We finally made it happen and had the first meeting of our little book club. We drank wine, ate cheese fondue goodness (and chocolate raspberry cheesecake), discussed books and agreed on a format Karen came up with excellent suggestions for deciding who's book gets read and who hosts for the next meeting, the first and last person to arrive respectively. That being said, since I'm just around the corner from Karen and biked over, I was the first to arrive; we are to read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the early November meet. This book requires a little patience at first, but once you get into the story it will grip you. It is funny, surreal, magic and tragic. And in the end you finish it and say, "Oh my god this book is brilliant!" and have to go back and reread it to fully appreciate its circular brilliance. I'm looking forward to rereading it for our next meeting. A friend observed, "I think if I were going to do a book club thing, I would want to have us read books I would never think of reading or be able to get through on my own." To which I say, we have cobbled together such a diverse group of people with reading tastes at polar extremes that we have achieved this. There is something outside of each of our reading "comfort zones" in the queue of discussion books as well as within the pool of general book exchanges of other recommended authors we're doing each time we meet. On the advice of several people in other book clubs, we wanted everyone to pick a book to recommend that they have read before and enjoyed. Friends have been a part of groups that read untested titles where everyone ended up not finishing the book because it was just so bad or not at all enjoyable or accessible.