Bar Book Club

We met last night at Coopersmiths for our book club.

Beer of choice: Scottish Highland Ale--a new beer for them, as far as I can remember. From the description I was expecting a darker beer, but it was good. I also tried a sample of their blueberry mead, another new offering, and liked that a lot. And then they had a watermelon beer. Beer mixed with watermelon juice. Those two should not go together. When you actually order it, instead of the little sample we requested, they shove a slice of watermelon on the edge of the glass. There are so many things wrong with that... I tend to be intrigued by new and surprising pairings in my food and beverages and am willing to try a lot of things, but from the first smell I knew I wouldn't like it.

I didn't get my copy of the book, At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen, until last week when we had visitors. So I'd only finally found a chance to read in the past couple of days and didn't finish it. What I read set up for an interesting conflict between a missionary beginning to realize he'd rather be an anthropologist (to the consternation of his wife and colleagues) and a half-Cheyenne mercenary who'd found his way down to the same South American jungle.

Our next book is Tea With Hezbollah. The book comes from an evangelical press, which makes me somewhat leery, but the idea of going in among these groups that we in the West label as terrorist and actually learning how they see things and who they are sounds interesting, if it truly is done in an open-minded way.

There was some question if the person who was supposed to bring books could make it, so I grabbed a backpack full of books from the library right before hand...and now I have a bunch of books checked out that I'd really like to read (and just when A Dance With Dragons comes out...). I'll probably have to bring books next month, so I could return them and try to check them out again then, but they're calling to me...