This year’s book gathering was held at St Hubert Church in Langley. Seventeen book groups attended and 9 “want to join a group” guests. Jennie Shortridge was our special guest speaker, giving us the wonderful suggestion of asking authors to come to our individual book groups and some ideas on how to make that happen.

As usual we had a great selection of food, with the emphasis on brownies. The book table was full of great titles, and most of you were able to get at least 6 to 10 books that you will really enjoy. We appreciate all of your contributions to this part of the program.

We have a slide show of the event at the Photo page on this site. Look closely you are surely in one of the photos. We have also posted the 3 books that each group shared with us on the top picks of 2008. We will update the book groups page very soon and ask that you review for any corrections.

Please let us know what you liked and didn’t like about this years get together. Thank you for your donations. They allow us to continue to have this fun event every year.

We are looking forward to another very successful gathering this year.  We have a number of new book groups that will be participating this year.  We have made a few changes that we think everyone will support.

First in place of the silent auction we are doing a raffle.  We will have a number of wonderful raffle prizes and we are asking that each person buy at least a set of 5 tickets for the raffle  ($5.00) .

Second,  we are asking a $5. donation from each of you which in turn gets you six books of your choice.  After that you may buy additional books at a dollar each.

Basically the $10. that each group member contributes guarantees that we will be able to continue to have this quality event for book groups every year.  So thank you for your support in this.

We didn’t mention the pot luck dinner in the new bulletin that everyone received from their leader, but I guess we should have.  Please do bring something to share with the group.  Entrees and salads are greatly appreciated, as we were short on them last year. But whatever you bring it will be appreciated!

We will have the books in the large hall when you arrive for you to pick from and a volunteer will add the books you bring.  Please don’t forget your books!! If you want us to pick them up in advance just give me a call.  We already have some incredibly great titles available.  Many are still on the best seller list.

The raffle items will also be displayed for you to see what you just might get if your ticket is drawn.

Our program as usual includes an author.  This year Pat Detmer will do the last 15 minutes.  We all enjoyed her wonderful humorous talk last year.  Jennie Shortridge, a  award winning Seattle writer will also give a short talk.

Of course the highly anticipated group discussion of your book group’s favorites, is the highlight of the evening.  We are asking the leaders to give us your top three in advance, so we can print out all of the titles and have the list for when you leave that night.

Your comments are welcome here, and we will provide a comment sheet at the event for you to give us your thoughts on how we might improve the event, and any other ideas or comments you may have.

We look forward to this year’s event and seeing you there.

Hi Book Groups of Whidbey Island

We have secured the large meeting hall at the St. Huberts Church in Langley.  We picked it for a couple of reasons.  One, it has convenient access and parking with lots of lighting.  Also it is on  Bayview Rd coming into Langley, so it is also easy to find.

The date is on Tuesday January 27th beginning at 6 PM as usual with the book exchange and potluck before the guest speaker and book discussion.  This year Peter Casale will be the emecee.  We have a couple of  excellent authors to choose from as our guest speaker, and we will get  the news on the choice to you soon.

We have sent an email out to the group leaders (names who signed up at the last get together to receive correspondence).  Unfortunately, the Lit Fun group contact email came back.  If anyone knows someone in that group please have them contact me directly.

We are asking a group member to attend a short meeting in November to go over details of the upcoming event.   Our goal this year is to include all of the book groups in the planning process, and continue to improve as the years go by in making this a must go to event for book group participants.

Check back at the beginning of December.  We should have more information then on the guest speaker and feedback from all of the group leaders who attend the meeting.

We look forward to seeing you on that dark night of January for some stimulating conversation  at the book club gathering.

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The Book Gathering was held this year at the Cash Store at Bayview in Langley. This was the 5th annual book group gathering, and though the location was somewhat difficult to maneuver, everyone enjoyed the evening. As we usually do, we had a book exchange and silent auction to raise money for a designated non profit and to cover the costs associated with the event.

This year were able to give the Whidbey Island Writers Association MFA Program a $500 scholarship check for a writer to use to attend the school.

Pat Detmer, writer and comedian extraordinaire , was our featured speaker. See her website at: http://www.patdetmer.com . I spoke with Pat after the function, and told her we were going to ask her back and cut 5 more minutes off her presentation time because she had handled it so well. There were daggers in her eyes, but I think she enjoyed doing the presentation, and might just come back again. (only joking about cutting the time, Pat)

The pot luck food approach still works, but we could a few more servings on some of the items brought. It was suggested that we assign certain food categories to different groups. An example would be Book Owls – salads. Please comment below this post if you have any thoughts on that. In fact please comment and make suggestions on anything that you think might make the event better.

Okay, enough for now, please visit the photo gallery. There are lots of fun photos of the event. Also we have the list of all the book favorites of the groups attending. You can purchase many of these books at Amazon by clicking our link here. By going through our website they give us a small fee. This will help us in keep this website, and continue to put on a great event every year. We appreciate your support, thank you.