Next month we're reading The Lonely Hearts Hotel
Secret Santa, a TBR Poll and best books of 2023
Our last book club of 2023 will be discussing The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O’Neill, a wintery tale about two orphans in Canada during the Great Depression. It’s a book I read before and really enjoyed, so I hope I didn’t oversell it to the book club! We’ll see how it holds up and will have a good time either way with our Secret Santa!
Here are the important details:
We are meeting on the 6th of December at 20:00.
The book club is at Opzoomerstraat 12C, Studio Tideland
The book club is Bring Your Own Booze, so bring drinks (at least) for yourself.
Want to join? Email me at boredtodeathbookclub@gmail.com to reserve your seat. I will email you back with a confirmation. I only take email reservations because social media sign ups are a bit more uncertain.
The book club is free, but donations are welcome to help cover the location costs. You can buy me a coffee or use a tikkie. The donations have been down quite a bit lately, so every small bit helps!
Have ideas for the book club? I love to hear it!
Secret Santa
We are hosting a secret santa book swap for our December book club to get into the holiday spirit. It will be a mix between secret santa and a blind book date where everyone brings a book (or two), wraps them and writes some buzzwords on the front. During the book club you can have a look at the other mystery books and pick one (or two) to swap for your own. Some things to keep in mind:
Take a look at our LONG list of book club books. Try not to swap recent book club books because the chances are high we already read them. Older book club books are fine, but do write that as one of the buzzwords so we’ll know.
Please only swap books that are good. Good meaning, books you think we’ll like and that still look presentable. No books that are falling apart or hate reads, old text books etc.
You can buy a new book to swap if you want, but the idea was to swap books from our closet, so please don’t spend too much money on this silly idea.
If you swap for a book you already have or something you don’t like, there will be the option to swap again if someone else wants to as well.
You don’t have to join the secret santa. It is absolutely fine to just show up to the book club to discuss the book and nothing else.
If we need more rules or you have any question, let me know, and please include in your sign up email whether you want to join the Secret Santa.
Nominate books for our February book club
After December, we are taking a short break. Early January is a bad time for book clubbing with the busy holidays, so we will meet up again in February. We want to do a poll based on the books from our book clubbers TBR, so let me know what book has been on your reading list for so long and we might just read it with the book club! Do try to keep these options under 400 pages because we are not very fast readers.
What to read next if you enjoyed When I Sing, Mountains Dance
This was Irene Solà’s second novel, but her first isn’t translated into English just yet. So I’ll recommend some other Catalan novels and books that are written from different perspectives. Starting with another contemporary Catalan author, Eva Baltasar. Her two novels Permafrost and Boulder are both definitely worth a try. She’s a poet, so expect pretty language and short novels. And to stay in the nature realm, I thought Learning to Talk to Plants by Marta Orriols sounded very fitting. And to round things off, Linet send me this cool book called A Grandmother Begins the Story by Michelle Porter which sounded like a perfect companion to our book club pick including several animal POV’s.
When I Sing, Mountains Dance Recap
Almost everyone really enjoyed the book. Not everyone had found the time to finish it, because even though it’s a short book, it’s one that requires all of your attention. When I Sing, Mountains Dance is definitely a vibes-book and while some of us were trying to puzzle out who all the characters were, others simply sat back and enjoyed the ride. We almost all agreed that the mushroom-chapter was great. For some reason that one stuck with us. We also learned that reading titles of chapters is incredibly useful and we should do it more. It’s a book, I’d recommend reading twice. Once to figure out the story and the characters and once to simply bask in its glory. You can decide for yourself in what order you’d like to do this.
Maybe a little early, but the end of the year is coming up which means time to think of your favorite books read in 2023! You can already take a look at our Best Books of 2022 list and I’ll share all the details about it in our next newsletter.