Sacramento Women's Book Club

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 for the first 30 minutes,
🧊 at 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 to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$5 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

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

Meetup has raised its annual fees, and Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. 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

(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 The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn't make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers.

Through meticulous research, she discovers history's unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time.

You'll meet a woman astride a white horse riding down Pennsylvania Ave, a young boy detained at a Japanese incarceration camp, a formerly enslaved woman on a mission to reunite with her daughter, a poet on a train, and a teacher who learns to work with her enemies. More than one thing isbombed, and multiple people surprisingly become rich. Some rich with money, and some wealthy with things that matter more.

This is a book about what really made
America - and Americans - great. McMahon's cast of improbable champions will become familiar friends, lighting the path we journey in our quest to make the world more just, peaceful, good, and free.

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,
🧊 at 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 to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$5 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

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

Meetup has raised its annual fees, and Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. 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

(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 Jason Mott's Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity
tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott's novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

As these characters' stories build and con-verge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it's also about the nation's reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America.

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,
🧊 at 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 to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$5 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

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

Meetup has raised its annual fees, and Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. 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

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

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

During André Leon Talley's first magazine job, alongside Andy Warhol at Interview, a fateful meeting with Karl Lagerfeld began a decades-long friendship with the enigmatic, often caustic designer. Propelled into the upper echelons by his knowledge and adoration of fashion, André moved to Paris as bureau chief of John Fairchild's Women's Wear Daily, befriending fashion's most important designers (Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta). But as André made friends, he also made enemies. A racially tinged encounter with a member of the house of Yves Saint Laurent sent him back to New York and into the offices of Vogue under Grace Mirabella.

There, he eventually became creative director, developing an unlikely but intimate friendship with Anna Wintour. As she rose to the top of Vogue's masthead, André also ascended, and soon became the most influential man in fashion.

The Chiffon Trenches offers a candid look at the who's who of the last fifty years of fashion. At once ruthless and empathetic, this engaging memoir tells with raw honesty the story of how André not only survived the brutal style landscape but thrived - despite racism, illicit rumors, and all the other challenges of this notoriously cutthroat industry - to become one of the most renowned voices and faces in fashion.

Woven throughout the book are also André's own personal struggles that impacted him over the decades, along with intimate stories of those he turned to for inspiration (Diana Vreeland, Diane von Fürstenberg, Lee Radziwill, to name a few), and of course his Southern roots and faith, which guided him since childhood.

The result is a highly compelling read that captures the essence of a world few of us will ever have real access to, but one that we all want to know oh so much more about.

"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,
🧊 at 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 to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$5 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

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

Meetup has raised its annual fees, and Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. 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.