Booknerds welcome new members to club

We are the Kansas Booknerds, and July marks our one-year anniversary.

We’ll be celebrating by throwing a party, along with discussion of our July book, “The Stolen Child,” by Keith Donohue.

We are a group of about a dozen ladies and a few gents who get together once a month at a different member’s home to eat, drink, laugh and, of course, gab about books. We’ve read a wide variety of books together – everything from “Mrs. Dalloway” (by Virginia Woolf) to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (by Douglas Adams) to “Godless,” a young adult novel by Pete Hautman.

The featured book at August’s discussion will be “The Confessions of Max Tivoli,” by Andrew Sean Greer.

We’re always looking for new members. We encourage people to check us out at our Yahoo group and come join us some month: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ks_booknerds/.

For more information, send e-mail to ks_booknerds@yahoo.com.

– Submitted by Annie Dressel

Neighbors enjoy good books, company

University Place Neighborhood Assn.’s Book Club just finished its first year’s reading list, which included the following titles:

¢ “In Cold Blood,” by Truman Capote

¢ “Goodbye Columbus,” by Philip Roth

¢ “Lovely Bones,” by Alice Sebold

¢ “Funny in Farsi,” by Firoozeh Dumas

¢ “Daughter of Time,” by Josephine Tey

¢ “Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini

¢ “The Sparrow,” by Mary Doria Russell

¢ “Fire Sale,” by Sara Paretsky

¢ “Blink,” by Malcolm Gladwell

We have been meeting the first Monday of the month. We are an intergenerational group of men and women. Our club’s only “rule” is that the host serves wine. There are a few entries about us on the neighborhood association’s blog at http://upna.blogspot.com/.

– Submitted by Arla Jones