Books 'n Booze

June was our 12th book club! And it was great, as usual. There were a few changes, namely the boys played Magic at the dining table while we chatted in the living room. It worked better than expected. But other than that, the night was mostly the same as usual. Jen made awesome bruschetta. She has a picture somewhere. But believe me, it was so good. For the entree, I made baked ziti and garlic bread. So, we had a little Italian theme going on. Delicious. Finally, Sarah made cookies for dessert using her new mixer! I liked the pinwheel ones the best but the chocolate chip/peanut cookies were really good, too. A very yummy book club!

Music

This month’s music theme was Strong Women because WE ARE STRONG WOMEN! Well, and because the main character of the book is a kick-ass girl. This month I was the one with repeated songs. One was on purpose because Fairytale fit so well with the theme. But Fighter was an unintentional repeat… I didn’t look at everyone else’s songs before I made my list. Oops. The songs were awesome and we decided it would be a good workout CD. Of course some country music made the list from Sarah and Jen put in some quirky music with Garfunkel and Oats.

Book

This month was our first fantasy novel. It is the first book in a trilogy, but it can stand alone by itself if you don’t want to read the whole trilogy (although Jen and Sarah said they would read the other two books). Brandon Sanderson is one of my favorite authors but since Mistborn is a fantasy book, I was a little worried it wouldn’t go over well. But it seemed like everyone enjoyed reading the book and that is awesome.

So, some things we talked about:

Overall, Vin was our favorite character although Sazed was an interesting character as well.
We all agreed that Tin would be the most useful Allomantic power, if you couldn’t be a full Mistborn. Although Sarah might benefit from being a Soother so everyone would always be calm when around her.
We tried to more solidly figure out how Allomancy with Feruchemy could make you live forever, like the Lord Ruler. We kind of figured it out, although Jen was not totally convinced.
We touched on the relationship between Vin and Elend. We had to go back to the book to see if Vin actually does go back to Elend at the end. (Spoiler: she does)
Sarah didn’t like the mistwraiths/kandra because they eat people. Understandable.
And at the very end of the night we realized we didn’t talk about Marsh… but there are more answers as you read the second and third book.

Mistborn was a success, yay!

Current Events

We talked about so many different topics! The first was about the soda ban in NYC. Overall, we don’t like that freedom being taken away or made more difficult but are all about taxing the hell out of unhealthy/super high calorie food. Good intentions but maybe not the right execution, Mayor Bloomberg.

If any of us actually watched reality TV, we thought that the new show Push Girls would be a positive show to watch, if it were done the right way.

Probably the most interesting conversation we had was about attachment parenting. Consensus: breast feeding a 3-year-old– crazy weird. Attachment parenting as it was conceived isn’t a horrible idea, but its transformation to what it is today is what the problem is. Parents today are not doing their kids any favors. But Sarah won’t be like that… because we’ll call her crazy. 🙂

We also talked about how to pack a carry on with 10 sets of clothes, how to make a ring out of a bill so you’re not screwed if you’re out and lose your purse, or whatever. There was a short discussion about how funny Garfunkel and Oats are, how the hell ADIDAS let the shackle shoes through so many lines of development, and how the Internet can be awesome (The Oatmeal raised a whole bunch of money for charity because some idiot was stealing his work, etc etc).

Other

There’s usually not an ‘Other’ section but this month is special. We have decided to add another facet to our monthly Saloon by having a sort of challenge every 3rd of the month, like “Fast all day.” Although I hope that’s not one we pick because that would be really hard.

We also talked about how we’re going to celebrate our Salooniversary! I’ll leave that to be a surprise for the next post but I’m super excited about it!!!

For next month: What Alice Forgot