A Lavish Literary Luncheon

Hello dear friends.  I hope you all are having a great weekend.  Ours has been a lot of fun - we enjoyed a couple of great lunches on the water and the Mister was in his element noshing on fried clams, his favorite.  The weather has been spectacular.

I want to take a minute to thank all of you who took the time to write a helpful note concerning Chili's anxiety issues.  I really appreciate it.  I will fill you in on more later this week.  

A couple of months ago, while I was in Chatham with the Mister, I visited the darling Where The Sidewalk Ends Bookstore.  It is located in a two-story antique barn with an attached Children's Annex full of educational books and imagination enriching toys for young children.  The lady who worked at the store was lovely and gave me a list of literary luncheons sponsored by the store.  Talk about making my day!  I practically skipped out of the store with that list in my hot little hands. It included some of my favorite authors.  A lot of the lunches were happening when we were going to be away, but the one I was most anxious to attend was at the perfect time.

I called upon my partner in crime, Anne, otherwise known as my new bff.  Anne and her Mister are voracious readers.  Anne was delighted to go and had just finished a couple of  Beatriz Williams' (guest author) books.   

So we hopped in the car on Thursday, which incidentally was an absolutely gorgeous day.  We arrived at Wequassett Resort and Golf Club just in the nick of time to pick up our tickets and find a table.

The Resort is positively breathtaking with its lush landscaping and a view of pure beauty. 

Every one of these books sold in a matter of minutes. 

I told you the view was beyond compare.

Can you imagine spending the day devouring a good book in one of these Adirondack chairs?  Be still my heart...

This fabulous mother/daughter dynamic duo are Joanne Doggart and Caitlin Doggart-Bernal, the owners of Where the Sidewalk Ends Bookstore and were responsible for putting together this dream of a day.  They have arranged five literary luncheons for this summer.  Some of the guest authors included Elin Hilderbrand, Nancy Thayer, Lisa Genova, and Alice Hoffman.  I wish I could have gone to every one of them!

Hotel Moscow is Talia's fourth book.  She spoke of her childhood in Tel Aviv and briefly of her research of post-communist Russia for her book.  The novel centers around a woman who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors.  The woman loses her job and she decides to travel to Russia and finds herself smack dab in the middle of a mafia conspiracy.  My palms are sweating already!  Talia was formally the publisher of Savvy Magazine and a contributor to Redbook.  

No question about it, Anjali Mitter Duva is a brilliant woman.  She grew up in Paris and completed her graduate studies in urban studies and civil engineering at MIT.  Faint Promise of Rain is Anjali's debut novel and tells the story of a family of Hinder temple dancers in the 16th Century.  She closed her talk doing a beautiful reading from her book.   

I was very excited to hear Beatriz Williams speak.  I am presently reading her last book, A Hundred Summers, which I absolutely love.  You can tell that Beatriz enjoys the art of story telling. While whetting our appetite for her newest book, her eyes lit up telling us just enough about Tiny Little Thing to make us all want to cut in line and be the first to nab a copy off the book table.  OK, maybe I'm just speaking for myself.  Tiny Little Thing is a story about a political family living in Massachusetts in the 1960's.  They have 3 daughters and one of them, Tiny, has a very big secret.  Beatriz got me so excited, I started to get heart palpitations.  Talk about right up my alley!  Need I tell you what I'm reading next?

Jane Green has written many great books and I have read a lot of them.  I have enjoyed every single one of them.  Jane's newest release, Summer Secrets revolves around a woman who abuses alcohol and harbors a secret from her past.  A lot of the book takes place on Nantucket.  I can hardly wait to open the first page of this one.  Another one right up my alley.  Jane Green is a very entertaining speaker.  Her depreciating humor and raw honesty rocked the house.  Jane shared stories about her battle with cancer,  divorce, and re-marriage.  If she lived near me, I would stalk her until she became my friend.  

As if the day was not perfect enough, we stopped at one of Anne's favorite vegetable stands on the Cape.  Doesn't it look like it could be in a Nancy Meyers movie? 

Hope you have a wonderful week.  
Have you read any good books lately?

Until next time...

Dogs on Cape Cod