We Don’t Bake Muffins Book Club is thrilled to have won the Retreat by Random House Book Clubs Are Beautiful Contest earlier this month! WhooHooooooo!!!

As part of the contest we had to provide a bunch of info about our book club. Once we were selected as a finalist we also had to submit our favorite Book Club moment.

Here’s our submission:

What Was Your Favorite Book Club Moment?

I have to preface this by saying, there are MANY moments to choose from. We take our discussions seriously but we manage to laugh a lot – whether the book is about genocide, child soldiers, cancer, etc – there is always laughter (not always wine induced, but sometimes…). If you’re a stickler for political correctness this may not be the book club for you.

   

So keep this in mind as I relay the events of Book Club in July 2008.

 

We were reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover by DH Lawrence. Written in 1928, it was banned from printing until the 1960’s due to its very descriptive & graphic sexual language. 50 Shades of Grey aside, the proverbial envelope has been pushed pretty far since 1928!

 

So we get to the meeting. It’s a warm spring evening, our host has all the windows open in her downtown St. John’s row house. In the middle of the living room is a big easel with a flip board. We talk about the book, there’s wine, everyone is feeling good.

 

Our host announces that we are going to play a little game called: “In Other Words”. The object of the game is to replace the terms & phrases used in Lady Chattery’s Lover with modern slang. I’ll give you some (censored) examples of the terms we had to translate:

• ‘her Venus mound’
• ‘At the back of his loins the fire suddenly darted stronger
• ‘the curve of her flank’  
• ‘meanwhile the birds of desire were asleep in the intricacies of her body’
• ‘evacuating crisis’
• “Nay, nay!” he said. “Ta’e the thick wi’ th’ thin. This wor a bit o’ thin for once.”  

That’s when the place went up!

She’d write a quote on the flip board and we shouted out (yes shouted – there was wine remember) our very ‘creative’ translations. It was very loud, very colourful and not for the faint of heart. A short time later the doorbell rang. It was a friend of our host. He had heard us laughing and ‘talking’ when he parked at the other end of street (warm evening..windows open remember?).

We explained that this was a Book Club meeting and invited him in to have a drink with us. He was very, very scared  but came in. When he rounded the corner the first thing he saw was our flip board…. let’s just say we should have taken a picture. The look of total shock on his face sent us into convulsions. It was hilarious.

 

It’s been many years and we hear our guest still talks about how all his book club stereotypes went out the window that night!   

 

Thanks for selecting us as a finalist!! Fingers Crossed!!

So What Did We Win??

The grand prize is a year of  books! We get to select 12 books and each of our members gets a copy of them all. Fantastic!

Here are the books we’ve chosen:

Wishing you a 2014 full of wonderful books and wonderful life!!