The Plot Thickens

Our February read will be Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I’ve Cried About by Isabel Klee!

Goodreads summary:

"From the social media superstar behind @SimonSits, Isabel Klee—known for her heartwarming tales of dog rescue—comes an utterly winning memoir about a twentysomething woman’s search for true love in New York City and the dogs who helped her find it.

A Jersey girl by birth, Isabel Klee had always wanted to live in New York City. At age 20, she got her chance, ditching her college upstate and moving into a grungy basement apartment in Manhattan. Dog-obsessed since childhood, her first post-grad job was becoming an assistant to a dog photographer, and something clicked into place: a career focused on helping dogs was the new dream.

Isabel quickly found a passion for rehabilitating rescue dogs and helping them get adopted. At the same time, she was caught up in a whirlwind of friendships, parties, fickle boyfriends and grand romances, which she recounts in honest, tender, and sometimes devastating chapters about the search for love and belonging.

Isabel’s first true love, though, was Simon, a fluffy puppy who’d been saved from the meat trade. As the highs and lows of her twenties hit Isabel in wave after wave, it was Simon who kept her grounded. Together, Isabel and Simon created a community of dog-lovers and a tight-knit group of friends pursuing their dreams.

In this honest and moving memoir, Isabel weaves together the stories of her foster dogs—and the challenges she helped them overcome—with tales of complicated relationships, hard decisions, and great loves in New York City, all leading to a happy ending not only for the rescue pups, but for Isabel herself."

We will meet at Café OLIVIA in Dallas.

Our March read will be Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin.

From Goodreads:

"The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb new translation by Michael Hofmann.

Franz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Cheated, humiliated, thrown from a moving car; embroiled in an underworld of pimps, thugs, drunks and prostitutes, Franz picks himself up over and over again - until one day he is struck a monstrous blow which might just prove his final downfall.

A dazzling collage of newspaper reports, Biblical stories, drinking songs and urban slang, Berlin Alexanderplatz is the great novel of Berlin life: inventing, styling and recreating the city as reality and dream; mimicking its movements and rhythms; immortalizing its pubs, abattoirs, apartments and chaotic streets. From the gutter to the stars, this is the whole picture of the city.

Berlin Alexanderplatz brought fame in 1929 to its author Alfred Döblin, until then an impecunious writer and doctor in a working-class neighborhood in the east of Berlin. Success at home was short-lived, however; Doblin, a Jew, left Germany the day after the Reichstag Fire in 1933, and did not return until 1945. This landmark translation by Michael Hofmann is the first to do justice to Berlin Alexanderplatz in English, brilliantly capturing the energy, prodigality and inventiveness of Döblin's masterpiece."

We will meet at The Coffee Shoppe in Grand Prairie.