Sacramento Women's Book Club

Hard to find a copy? Use Zip Books at your local library

💠 What can I expect? 💠

We will meet in-person after hours in Time Tested Books. Front door willl be unlocked, and staff will point the way.

We catch up socially for the first 30 minutes and then start discussing the book promptly at 7pm.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️A snack to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$7 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. To cover the store's overhead, there is a $7 donation per person. You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

(Heads up: Time-Tested Books can run a bit warm after hot downtown days like these. 😅)

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

According to Confucius, "an educated woman is a worthless woman," but Tan Yunxian — born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness - is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations - looking, listening, touching, and asking - something a man can never do with a female patient.

From a young age, Yunxian learns about women's illnesses, many of which relate to childbearing, alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose - despite the prohibition that a doctor should never touch blood while a midwife comes in fre-
quent contact with it - and they vow to be forever friends, sharing in each other's joys and struggles. No mud, no lotus, they tell themselves: from adversity beauty can bloom.

But when Yunxian is sent into an arranged marriage, her mother-in-law forbids her from seeing Meiling and from helping the women and girls in the household. Yunxian is to act like a proper wife - embroider bound-foot slippers, recite poetry, give birth to sons, and stay forever within the walls of the family compound, the Garden of Fragrant Delights.

How might a woman like Yunxian break free of these traditions and lead a life of such importance that many of her remedies are still used five centuries later? How might the power of friendship support or complicate these efforts? A captivating story of women helping each other, Lady Tan's Circle of Women is a triumphant reimagining of the life of one person who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today.

Hard to find a copy? Use Zip Books at your local library

💠 What can I expect? 💠

We will meet in-person after hours in Time Tested Books. Front door willl be unlocked, and staff will point the way.

We catch up socially for the first 30 minutes and then start discussing the book promptly at 7pm.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️A snack to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$7 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. To cover the store's overhead, there is a $7 donation per person. You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

(Heads up: Time-Tested Books can run a bit warm after hot downtown days like these. 😅)

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision.
We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.

"One of this year's finest works of narrative nonfiction." — Oprah Daily

ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE NEW YORK TIMES, TIME, PEOPLE, THE PHIL-ADELPHIA INQUIRER, SLATE, READER'S DI-GEST, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, OUTSIDE, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, BOOKPAGE

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
OPRAH DAILY, THE NEW YORKER, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE GUARDIAN, THE ECONOMIST, SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, PROSPECT (UK), GLOBE & MAIL, ESQUIRE, MENTAL FLOSS, MARGINALIAN, SHE READS, KIRKUS REVIEWS, LIBRARY JOURNAL

Hard to find a copy? Use Zip Books at your local library

💠 What can I expect? 💠

We will meet in-person after hours in Time Tested Books. Front door willl be unlocked, and staff will point the way.

We catch up socially for the first 30 minutes and then start discussing the book promptly at 7pm.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️A snack to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$7 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. To cover the store's overhead, there is a $7 donation per person. You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

(Heads up: Time-Tested Books can run a bit warm after hot downtown days like these. 😅)

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP, for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. That is, he loves spending time with them when they come out to Palm Springs for weeklong visits, or when he heads home to Connecticut for the holidays. But in terms of caretaking and relating to two children, no matter how adorable, Patrick is, honestly, overwhelmed.

So when tragedy strikes and Maisie and Grant lose their mother and Patrick's brother has a health crisis of his own, Patrick finds himself suddenly taking on the role of primary guardian. Despite having a set of "Guncle Rules" ready to go, Patrick has no idea what to expect, having spent years barely holding on after the loss of his great love, a somewhat-stalled acting career, and a lifestyle not-so-suited to a six- and a nine-year-old. Quickly realizing that parenting — even if temporary — isn't solved with treats and jokes, Patrick's eyes are opened to a new sense of responsibility, and the realization that, sometimes, even being larger than life means you're unfailingly human.

With the humor and heart we've come to expect from bestselling author Steven Rowley, The Guncle is a moving tribute to the power of love, patience, and family in even the most trying of times.

Hard to find a copy? Use Zip Books at your local library

💠 What can I expect? 💠

We will meet in-person after hours in Time Tested Books. Front door willl be unlocked, and staff will point the way.

We catch up socially for the first 30 minutes and then start discussing the book promptly at 7pm.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️A snack to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$7 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. To cover the store's overhead, there is a $7 donation per person. You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

(Heads up: Time-Tested Books can run a bit warm after hot downtown days like these. 😅)

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

Why can't our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount?

Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens?

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition-the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim-that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.

Drawing on his twenty-five years of groundbreaking research on moral psy-chology, Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, con-servatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns.

In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts.

If you're ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.