2011.04.25 Meeting Notes

thumb|Dexter Cake
Great meeting on Monday, but I think the highlight was David's awesome cake! If you weren't there, you missed a great snack. It was a red velvet cake, with white icing. Sticking out of the top was a giant knife and around the blade was red blood spatter, made of icing of course. Jeff will post a photo on wiki soon. Thanks to Dave's wife for the baking.
David led the meeting as well and did a great job talking about our latest Dexter read. As much as we all love Dexter, it seemed to be the group consensus that it was a weak book with not much point to it. I think Anne and I gave it the highest scores and we were 5 and 6 out of 10.
We think maybe Jeff Lindsey was getting complacent and just churning the books out and not thinking too hard. We weren't really impressed with our murderer, who wasn't even a murderer to begin with, as he was just "borrowing" bodies from the morgue for his art work. And don't get me started on the whole Cuba thing, the trip added no real value to the story and someone even suggested that the author must have visited and had a great time and just wanted to talk about the locale. I felt Daisied when Dexter brought the 2 kids with him at the end, as their purpose seemed to be to untie their Mom and save her from the saw blade. Others mentioned how neat and tidy it was that the policeman who had started to suspect Dexter died in the end, so his secret is still safe. We discussed the whole sociopath angle and Judy chimed in that in real life Dexter either would or would not be one, there's no halfway/kill the bad guys for a good reason, option.
Roxanne was horrified at something in the book that the rest of us thought was pretty cool, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. Probably partly because the rest of us horrify Roxane more often than not and partly because it was a book about a serial killer, so picking out a one horrifying point is really hard.
Here are a couple of ideas I came up with to deal with Distastful Dexter Dilemnas:
1. When you're entering a man's apartment in order to cut him up in the bathtub - look for a nanny cam!
and
2. When you miss the nanny cam, and a video of you cutting up said man is on youtube, maybe it's not a good idea to watch the video at work.
Ok, so this month's book is Trail of Blood by Lisa Black. I appreciate everyone's response to our ONE available copy. Most of us are trying to get the book on our own, either online or through other library systems. We knew that this one had very few copies at the library, but we voted it in anyway and are now dealing with trying to read it. I think this is a good exercise to remind us why we pick books with a lot of copies, but this one was my addition to the list and we have the author calling in for the club meeting in May, so again, I appreciate your team effort as we struggle with copies. I have heard from a few people that they've gotten the book at other libraries and I am almost done with my personal copy and will pass it on. I know one person won one at the Christmas party too, so it's a start. Roxane has our one Douglas County copy, and as soon as she's done she's going to return it to Lone Tree and email me or the group so someone else can have it. If we work hard to get copies from other libraries and everyone reads fast, we should pull through this one. Please shoot me an email if you need a copy, that way if someone knows they can't make the meeting in May or has already read it, I can cross them off my list and can coordinate for those who do need one.
We decided that it's more fun to pick the second half of the year's books at club, and an email vote was vetoed. Since Terri likes to have the book titles earlier than May, I told her that we would read Meg Gardiner's The Liar's Lullaby for July, and she will put it on the website. It was voted in as our alternate pick, so I know it's high up on everyone's list. Next month we will vote for the other 5 to finish out 2011. I will email a list to everyone beforehand and bring extra copies to the meeting. Keep sending me book ideas this month and I will continue to add to the list prior to May 23rd.
Thanks everyone!
Kerry