Tag Archives: Favorite Books

New Year’s Book Club Refresh!

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Chirped by Cass and Tina

Book Club RefreshFeeling a little isolated lately? Don’t give up on your book club! Reading and discussing a great book together provides connection and mental stimulation. In a virtual format, it’s also a great excuse to close yourself up in your room with friends and a glass of wine! Lol. Book clubs can work nearly as well virtually as they do in person. In some ways, they can be even better! Give your book club a New Year’s Refresh with these ideas for injecting a little more fun, swag, and kinship, while still staying safe…

Book Selections

Every September our book club selects new titles for the year ahead. Selection night is usually accompanied by a potluck dinner at my house. We gather together, eat, drink, and present our book ideas. Then we choose what books to read for each month. This year, due to the pandemic, we had to meet via Zoom. It was still a fun night, and we are excited about the titles we have lined up for the coming year. If you’re curious about what we chose… here’s the list! Continue reading →

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Book Club Starter Basket

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Chirped by Tina

After a long hiatus, we’re back with a new post! Our empty nests aren’t so empty these days, what with husbands and one of the nestlings back underfoot. Our routines are all akimbo, and it’s harder to meet up in person… But we’re zooming as I type, and we’re motivated, because this post is time sensitive! Hopefully this will jumpstart a return to a more regular schedule of blogging. We’ve got plenty of ideas starting to pile up from all our time at home!

Cass and I have put together a couple of “Book Club in a Basket” ¹ raffle items in the past for the Christopher Court Foundation. Those baskets revolved around food, drink and props related to the featured book – to add a little spice to a club meeting! For 2020, the challenge was to assemble a basket that’s more friendly to virtual gatherings. What better way to safely reconnect with friends and family than by hosting a video chat to discuss a terrific novel? We set to work creating a “Book Club Starter Basket” to benefit a local non-profit organization called the Penn Foundation.² It’s our attempt to take the Continue reading →

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February’s Cheep Trills

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Chirped by Cass and Tina

Oh February! Even though it had an extra day this year, it still seemed to fly by. The weather didn’t help, being very mild, warm and wet here in PA – hurrying us along towards spring. Our shortest month did, however, yield some efficient days of crafting, blogging and catching up. We squeezed a lot in! Here are our top ten favorites from this productive month…

Favorite Books

February’s choices for both book clubs had mixed reviews from our members. Cass’s book club read Keeping Lucy by T. Greenwood. It describes a mother in the ’70s trying to save her daughter (born with Downs Syndrome) from a cruel institution and manipulative in-laws. The novel is based loosely on a 1971 exposé of horrific care inside a Massachusetts “school for the feeble-minded”. A guest speaker came to talk about her adult son, who has severe autism. The writing was good, the discussion interesting. Some of us were dubious about how quickly Lucy adapted and rebounded from her first two neglected years. But hey, kids are resilient, right? Continue reading →

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September’s Cheep Trills

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Chirped by Tina and Cass

Another month, a new season… and our latest list of places, projects, pups and pleasures that pumped us up!

Favorite Book

Our book selection this month is The Rent Collector, by Cameron Wright. The story takes place in a community that lives in (and scrapes a living from) the refuse of a Cambodian waste dump. It describes the unexpected relationship that unfolds between an uneducated young mother and the dreaded woman known as the “rent collector”. The novel itself is heartwarming and inspiring, but the larger historical backdrop was also riveting. Many of the characters are loosely based on real people that the author’s son met while filming a documentary about life in this municipal waste dump. We also learned horrifying details about the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in Cambodia. It’s something of a perfect trifecta when a book combines vivid world-building, great character development, and enough historical fact to make it educational as well as enjoyable! Two thumbs up!

Favorite Local Restaurant

With the chicks back at college, we’ve been rediscovering all the empty nesting habits we’d set aside for the summer. When it comes to meals, that means extremely light fare most weeknights, with the occasional date night or dinner out with friends thrown in on Continue reading →

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