Book Was A Bust!

So, Our Book Club met last night, and we even had our new member Amy. However, the consensus on the book, Little Chapel On the River: a Pub, a Town, and the Search for What Matters Most by Gwendolyn Bounds, was that, aside from being non-fiction, the book just didn't have that much to offer.

Sure, there were good points, and there were certain parts we actually liked, but no one LOVED the book. We didn't like that Bounds told stories about her grandparents but then stopped, sort of without notice. We liked that we were reminded of such an important event in history, September 11, but we didn't like that Bounds never returned to it. Navel-gazing aside, a sense of how she felt, why she wrote the book, why she needed to leave New York City all may have made the book more compelling. We liked some of the characters...we just didn't care about them, and we weren't really sure they were believable.

But we did answer the question about what matters most...and it's a place of belonging. But here's where the jury was still out. Could a place such as Guinan's Pub & Country Store really exist?

Do YOU have the place that, when you walk in, you just feel at home? And, do you have to grow up in a city in order to have that sense of belonging?

As a group we have a couple of those places -- restaurants, mainly -- and we're grateful to the people there who make us feel that way.

My First Blog for Our Book Group!

Woo hoo!

I finished reading the selection for June, Little Chapel on the River by Gwendolyn Bounds, and now I'm waiting until we discuss it on June 27. In the meantime, I get to blog about it!

The subtitle on the book is: a pub, a town and the search for what matters most, so, that's the question of the day: What matters most?

The story of the Little Chapel on the River is that, after the attacks on the Twin Towers, Bounds found herself homeless and shaken, and she finds solace at Guinan's Pub, about 50 miles north of New York City. According to the publisher, the book is one that "asks questions about the power of human decency and goodness and gives reason upon reason for one to hope that such places as Guinan's will never completely disappear."

While most of us don't live through the tragedy of planes flying into the World Trade Center towers right next to our apartment building as up close and personally as "the Gwendol" did, we all search for what matters most.

So, what does matter most, for you, today? And, perhaps more importantly, how do you communicate that?

~Guida