November 2010 Archives

Over lunch today, we talked about The Lost Hero and compared it to the original Percy Jackson series. This new series is full of action and story elements, with abundant humor and surprises.  The sequel won't be out for a year, so we'll have to find something else to read in the meantime.  Luckily for us, we have a multitude of series, and we're looking forward to author Frank Beddor's coming in January to talk about his two Looking Glass Wars series--one in traditional format and one a graphic novel series.  So we're going to read the first print book in the trilogy for our next meeting on Dec. 10 and the other two for the January 7 author visit, at which time Mr. Beddor will have lunch with both book clubs.  (Feel free to enjoy the graphic novels too--I'm sure we'll be including them in the discussions!)  We've also been meaning to talk about Stormbreaker for a couple of months but keep running out of time.  Alex Rider and Rick Riordan's characters have some things in common (as well as Beddor's folks), so we'll talk about Stormbreaker and author Anthony Horowitz first next time, and then The Looking Glass Wars. 

November 3:  The Read for Fun book club met today and enjoyed discussing The Maze Runner.  A few people have already read the sequel, The Scorch Trials, and we discovered that the 3rd and final book, The Death Cure, has been finished and is now being revised for publication.  In his blog, Dashner gives credit to Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games series for making his book more marketable.  He went through a lot of rejection before getting his book published, and it's now on the NYT bestseller list.

The group ate Papa John's pizza, nominated several books, and selected Rick Riordan's new book, The Lost Hero, for December.  We'll meet on Wednesday, December 1, for our final meeting of the calendar year.  We will soon have a list of books that were nominated but not selected, since one book a month is not enough for a lot of our members.