What we’re about
Welcome! We are a diverse group, including college students, working professionals, stay-at-home parents, and retirees. What we all have in common is a love of reading.
We meet once a month (third Sunday) to discuss interesting books. It's a very social and friendly group, so come join us and make some new friends!
Candidate books:
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Classics
Past Books
Host Homes
Upcoming events (2)
See all- Sept 2025: "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan.Jan's House, Fort Collins, CO
This month we will be reading and discussing "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan.
Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.
Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves.
Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he discovers the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.
Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art.
DETAILS ABOUT OUR MEETING: We are starting at 6:00 PM for a general greetings and a potluck supper. The book discussion will begin at about 6:45 PM. At the conclusion of the discussion, we will elect the next Non-Fiction book to discuss at the November 2025 meetup. The candidate books will be:
- I'll Push You: A Journey of 500 Miles, Two Best Friends, and One Wheelchair by Patrick Gray & Justin Skeesuck
- Comet’s Tale by Steven D. Wolf
- Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement by Daniel Kahnerman, Oliver Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein
Hope to see you there.
- Oct 2025, "Our Missing Hearts" by Celeste Ng2868 Storm Vw Ct, Timnath, CO
This month we will read and discuss "Our Missing Hearts" by Celeste Ng.
Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn’t know what happened to her—only that her books have been banned—and he resents that she cared more about her work than about him.
Then one day Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, and soon he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of heroic librarians, and finally to New York City, where he will learn the truth about what happened to his mother and what the future holds for them both.
Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s about the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children and the power of art to create change.
DETAILS ABOUT OUR MEETING: We are starting at 6:00 PM for a general greetings and a potluck supper. The book discussion will begin at about 6:45 PM. At the conclusion of the discussion, we will elect the next CLASSIC-Fiction book to discuss at the December 2025 meetup. The candidate books will be:
- "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- "The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Arthur Conan Doyle
- "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov
Hope to see you there.
