For our fourth Young Ladies Literary Tea, we read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Really, could we have chosen a more perfect book for a literary tea? An advantage of doing these teas monthly is that we can settle into a rhythm. As usual, we went to the home of my friend Giovanna, some of…
Tag: book club
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…
Rose Campbell Young Ladies Literary Tea
In this third Young Ladies Literary Tea, we returned to Alcott. In an unplanned twist, our general Eight Cousins book club got upgraded to a Young Ladies Literary Tea for the Rose Campbell books. Alcott’s writing is so safe that I decided to convert this to one of our teas because I knew that it…
Freckles & A Girl of the Limberlost Young Ladies Literary Tea
After the success of my Young Ladies Literary Tea for An Old Fashioned Girl, I had high hopes for our second meeting, Freckles & A Girl of the Limberlost. Due to some logistical complications, we had to move the tea to my house. As I said in my last article, this is a grand experiment…
An Old Fashioned Girl Young Ladies Literary Tea
Over the last sixteen months, I have marveled at the way that my book club for young readers has grown and changed. All of this has been a grand experiment, and I have learned so much about what works well for us and what could be improved. One of the things I always wanted to…
Hobbit Club: August Meeting
I do not know what I did to get so blessed. In all likelihood, nothing. God knew what Greg and I needed, and He just asked us to obey His promptings and follow His lead. And, by His grace, He has led us into a Hobbit Club which can only be a gift from Him….
The Green Ember Book Club
This week, I hosted a The Green Ember book club at Cathedral Book and Gift for 30 readers aged 7-15. It was one of the most fun book clubs we have had to date. Of all of the books that we have read together, this one, The Hobbit, and Jonathan Roger’s Wilderking books have inspired the most…
Book Club: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Earlier this month, I hosted a Wonderful Wizard of Oz themed book club at Cathedral Book and Gift with 15 young readers. I think that of all of our book clubs to date, this was my favorite. I do like the Oz books, but that is not why this was my favorite. Last summer we…
Book Club: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Earlier this week, I hosted a book club at Cathedral Book and Gift for 34 readers aged 7-15. I was shocked by the number of registrations for this particular club because our book was Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a book which many find to be quite strange. During my years at Hillsdale College,…
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 Princess and the Goblin
“Reminding ourselves that Beauty is one in being with the Good and the True, we should remember that the beautiful always leads us back to love and reason. The lifting up of the heart in the presence of beauty enables us to give our hearts in love and to raise our heads in contemplation. This…