Guide to Good Living: Great Books & Girlfriends by Malena Lott
Keys to happiness. Top ten ways to love your life. How to reduce stress and live longer.
Self-help articles flood the Internet, self-help books line our shelves, and yet something still seems to be missing. I’ve got a big bone to throw out there: human interaction. You know, the real kind, where the person you’re listening to isn’t on a flat screen or a big Mac monitor? Where your communication isn’t limited to 140 characters? Where you can share ideas, passions and pomegranate martinis using all five senses?
That’s right. I know it’s old-fashioned of me to propose that girlfriends get together when we’re up to our eyeballs in kids’ schedules and working our fingers to the bone at the office and at home, but here’s the thing: what all those self-help articles have in common is that friends make us happy. Happier than our husbands? Happier than our kids? You betcha. Now, I can imagine you shaking your heads right now, but the research isn’t saying we don’t love our kids and our husbands, but when the research reports stress levels, honey we’re way more stressed with our hubs and kiddos than we are with our friends. Makes sense. Our friends don’t ask us to wipe their butts or make them PB&J sammiches.
Seriously, Girls Night Outs are nothing new, and neither is the concept of book clubs, yet as an avid reader all of my life and an author, I’ve never been in a book club before. My stumbling block? One book picked by a group. Like, an assignment or something. No thanks. I read about a book a week, and I’m usually reading three or four books at a time, based on my mood of the moment. Then it dawned on me: why not let the book club members read whatever they want and discuss it at book club? And furthermore, why not make it more like a girls night out without the guilt. Because, let’s face it, some husbands make wives feel very guilty about a night out for fun-fun-fun while they are left at home with the young ‘uns, or hell, anywhere without them.
But to say, “I’m going to book club?” It sounds like, and is, an intellectual pursuit. Yes, you’ve got a commitment to read, which the majority of Americans don’t do enough of, and you have an obligation to not back out quite as easily as if it were just a night out on the town with the girls.
Hence, Book End Babes was born. Book End Babes is a national book club – a sorority of literary sisters – who share a passion for books. Just like book ends, we support the book industry and authors. We’re high tech and high touch. We have real-life chapters all over the country (and one Skype chapter) and we share great recipes for food and drinks and come together to discuss the books we’ve read that month. The chapters can organize however they wish and choose Anything Goes, All 4 One or Any Four from our top four picks to discuss.
On our site, we invite the members and authors to share essays about books and girlfriends. We get to know the authors a little better to connect readers and writers. Do we use technology? Absolutely. I love Twitter and Facebook and we have both for Book End Babes. We want visits to the site to enhance the readers’ life and inspire our chapter members to read more and make their book parties more fun so that their members will keep coming.
Many online relationships lead to real-life friendships, too. I got to meet our Chapter 2 Rebel Book Club in person a couple of weeks ago in Wichita, Kansas. I hope you’ll consider starting up a Book End Babes chapter in your area. We’ll start you out with a kit and the next four queenBs to host a chapter will get a cool tote bag and one book from our book closet. Our goal is 25 chapters by December 25th, all around the country. I hope you’ll consider taking your love for reading from the solitary to the social. Because we all know that real babes read books.
Malena Lott is the author of The Stork Reality and Dating da Vinci. Find out more about Book End Babes at www.bookendbabes.com and follow them at www.twitter.com/bookendbabes
