Hobbit Club: September Meeting

In our September Hobbit Club meeting, we drank Dragon Eye Red Ale beer that Greg and I brewed, we had birthday cupcakes for Frodo and Bilbo, and we laughed until our sides hurt. It was a party for Hobbits! The reading for this month was the Joseph Pearce commentary, Frodo’s Journey. At this point in…

Book Club Questions

Sometimes the hardest part about leading a book club is getting the conversation going. While every book will have its own relevant questions and topics for discussion, it is nice to have a cheat sheet you can consult when the conversation dries up. Here are a dozen of my favorites: What did you like most…

The Hobbit Club

Last year at about this time, some friends and I decided to start a book club for us grownups (as opposed to the book clubs for young readers and teens that I was already doing). We settled on reading Tolkien with the aid of Joseph Pearce and our Hobbit Club was born.  In our first…

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

This is part of Diane’s  Literature Course I Series It wasn’t easy to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin again. I knew how it was going to end. It has been about a quarter of a century since I read it the first time, so I didn’t remember details, but it came back to me as I got…

Virtue Book Club – September

The first meeting of my “in real life” Tending the Heart of Virtue book club was last night and I am positively glowing this morning. For a year I prayed about this idea. I knew that I wanted a local book club that would celebrate the role that books have in our quest for holiness…

Tending the Heart of Virtue

“Becoming a responsible human being is a path filled with potholes and visited constantly by temptations. Children need guidance and moral road maps and they benefit immensely with the example of adults who speak truthfully and act from moral strength.” – Tending the Heart of Virtue by Vigen Guroian In Diane’s review of The Pleasures…

Book Club: The Bark of the Bog Owl

As I explained in this post, I am having great fun hosting a young readers book club at my local Christian book store, Cathedral Book and Gift. The second book in our middle-grade reader series was The Bark of the Bog Owl by Jonathan Rogers. Bark is a fantastic first book in a very worthy…