Leo Johnson, Are You Telling Me There's No Santa Claus?

So yesterday was the second Eleven-Books Club meeting, for the book David picked, Novel with Cocaine, also known as The Cocain Romance. It snowed & slushed, & I think that contributed to a significantly lower attendance...though actually doing a headcount, there was only one less person than last time. This crew was me, Jenny, David, Terra, ranai, Carmen & another Jenny. I think that because a lot of these people are in my apartment fairly frequently, it seemed like less than last time, where there were people who'd never been over. There was a bunch of wine-- white & red-- & David got a bunch of groceries, all the important food groups. Chips, dips, cheeses, yogurts, fruits. We actually started up recapping the first club meeting because more than half of them hadn't made it to it but had actually bothered to read The Big Year anyhow. Both remind me of Trainspotting-- Novel with Cocaine because of the obvious drug connection, & The Big Year because of the actual hobby of trainspotting being similar to birding. Carmen was last to arrive & when she did we started in on the book in earnest. Scoreboard: Danielle hated it, I disliked it, Carmen disliked it but liked certain lines, Terra, David & other Jenny fell somewhere in the middle & my Jenny liked it. I mean-- for me, I still liked the part where Vadim & Sonya meet, & I like the meta-text payoff of "Burkewitz refuses." Other it quotable, which is fine-- there are certainly bits of it that were well written & well translated. Everyone bonded over not knowing what "rodomontade" meant, even though we are all word nerds. We closed up talking about future books, rules of thumb for selections, unrepresented genres, diversity of authors & protagonists, that sort of thing. Oh! & in the middle of everything a bookshelf broke, started leaning over, so we had to do emergency triage, clear everything off it, tighten the nuts & bolts, & put everything back on it. Stressful!