Book Club Babes

 

Since November 2005, I have been part of an amazing book club. It started casually enough; I emailed a couple of friends in October of that year and asked if in the new year they might be interested in starting a book club. Someone (I don’t recall who) replied with, “Why wait. Let’s start next month”!

And with that, the Northern California Book Club Babes was born!

We meet about every 6 weeks or so usually at someone’s home or at a restaurant.  The hostess chooses the book and generally supplies the main dish for our potluck gatherings. In these last 12 years, our club has gone through several iterations and updates but we have been going strong since the beginning.

This month our chosen read was “Born A Crime” by Trevor Noah, host of the The Daily Show.  Some of our members watch his show but some don’t (I fall in the don’t category).  The consensus of the group was that the book was very good and those of us who listened to it agree.  There was some discussion about how the book jumps around in terms of time frame as it was at times difficult to tell what age he was when certain events occurred.  Overall though, the book is humorous, intense, interesting and thought-provoking.  It’s interesting to learn about someone who comes from a place very different from yours.  And it’s also telling that many of the events, circumstances and feelings came across as very familiar as well.

This book is definitely recommended.

When we meet, we like to attempt to tailor the food to the book in some way. The interpretation can be exact or very loose (we’re quite casual about this part).

For this meeting, we got together at Bissap Baobab, a Senegalese restaurant located in the Mission District of San Francisco.  The book takes place in South Africa so something in the African realm was the goal.  We are a group of  11 with many in the group having a very wide palette range.  I do not.  As a result, I pre-gamed meaning I had Chinese food before hand.  I did however, enjoy a couple of Senegalese alcoholic beverages.  Tonight, 7 of us enjoyed the evening together.

As usual, we talked, laughed and enjoyed ourselves!! I didn’t get a ton of pictures because I was too busy enjoying my time with the babes.  My one complaint is that the restaurant is LOUD so it’s not really conducive to chatting.  We managed to make it work though!  Next up for the babes, is our annual holiday party!

Do you belong to a book club? What do you enjoy reading?