Grand Ledge High School - Class of 68 Book Club

As many of my book friends know I emigrated from the USA to Australia.  I actually originated in a little town of about 5500 people when I lived there in the 1950's and 1960's.

The state of Michigan. Grand Ledge is in the middle of the mitten.

I left Grand Ledge in 1973.  Recently I was playing around on Facebook and I found a Facebook page for the Class of 68 in Grand Ledge.  I checked it out and suddenly all of these memories came flooding back.  I joined the group and have been chatting to many of my past classmates.  I had not heard of anything to do with all of these people since I was in high school.  It has been a really fun experience.

Grand Ledge High School - we all left from Grade 12  in 1968

Well to make a long story short we decided to set up a book group. Many of my past classmates have moved away and we seem to be scattered all over the place now. But some loyal classmates have stayed in Michigan and it has been great fun to visit them.

Our book group is called....Grand Ledge Class of 68 Book Group.  We might think of something more original in future but we have now started on the first book assigned.

To set up the group all of us put forward two books and one topic of interest.   I have written all of the names onto little coloured slips of paper and put them in the Book Jar.

March Book

April Book

Today I gave the jar a good shake and the paper book nuggets were scattered onto a bed in the spare room.  Then Cousin Eddie, my 14 month old kitten came in and thought he would check this out. It looked like a lot of fun to him. So I asked him if he wanted to choose the books.   Of course he did.

Travel Writing - Free Choice for May

The inaugural book for 1 March is Beach Music by Pat Conroy.  Cousin Eddie picked To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee for the April book and he chose a Travel Book of any kind for May. Each of us will read a travel book and then talk about where we went and what we did, what we saw. This is not going to be a standard book group. We are going to do lots of fun things. We will read literary fiction but we will also be reading a variety of crime, spy and adventure books.  We have several men in this group which is excellent because men aren't known for joining book groups.

I folded up the titles so Eddie wouldn't cheat and read them.
He had a great time checking these out.

Cousin Eddie grabs one and our May book is chosen.

 We have created a separate Facebook page for our group and we will use it to discuss the books at the beginning of each month.  I think the Penguin and I are going to have a great time with our very diverse group.