the drama on the porch.  That stupid chipmunk would not run out the opened door.  Hubby had a dickens of a time trying to shoo it out.  At one point the chipmunk sat down in the middle of the threshold to the door.  What a dumb ass!  That chipmunk ran around the porch, up the grill, across the table, until hubby threw a towel over it.  He scooped it up and brought it outside.

The cat's been looking for it, ever since.

I came home to listen to this tale.  Can you imagine if that chipmunk ran across the floor in the middle of our discussion of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand?  This meeting would be the topic of discussion amongst my friends and I, for the rest of our lives.  Never mind my worrying about taking peas out of pods, or not.