Monday we went up to San Jose to meet with our book club. This month's book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time went over smashingly well. In fact, it was the first book that I remember as one that the entire book club liked. We're pretty diverse and there's usually one or two dissenting voices. We've also had a couple of books that were unanimously hated--giving the person who suggested it the Mantle of Shame until the next awful book comes along (poor Kevin wore the Mantle for this book for a while). We've had a couple of extremely popular books that we've unanimously hated. But I honestly can't remember a book that everyone liked--and I've been in the club for 5 years.
I won't rehash Curious Incident--you can go read the description on Amazon--but I have been recommending it right and left and it's such a short, easy book to read it shouldn't take a reasonable reader more than a few hours. Our conversation was lively and stayed on topic for much longer than usual. Our host's twin sons (Jack and Chase, aged 2.5ish) were very cute. Overall it was an extremely satisfying club meeting and the drive up there paid off.
Book club was Tuesday, so Wednesday we headed up to Berkeley. The last time we were there we found this lighting fixture for our dining room that was aboslutely perfect. Then we promptly forgot all of the deails of it. So we went back up there to check it out again. It didn't seem quite-so-perfect the second time around, but we both liked it a lot, so we decided to go for it. Unfortunately they didn't have it in stock. So we wrote down the information to look for the manufacturer. It had a really unique name, "Trend" which made it impossible to find on the web. Once Kevin reached a site we thought was it, you couldn't get into the site without a password, presumably so that the only place you could buy them was through dealers. This was an incredibly stupid move on their part because you couldn't even see their catalog online (so we didn't know if it was the right "Trend" or not!). Even if you're selling exclusively through dealers, you really should have your catalog on the web so that people can look up styles and go seek them out at their local independent lighting place. The whole process was very disappointing, and I'm not sure what we're going to do. Probably keep looking down here in SoCal. Oh well, their loss.
Posted by Shelby at May 5, 2005 03:31 PMI go to a monthly book club too. We haven't collectively read Curious Incident yet, but most have read it alone anyway. I work in a bookshop so got a proof copy of it before it was published. Obviously, that was before all the hype, and I remember bigging it up like a crazy person after I read it and everyone looking at me weird 'a kid with aspergers?'.
Can I just say, heck, I'm not surprised Kevin got the Mantle of Shame for that selection. Hehehe, I would have shot him down in flames right away ;-)
Posted by: Cat at May 11, 2005 12:29 PM