Greater Sacramento Women's Book Club

"Sweeping, ingenious... A kiss to build a dream on." - Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories — personal and collective.

(NPR review and author interview at this link)

Hard to find a book? Suggest a title or use Zip Books at your local library.

💠 What can I expect? 💠

We will meet in-person in the community “Gather Room” at the back of the store.

💬 We catch up socially,
🧊 including a brief icebreaker in which we mention a book or author we recommend, and
🕡 at 6:30 we start our book discussion.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️ A snack or drink from Raley’s to share
◾️ $5 (cash or Venmo)
◾️ And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

The $5 offsets Meetup fees. You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

However❕We would never want you to miss a book club discussion because of the $5, so please message me if you have any concerns

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay.

Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book — Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns - and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan's tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page.

As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

A book about storytelling — its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change — and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres's Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illus-trations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made — a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter,
Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.

"Sweeping, ingenious... A kiss to build a dream on." - Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories — personal and collective.

(NPR review and author interview at this link)

Hard to find a book? Suggest a title or use Zip Books at your local library.

💠 What can I expect? 💠

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

💬 We catch up socially for the first 30 minutes,
🧊 just before 7pm we do a brief icebreaker in which we mention a book or author we recommend,
📕 and then we start our book discussion.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️A snack or drink to share
◾️$5 (cash or Venmo)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

The $5 is split between our access to this Meetup platform and our access to the meeting location.

You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

However❕We would never want you to miss a book club discussion because of the $5, so please message me if you have any concerns

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay.

Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book — Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns - and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan's tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page.

As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

A book about storytelling — its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change — and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres's Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illus-trations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made — a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter,
Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.

It’s movie award season 🏆 🎥 🍿 and NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour recommended this book in its “Books We Love: No Biz Like Showbiz” episode .

Nostalgic-Novembers: We read memoirs for the last three Novembers in a row. Now another “November to remember”

Published October 24, 2023

Hard to find a book? Suggest a title or use Zip Books at your local library.

💠 What can I expect? 💠

We will meet in-person in the community “Gather Room” at the back of the store.

💬 We catch up socially,
🧊 including a brief icebreaker in which we mention a book or author we recommend, and
🕡 at 6:30 we start our book discussion.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️ A snack or drink from Raley’s to share
◾️ $5 (cash or Venmo)
◾️ And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

The $5 offsets Meetup fees. You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

However❕We would never want you to miss a book club discussion because of the $5, so please message me if you have any concerns.

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

Once upon a time, if you wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing, you didn't check out Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB.

You asked whether Siskel & Ebert had given it "two thumbs up."

On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they'd ever exchanged a word) met for lunch in a Chicago pub. Gene Siskel was the film critic for the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert had recently won the Pulitzer Prize — the first ever awarded to a film critic — for his work at the Chicago Sun-Times. To say they despised each other was an understatement.

When they reluctantly agreed to collaborate on a new movie review show with PBS, there was at least as much sparring off-camera as on. No decision — from which films to cover to who would read the lead review to how to pronounce foreign titles — was made without conflict, but their often-antagonistic partnership (which later transformed into genuine friendship) made for great television. In the years that followed, their signature "Two thumbs up!" would become the most trusted critical brand in Hollywood.

In Opposable Thumbs, award-winning editor and film critic Matt Singer eavesdrops on their iconic balcony set, detailing their rise from making a few hundred dollars a week on local Chicago PBS to securing multimillion-dollar contracts for a syndicated series (a move that convinced a young local host named Oprah Winfrey to do the same). Their partnership was cut short when Gene Siskel passed away in February of 1999 after a battle with brain cancer that he'd kept secret from everyone outside his immediate family — including Roger Ebert, who never got to say goodbye to his longtime partner. But their influence on in the way we talk about (and think about) movies continues to this day.

Photographer/© ABC/Getty Images.

It’s movie award season 🏆 🎥 🍿 and NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour recommended this book in its “Books We Love: No Biz Like Showbiz” episode .

Nostalgic-Novembers: We read memoirs for the last three Novembers in a row. Now another “November to remember”

Published October 24, 2023

Hard to find a book? Suggest a title or 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;
🧊 we do a brief icebreaker in which we mention a book or author we recommend,
📕 and then we start our book discussion at 7pm.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️A snack or drink to share
◾️$5 (cash or Venmo)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

The $5 is split between our access to this Meetup platform and our access to the meeting location.

You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

However❕We would never want you to miss a book club discussion because of the $5, so please message me if you have any concerns.

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

Once upon a time, if you wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing, you didn't check out Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB.

You asked whether Siskel & Ebert had given it "two thumbs up."

On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they'd ever exchanged a word) met for lunch in a Chicago pub. Gene Siskel was the film critic for the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert had recently won the Pulitzer Prize — the first ever awarded to a film critic — for his work at the Chicago Sun-Times. To say they despised each other was an understatement.

When they reluctantly agreed to collaborate on a new movie review show with PBS, there was at least as much sparring off-camera as on. No decision — from which films to cover to who would read the lead review to how to pronounce foreign titles — was made without conflict, but their often-antagonistic partnership (which later transformed into genuine friendship) made for great television. In the years that followed, their signature "Two thumbs up!" would become the most trusted critical brand in Hollywood.

In Opposable Thumbs, award-winning editor and film critic Matt Singer eavesdrops on their iconic balcony set, detailing their rise from making a few hundred dollars a week on local Chicago PBS to securing multimillion-dollar contracts for a syndicated series (a move that convinced a young local host named Oprah Winfrey to do the same). Their partnership was cut short when Gene Siskel passed away in February of 1999 after a battle with brain cancer that he'd kept secret from everyone outside his immediate family — including Roger Ebert, who never got to say goodbye to his longtime partner. But their influence on in the way we talk about (and think about) movies continues to this day.

Photographer/© ABC/Getty Images.